Two• South. African Novels

Whistler's Corner. By Nora Stevenson. (Cape. 7s. 6d.) The Ridge of White Waters. By Norman Giles. (Collins. 78. 6d.) THE Dominions provide all the " material " but few or

none of the amenities necessary for an artist, but the life they offer calls for a robustness, an insensitiveness, seldom found enclosing a highly-organized nature. There have, of course, been notable instances where such a nature has managed to assert itself, but exile, suicide, or disintegration have often followed. Those who are able to continue to

look into a Dominion and write are too often the servants of banality, and the great -open spaces in which they live are apt to go to their heads, so that they run a risk of con- veying to their readers all the emptiness and none of the

grandeur of their surroundings. The South African novelist, in partieular, is apt to assume, like a kind of. protective colouring, something of the aridity of the veld which surrounds him. His best course, perhaps, is to choose some small scene, familiar and apprehensible, and describe it as well as he can. Mr. Norman Giles, in his latest novel, has approached a theme which might well make a Tolstoi hesitate, and it has been too much for him. Mrs. Stevenson, on the other hand, has been less ambitious and more successful.

Whistler's Corner is a sanatorium for consumptives on the outskirts of a dorp in the Transvaal highveld, and the

time of the story is 1912. This is not necessarily a slight setting (one remembers The Magic Mountain) but it is a promising one, especially in the hands of a writer who does not

merely inhabit but is aware of " the clear landscape with its deathly stillness, its barrenness and dryness."

The sanatorium is in the charge of Emil Blut, who is unqualified as a doctor but is a natural and successful healer, with his heart in his work. Among his patients is a Mrs. Lamb, a fatal woman, whose lungs are very unsound and who causes an immense scandal and endangers her existence by a love affair with a handsome but scarcely respectable local. In trying to help her to help herself towards a cure, Blut comes to understand that she is a woman and not merely a patient.

His heart is ensnared ; his position is threatened. It would be hard to say whether Rachel Lamb and Blut torment

themselves or each other the most. "I saw in her," he says in retrospect, "a menace to my work, and she saw in me a menace to her pride." There, roughly speaking, is the

situation on which the story hangs and out of which it develops, conjuring out of disaster a justification of "corn-

-passion and love." The character and predicament of both Blut and Rachel Lamb are beautifully realized, and a pro- tracted feeling of nightmare and suspense and tormented

indecision pervades the whole story. But although Mrs. Stevenson seems to be the best woman novelist now writing in South Africa, and this the best book she has yet written, it is by no means without faults. The character of Mrs. Lamb's lover is not drawn at all—he is little more than a romantic cipher out of a magazine tale. It might be complained that the story is spun out and too repetitive ; Mrs. Stevenson adds nothing to our knowledge of the natives ; and she has yielded to the temptation of using one of those spectacular thunderstorms to end a drought and a story at once. The ending is somewhat forced, and then the writing and proof-reading have both been careless, sometimes with grotesque effect :

"Her head was a veritable bird's nest of false and natural hair of a bright shade of red that clashed with the crimson of her blouse', stretched tight across her busts."

A double-breasted blouse, perhaps ?

The dust-cover of Mr. Giles's book carries a map of an extensive part of the African continent, and also some extensive claims on behalf of the story, which is an attempt to relate the fortunes of various characters to historical events during the period that includes the rise of Johannesburg, the Jameson Raid, and the Boer War. The much-abused

word " epic " is also dragged in. Actually Mr. Giles has only tried to follow the fashion for chronicles, "cavalcades," and other rechauffes of the past. An undistinguished story is padded out with references to historical persons and

events ; the characters show few signs of life, possibly owing to the colourless atmosphere in which they find themselves ; and there are, alas, no graces of style.

WinntAx Ptomna.