29 JULY 1938, Page 26

FICTION

By BATE O'BRIEN Ruined City. By Nevil Shute. (Cassell. 7s. 6d.) The Doomsday Men. By J. B. Priestley. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) Promenade. By G. B. Lancaster. (The Bodley Head. 8s. 6d.) The Traveller's Return. By E. F. Bozman. (Dent. 7s. 6d.)

AT least three of the novels to be reviewed this week can be . described, irrespective of their variations of merit, as "'holiday fiction." Not that one is certain, really, what " holiday

fiction " is—surely the book to read at any time is the book which might stimulate at any time—but there ., is a sort of mass-definition of the thing afloat in summer. Definition by negatives and elimination. The analytical novel or the passionate, the elegiac, symbolic or universal, is not for the family hold-all now. No use cramming in Turgenev or Henry James with Johnny's bucket and spade. Lei the work of imagination have its holiday, and let invention be our cheerful servant on the beach. Narrative is required .which of its own movement can establish a necessary minimum of characterisa- tion and which unfolds events either odd enough to create an undistressing tension or sufficiently reflective of our ambling experience to provoke the placid tribute—" true to life."

To meet these requirements effectively takes a good measure of technical skill ; takes the fully equipped writer, in fact.

And Mr. Nevil Shute, whose name is new to me but whose Ruined City is his fourth novel, is certainly all of that. Indeed

his book, which is economical, exact, humorous and dryly benevolent, can be recommended with safety to almost anyone, holidaying or not. It is a very neat story about money, the City, the Balkans and a distressed area in the- North of

England. .

Henry Warren is the young middle-aged, overworked head of a sound private bank in the City. By the end of the first chapter he has arranged to divorce his flippant, unfaithful wife, and, feeling ill and weary of money-maling, sets off incognito to walk and collect his thOughts in Northumberland. On the road he crumples up in bad pain, and is taken by lorry to the hospital in Sharpies, a town the one industry or which, shipbuilding, has been closed down for five and a half years. He is operated on for acute obstruction, and spends a month in the hospital as " Henry Warren, out-of-work bank clerk." In that time he learns much of the lives of his fellow-men and of the appalling evils of unemployment. Alice McMahon, almoner of the hospital, who loves her derelict native town and is an unusually agreeable female character, presented with the minimum of fuss, helps him to that know- ledge without guessing at all at the service she is doing Sharpies. The rest of the book is taken up with Warren's heroic and eventually successful attempt to restore work and self-respect to two thousand families., He buys the desolate shipyard and, in order to obtain for it the kind of building contracts which alone in its difficult years of revival it could hope to secure, he has to involve himself in tricky negotiations with the comic Government of Laevatia in the Balkans, and eventually has to commit himself to personal dishonesty in company promotion in order to get the shipbuilding business floated. He manages to protect his fellow-directors from the con- sequences of his manoeuvres, and to take their full brunt —three years' penal servitude—upon himself. But he saves

Sharpies, wins the love of the agreeable almoner-girl, and emerges from Parkhurst and from -the story attractive, non-

unctuous and respect-worthy. All the steps of his progress are interesting, and his adventures in the Balkans are amusing. The author never wastes a word and his dialogue especially is effective. He has a sympathetic dryness of manner which gives credibility to his benevolent fairy-tale. And if the happy ending of Ruined City does indeed strike some as so like a fairy-tale as to be rather saddening—such qualms depend, I suppose, on the colour and depth of each reader's social philosophy, and are not to be debated here.

Mr. Priestley has also elected to meet our seasonal need with some easily assimilated though stoutly planned adventures.

The Doomsday Men is designed to raise our hair—but only playfully, of course. We are never really allowed to doubt that right is might, or to imagine that the three mad McMichael brothers can get away with their nefariously twisted philan- thropic intention to destroy the face of the earth, " to peel it as if it were an orange." Naturally in the second last, and half of the last, chapter it begins_ to_ took like a very near thing,

indeed—our author piling menace on suspense, and desolation on both, and letting us hear the brilliant minutes tick away in Californian light. For this is a horror story—with a difference. More than one difference. Firstly, there is neater character work than is usually looked for where desperate deeds are afoot.; secondly there is a flow of agreeable humour; thirdly there are some passages of instructive and sometimes-touching good sense ; fourthly, and, best, there is fine, bold evocation of the landscape of the Californian desert and on every other page a vivid sense of the characteristic light and air of that strange, radiant, empty world. These things, especially the last, make good and decorative wrappings for a very wild story—" an idle tale," as the author pleads in his rhyming dedication, a knotting together of " invented " and coincidental plots in which it is perhaps difficult to find the " threatening shadows on the wall " which we are invited to look for.

No need to outline, the intricacies here. Indeed, intending readers would not thank me for that exacting service. But it is only fair to warn everyone that the opening chapter—taking place in Beaulieu on the French Riviera during the Tennis Tournament—gives very little suggestion indeed of the dangerous situations and wild, remote scenes ahead. It does however plant very effectively a heroine who is, I think, all that is meant by the inadmissible word, " intriguing." And it launches the main love-interest, to be pursued across the western world and to the edge of a horrible death. There is also an amusing middle-aged love-story ; there is an unavenged - corpse in Los Angeles ; there are a disappeared middle-aged scientist and a young scientist who finds, loses and finds him again ; there is a heroic drunkard with a tipsy aeroplane ; there are Paw Larrigan and Maw ; there is the McMichaels' lost and, horrible fortress in the desert ; there are the Californian sky, and love, horror, death. and escape. Holiday fiction indeed—the whole works, and very well engineered, Promenade is for those loungers on the cruising deck who like to read a page or two, put the marker in. while they play off their deck-tennis match, and read a few more pages before cocktail time. It is a large, pleasant, informative book ; its scene is New Zealand from its colonial beginnings in. the 5830's until the young men are leaving it for the South African War ; its characters are mainly the picturesque English Lovels, an impoverished county family in the early chapters, and at the end, those who -are left, legislators, shipbuilders and sheep farmers of considerable wealth. There are Maoris, too, of course, presented with vividness, knowledge and sympathy ; and there is a great deal of colonial history, ironic and lively. The chief character is Sally, married at fifteen to Mr. Peregrine, afterwards Sir Peregrine Lovel. These two found a large family. He is the usual stuffed Victorian prig-husband and she the inevitable little dearie, faithful to " Mr. Lovel," timidly sweet to her various children, and hopelessly loved by cynical Cousin Jermyn Lovel, a writer and a person of great " charm." There is too much " chum " scattered over the book. Roddy and Tiffany and Prue Lovel are far too rich in it ; so in their ways are Sally's remarkable sister Darien and the merchant, Nick Flower, a Lovel too, though with- the bar sinister to embitter him. And most of the younger Maoris are too charming. But the changes and difficulties of pioneer and colonial life are carefully worked through, the historical details seem sound, and all the actual information about Maori life is interesting. And though the English characters are mostly period pieces, the long tale is managed with so fluent-an assurance and the familiar Victorian humours and quaintnesses are so deftly exploited that a host

of readers are sure to find it " true to- life." - .

The Traveller's Return is a saddish ghost-story which, as it grapes back over the now so poignantly old-fashioned and simple-seeming griefs of the 1914-18 War, will no doubt make its own appeal to many of those in whom the wounds of that time still throb. It is too complicated and—in my opinion—too curiously mismanaged a story for brief recapitula- tion here. The three old aunts of the returning ghost-soldier are good and touching ; his brother George is also a credible character. But the sad theme is not sufficiently clarified and, whereas there are many incidental touches of sensibility and understanding to admire throughout, the final effect is unsatis- factory and untidy.