FICTION

By LOUIS MacNEICE A Trojan Ending By Laura Riding. (Constable. '8s: 6c1:) Spanish Fire. By Hermann Kesten. (Hutchinson. 8s. 6d.) ; Golden Peacock. By Gertrude ,Atherton. (Thornton-rButter-; worth. 7s. 6(1.) maiden Castle. By John Cowper Powys. (Cassell.. 81. 6d.) A Bridge to Divide Them. By Goronwy Rees. (Faber and Faber. 7s. 6d.) ; The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond. By G. K. Chesterton. (Cassell. 7s. 6d.)

IT has always• seemedstn me most surprising that people should write or read historical novels. -History is exciting because it is fact. For thine who db_not_lifte such an utter complexity of facts there is the more simplified and readable type of history- book written by people like Lytton Strachey and M. Maurois.

history.giVes us the truth abciut things we did not know, fiction -should. give _us the, truth about things we.. do know. The historical novel seems to me a -rusty hybrid of these two different kinds of truth. Yet the hiStatical novel remains popular, as .do books of popular science. And here we have three new historical novels all of Which no doubt will be eagerly received.

The reader-in-the-trainWill probabiy.prefer Mrs. Atherton's; hut the best reception ought certainly to be given to Miss Riding's. Mrs. Atherton gives us an exciting story of Augustan Rome—the nature as before—but her -book is not nearly circumstantial- Or knowledgeable enough to be good mien of its kind (it is not nearly as good as Mr. Jack Lindsay's novel about Cleopatra, which itself was a failure): Mrs: Atherton's heroine is a niece of the poet Horice. (Cpiaintly called Uncle Horace or Quintus Horace Flaccus) who is a girl of spirit and mixes with all the greatMaecenis, - Augustus, Livia, Julia.

The characters are unconvincing, even though the story is told in the first person by the siiitien7year7old heroinea convention which should have made the author's task much easier. There have been too many novels about Ancient. Rome. If people must go on writing them, they should hang the whole story on some new and startling situation. I Would suggest a story in the first person by a Petronian an opportunity for a macabre elegance which is not -affbicled. by contemporary life. There is no point in going two thousand

years back if you want to write a chit-Chat 1161re-story. ,

Spanish Fire is a much more serious piece of work has much more history in it. I do. not know, how accurate' the history is, but it is given intensity by the author's feelings,' which obviously relate the actions of Ferdinand and Isabella to the horrible paradoxes of modern dictatorshin. Witness the bitter comment on the death of King Henry the Fourth of Castile :

"He did not make his country greater, and under his rule there was much discord, and the good people were grumbling, happy and free, and could openly criticise_ their king and mock him. The rulers who succeeded him aggrandised their kingdom, and had still more subjects to oppress, fight, ennoble and slaughter, outrage and afterwards honour. The good people were no longer free and no longer happy. They were only proud and rewarded. The king was no longer one man among them all, he sat high above on the throne, and beneath him were swarming shadows."

The reign of Ferdinand and Isabella certainly gives ample . material for the bitter moralist,, including, as it does, the expulsion of the Jews, the ruinous conquest of Granada, the institution of the Spanish Inquisition and the juvenalesque bathos shown in the Court's treatment of Columbus. Herr Kesten as a novelist resembles Lion Feuchtwanger ; he likes to churn a mess of violent detail, rising (or sinking) at moments to snch German hyperbole as the following

"But the King and the Queen and the Inquisitors have already eaten of the corpses, the fat is already dripping from their greasy mouths, the noble Ferdinand still chews comfortably, handing the fat marrowbones to his devout and sweet wife Isabella, who cracks with gleaming teeth the little bones of the widows and orphans of heretics; and the fat marrow runs down the soft* thin to the soft bosom of the good mother of the land." .

