FICTION. 4 PILGRIM'S REST.* Pilgrim's Rest is essentially a novel
with a hero. Hayman, a middle-aged miner and gold prospector, is leaving the South African " low country " for a securer and more settled existence on the Rand. He has been all his life a gambler, and is quite " cleaned out " except for a small sum in a Johannesburg bank. His intentions are upset by the dis- covery, in a dead man's wallet, of a slip of paper giving details—the cryptic abbreviated details dear to the treasure- hunter—of a fabulously rich mine situated somewhere in Darkest Africa and known, apparently, only to the dead man. Hayman's resolutions are immediately thrown to the winds. How he went to Johannesburg to make arrange. ments for his expedition ; how on the eve of his departure he lost all his money at poker and had to set to work in the mines to replace it ; his thrilling adventures as a " black- leg " in the Rand Labour riots, which through him threatened his sweetheart and her family—these stirring events are the subject of the book. It is as exciting, from, one point of view, as Treasure Island, and, from another, as Reade's Put Yourself in His Place.
It is remarkable how, in the face of impersonal interests so absorbing, the interests of mystery and violence, Mr. Brett Young has been able to make the reader realize and
• Pitgrion's Rat, By Y. Brett Young. London : Collins. UM dd. net.!
care intensely .for the characters who support this weight of melodrama. They are burdened, too, by being set in an environment familiar to them, though perhaps strange to us —an environment described sometimes scenically, some- times technically, but always minutely and exactly. It is unnecessary to say how vividly Mr. Brett Young conveys not only the features but the atmosphere of a landscape or a gold mine. But these descriptions are open to two objections. Either they are presented, if not as a com- ponent part then as an adjunct or condition of the hero's consciousness ; or, in the meticulous visualization of his surroundings, Hayman is a lay figure, almost out of place. Seen through other eyes, those surroundings do not help us to understand him ; there is no suggestion that they were subtly malignant, nor is his feebleness contrasted with their immensity. One remembers the brilliant description of the garish Johannesburg civilization for its disturbing effect on Hayman, fresh from the wilds ; but often he is implicitly made to observe and catalogue objects of which, on account of their familiarity, he could not be vividly aware : he must have taken them for granted.
That one's interest in the characters flags a little towards the end is perhaps a necessary consequence of the author's method. The story lacks cohesion : it is episodic. It has no sensible thread, no recognizable direction. Or rather, it has several—the lure of the N'dalo gold, the machinations of the trade unions against Hayman, and, finally, his suit with Beatrice Wroth. So there are at least three important centres, three separate climaxes, each demanding for itself its emotional response and weakening its successor.
It may be that the uneasy movement of the story is symbolic of its hero's resiliency. He was always prepared to " cut his losses." Mr. Brett Young does not flinch from his " strong situations," but he has an almost unequalled faculty for making every situation strong. Hayman may bend before the blows of ill-fortune, but nothing will break him. And one grows to take for granted his happy invul- nerability and to care less for him. This is true of the others, too. Ma Pagano, whose strange attitude to Hayman is so wonderfully described, doesn't really mind when he leaves her notorious establishment. Mrs. Wroth fights desperately for her daughters ; but will she really be sorry to return to England and resume gentility with the brother who was, as she often said, a clergyman ? There is a kind of cynicism in these emotional capitulations ; the ebb of emotion is out of proportion with its flow. There is a great demonstration and then, like the strikers, the characters slink back, eating their words.
Pilgrim's Rest is such an admirable book that we are driven to ask ourselves why it is not a better one. It has great breadth of treatment and marvellous sureness of touch ; it is free from any taint of morbidity. It is exciting and even sensational ; but the excitement is the excitement of life, not of fiction. It portrays the romance in industrial conditions without a hint of false sentiment or romanticism. Its effect as a whole is marred by faults which inferior writers, through the very paucity of their material, often avoid : overcrowding of detail, weakness in design and uncertainty of emotional emphasis. But these, after all, are minor defects, and in the full, proud sail of Mr. Brett Young's narrative they seem trifling. Pilgrim's Rest, with all its blemishes, remains one of the most interesting novels of the year.
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