29 MARCH 1946, Page 20

Fiction

Yes, Farewell. By Michael Burn. (Cape. 12s. 6d.) How expensive novels are becoming! To me they always seemed too dear even in the seven-and-sixpenny days, for novels are not things that one is disposed to buy blind ; we buy them surely for the most part when we know them, and if we are to be tempted to an occasional pig in a poke it seems like sense to mark such purchases down as much as possible. It is difficult, for instance, to imagine that many private Citizens are going to put down five half-crowns apiece in order to find out what Mr. Michael Burn's first novel is about—good and attractive though this book happens to be ; and as for the spendthrifts who are going to exchange fifteen shillings for Mr. Mervyn Peake's new effort of imagination—ah well, we'll con- sider their odd bargain in a minute or two!

Yes, Farewell is a good and appealing novel, and introduces a writer of true promise. It deals with the lives of prisoners of war in Germany. Its chief character, Alan Maclaren, wounded and captured in the Narvik expedition, had spent three years of fretful inactivity in an Offiag at Schloss Durheim in central Germany, and when the story opens, in the autumn of 1943, he is planning escape with two of his brother-officers. They do escape ; one of them makes for England, but the other two, Alan and Tug, going eastward across Germany, almost get into Czechoslovakia, but are recaptured when within sight of their goal. For a time they are housed with political prisoners in a terrible gaol in Munich, where they learn in good earnest what it means to be a Jew or any kind of free spirit in Nazi Germany. Tug is shot in this gaol, and Alan eventually is returned to his companions at Durheim, there to await the end of the war and the triumphant entry of the Russian armies into their village and fortress. '

The story is no doubt like .many others that will be written or that lie in men's minds from those years, but it is not the less interesting or moving for that, and Mr. Burn has a fortunate narra- tive manner, reflective, unsensational and perfectly simple. His purpose is to show what happens to a prisoner's mind, how futility and loneliness may all but destroy it, but how also, with luck, it may be forded into habits of true reflection and so even into pur- posefulness. We get to know and like Mr. Burn's unpretentious and serious young hero very well as we follow his moods, his memories and his efforts at self-discipline and hope throughout these level and disarming pages. As Alan gropes towards self-knowledge and knowledge of mankind, his brother, the author, is not afraid to put us through debates, conversations, lectures and soliloquies, none of them blazingly original, but all ringing true to their time and place and to the characters partaking of them. In Mr. Burn's writing we feel the care which he is taking to be true, to make no flashy claim for his own thought or experience, but to set down accurately what he brought away from the long years of alternating patience and despair.

Titus Groan is a huge and, as has been said, expensive volume. It is beautifully printed and a lot of trouble has been taken ; perhaps if Mr. Peake had set out his extraordinary tangle of narrative and visions in drawings instead of in prose it might have been easier to judge'his purpose. For my part, I have carried the book round with me now for some days, and I believe I have read practically all of it. That I don't like it is easily said ; because to begin with Mr. Peake writes a bad, tautological prose, and his humour, though so wearisomely crusted with grotesque, is in fact no more than facetious —but, like it or not, I desired to find a reason, a reason in the writer's soul, I mean, for the composition of this heavy fantasy. I have not found it ; it seems to me to be a book without a drivin4 force, a large, haphazard Gothic mess, carried along on vague gushes of external vision and having nowhere in it any gleam of that mad-

tress, that passionate necessity, which could be the justification of the kind of work that it purports to be.

But after Gormenghast—that is, the Groan castle—Sally Park, in Co Limerick, will come as a nice change. Miss Hassett's novel— and this is the first of hers to have come my way—is agreeable and old-fashioned ; it contains plenty of sharp feminine jokes, and the author makes pleasing use of the Munster idiom. As her story works out humour is regrettably inclined to thin, and blazing old- world sentiment takes charge ; I was reminded sometimes of a novelist whom in my childhood I used to read in Nelson's shilling library—the little red books—Mrs. B. M. Croker. She also could make good female jokes, but, like Miss Hassett, she usually had

them disperse before love and kisses. KATE O'BRIEN.