Most Spanish histories arb so unreadable that I must admit that there is an excuse for this book's existence, especially as the story ends so appositely with the establishment of the Habsburgs in Spain. Was it for this, asks Herr Kesten, that the country had had to endure "the prizing of purity of blood . . . the deification of the nation and the rampancy of blind nationalism " ? - - - - - Miss Laura Riding's novel, is entirely different from the usual historical novel and vastly more interesting. The usual historical novel is a chunk of history, unphilosophic as . Aristotle would have said, un-Aristotelian in that it has neither . a beginning"-nor an end, but is all middle. Whereas the Trojan War is what the Jtingians,:wotild call an archetypal • myth, Miss Riding does not nuke' a fairy-story of it but a ptuilosophic,- and Serious drama. .The Homeric gods are - eliminated from the action and their plate is taken by opposed . . motifs, simplifying and Supporting the action for the twentieth- . century mind in the saine Way as the gods simplify and . support it for the child-mind. _ The : Trojans are set over

against the Greeks—wisdom-a.s against 'intelligence, an adult

and almost suicidal acceptance Of -distil* as against the Greek fuss of scepticism and ',experimenr .(compare the often-quoted remark of the Egyptian, in HerodinliS—!` Yon . Greeks are always children ") : , • "Passivism 7' (says Miss Riding) !` was..a peculiarly Trojan

philosophy that:had, t;akeii. shape-since the -War.- . They could not disbelieve in- the divine, background . of human life because pride Of soul prevented them from believing-in destruction ; but

they were nevertheless, in their pride, readY'-f,n7r destruction." . ,

Our sympathy is therefore demanded for the Trojans. The only two Greeks wilt). are made sympathetic are Diomedes and Achilles, Achilles' withdrawal from the fighting being attributed not, as in the to selfish pique, but to a Philosophic disgust With the whole Greek cause and it exponents. Miss Riding is vet* ingenious in whitewashing the death of Hector. It is greatly to Miss •Riclirig's credit that her philosophy does not turn the book' into a tmere 'allegory. Her characterisation is excellent— especially us Helen, Cressida, Troilus, Priam and Paris: With the Greek leaders other than Diomedes and Achilles her laudably savage attitude "tosvar-cS-- acquisitive militarism tends to lead her into Caricature: - f-reFeither-faidt is also a good one. In her endeavour to be circumstantial and give .body to the boOk She continually digresses On any chance oppOrtunity—a

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vase or a name—into thickets Of imitlif or gebgraphy. Most readers will skip many of these withourhann to themselves or the book: --A COniPiiisOn of her -chat-a-tier; with Homer's is a fascinating study of identity in difference, e.g. her Paris is an

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amplified and explicit portrait of what is implied in the Iliad, whereas her Hector and Achilles are more essentially transmuted by the touch of mndein psychology. 14stly, Miss Riding has that -.Very rare thing nowadays,- a living .• Prose rhythm. I :recommend this book' enthusiastically. 1 Mr. J. C. Powys in his new novel gives us exactly what we _expect from him. It is:all •very queer and very Cymric, impress- ing by its morose insistence on some vague and barbarous - underlying reality Which moves like an .underswell beneath the Dorset landscape and in the souls of his carefully picked characters, a gang of Powysian eccentrics. The psycho-analyst would have a lot to say about this book—its preoccupation with sterile love and cerebral desire, its evidence of a paternal fixation. When the hero discovers his father he finds a man who thinks he is the incarnation of some pre-Christian anarchic deity which ",moves from the impossible to the impossible. . . . And when it breaks through . . . the superstition of science will be exploded forever."

A Bridge to Divide Them is a very careful presentation of a Lawrentian hero, a collier, in Lawrentian juxtaposition with a rich girl. With both the characters and the descriptions of scenes I have the uncomfortable feeling that I have heard all this before. The accumulation of short sentences is too pat, the sirnilies are conscientious rather than spontaneous. I feel that Mr. Rees is forcing it when he tells us that the mouths of the factory chimneys "held a red glow like a rose in a vase "or that the bowler hats held in the hands of mourners Were "like round black . fruits." Mr. Rees will probably write some fine novels, but he must avoid the clichés not only of phrasing but of vision.

The short stories in G. K. Chesterton's last book are on the familiar •pattern but lack the old vitality. They are made to hirge on the paradoxes of Mr. Pond, a typical Chestertonian hero. Chesterton's ingenuity is beginning to creak, but I found this book more enjoyable than any of the above except ,A.-Trajatt Ending- .