29 MAY 1941, Page 24

Fiction

I AM unable to arrange these four books in any order of merit. By ordinary rules, Mr. Freeman is the best novelist in the list, but I find him dull ; Miss Mack tells a tolerable story, but she is slow and sentimental ; Mr. Bishop, ambitiously fantastical and satiric, flops too often to sheer puerility ; and Mr. White, very famous and admired, seems to me to be devoid of taste.

The Star Called Wormwood is an elaborately planned satirical diversion. A farm-lad in Devon in 1839 gets accidentally shot in the head, and as he hangs for six months between life and death his spirit goes on a fantastic journey forward to the year 2839. His fellow-traveller on this journey, appointed by William Blake, is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They find our world, more or less. They find work in an industrial town in the North of England. They find and puzzle over gas-masks and the black- out. They find Greatest Bretagne at war with Laestrygonia. They make all kinds of spirit-journeys here and there—to inter- view " Mitler," and somebody called " The Admiral," and a " Mr. H. V. Bells." Coleridge talks copiously ; Blake chips in at times ; the angel Gabriel calls. They attend a not entirely boring rehearsal of a judgement-scene before The Throne. In this God puts the problem of his creation, man, before a repre- sentative committee chosen from man—Mozart, Pascal, Napoleon, the Neanderthal man, Rembrandt, Dr. Watson and so on. The decision finally is for Heaven's reversion to its earlier methods of direct intervention in human affairs. Before the rehearsal becomes a full performance the industrial town has a bad air-

raid, and the farm-lad suffers a direct hit. When he comes back to his body •in bed in 1839 they certify him as mad.

That is all. To be good, it would have to be superbly good ; in fact, it is very uneven and sometimes painfully bad—for instance, the Cabinet meeting of Greatest Bretagne is next thing to unreadable, so unfunny is it. But the farm-lad and Coleridge, although the parody of the latter is absurd, make a pleasant enough pair as they jog about, wondering and surmising—and if there are any still around with ears for schoolboy jibes at our general tragedy, here is their book.

Mr. Freeman's method is well known. In Chaffinch's he writes of East Anglian rural life, of the virtues, sufferings and wrongs of humble people. He adheres to the method of flat fidelity, and he knows with surety the characters, habits, speech and occupa- tions of his chosen scene. That he has pity for these people, that he knows them to be mainly good in spite of the human predisposition to evil, is implied in his sober manner—yet dull- ness overrides all. Because the author, bestowing dignity on his characters by keeping them in real though inarticulate conflict with the simple laws of human behaviour, yet does not risk in any one of them individuality of conscience or of feeling. He ranges them as good and dignified animals, which is not enough imaginatively, though it may pass as a flat general truth. Still, this tale of lifelong work and patience and loss and humble gains is well written, so far as it goes.

Velveteen jacket is also about East Anglia and humble life. It tells of the love of young Daniel, the gamekeeper's son, for the son of the Squire, and of the misfortune that came to Daniel through his love for a gipsy girl, and how he made good in middle life, and always loved Mr. Johnny, the Squire. It seems to ring true to nineteenth-century country matters, in a senti- mental way. In The III-Made Knight, Mr. White obliges with his rendering of the story " Of Lancelot of the Lake," " Top of the Averages," and so on. There is a great deal of information, if you want it, about armour and falconry and tilting, some public school fun about Galahad, some Buchmanite religiosity, and a dreadful, man-to-man marling of a famous love-story.

KATE O'BRIEN.