NEW NOVELS

Journey on the Way. By Frank Vernon. (Harrap. 7s. 6d.) Tins singularly neutral Sunday, marooned in mist between Christmas and Boxing Day, and holding neither the climax of the one nor the other's alleviation of escape and aftermath, is no weather for the appraisal of literature, and Providence, knowing this, has mercifully withheld works of genius. Last

night, stimulated by the unexpected becomingness of our cracker-hats—or was it the vine-leaves in our hair ?—we might have found it simple to weigh the merits and defects of a new Tom Jones or Anna Karenina, but this morning—

no such matter. This morning our mood is as pedestrian, but we hope at least as amiable, as that of the works to be discussed.

With no one challenging under literature's proud flag there- fore, the day is carried by informativeness. The Silver Land, after a slow start, gets away into a really knowledgeable and pleasant reconstruction of life in the Arctic Circle and in Eskimo encampments. Four Englishmen, who have apparently had other Arctic adventures together in Mr. Scott's first novel,

Snowstone, set off from the north of Scotland in a red aeroplane called ' The Lobster,' to seek an unknown Eskimo tribe which "must live between latitudes 66r and 75k, where the breeding grounds of the knot and the grey phalarope overlap." Accident

has given a dramatic stimulation to conjecture, and later coincidence does not fail of her long, strong arm. Nor indeed do our heroes' guardian angels. They pass through a varied succession of adventures, are justified of the learned surmises which impelled them north, fit the jigsaw of drama and scientific guesswork into place, are soundly tested as to courage, humour and initiative, and emerge from the ordeal of The Silver Land safe and well, and very safe in the liking of the reader. And one of them makes a personal decision at the end of the book which must not be revealed here but which

is romantic, reasonable and in every way to be applauded. A good adventure story about four agreeable and intelligent

men ; its author presents a variety of human beings, English and Eskimo, quite credibly ; he recreates Arctic scenes and ways of life with the unpretentious ease of a familiar ; but above all he presents us, gaily and lightly, with his knowledge, ethnographical, geological, zoological—and at least one ignorant reader was impressed and entertained.

Treasure in Heaven is another informative novel. This time we are taken behind the scenes of welfare-work in London slums. Fanny Manningfold is an elderly spinster who lives in Kensington with her ineffectual old parents and devotes her life not merely to them and to a host of more or less selfish relatives and friends, but mainly to committee work intended to benefit the slum-dwellers of South Trent.

The story, detailed and flatfooted, is the usual sad one of the frustration of good intentions, but, at the risk of seeming to take arms against the light, one must record a persistent feeling of impatience against the dear, good, blundering Fanny. She is—let us face it—an old silly, and in our harsh day an anachronism, but, alas, not sufficiently either to be a tragic or satisfactory figure in fiction. She has flashes of shrewdness and humour, but her author can make her neither grotesque nor heart-rending—and so, however true to life, her larger truth in art is not established. She is not a sufficient figure, not even sufficiently pathetic, to take the centre of a long, realistic novel. A genius could not write a satisfactory novel about the sort of nice old bundle in whose presence one becomes, with the best will in the world, absent-minded.

Fanny, though everyone's fool and on the side of the angels,

is not fool enough nor winged enough to be cast as any kind of heroine. Her creator had no doubt a praiseworthy idea in seeking to assert imaginatively the obvious values of the prosy, the shrewd and the good. But alas for the perversity

of art ! Where there is not passion it seems that there cannot even be pathos. There is good work here, good writing ; good sketches of slum life and character, and of committee ladies, lady novelists and American journalists—but Fanny has to carry the book, and she has not got the shoulders. We deplore her disappointment and applaud her zeal, but— resent, if you like, our hard hearts—we are bored.

To call a novel Emma is an excellent way of calling attention to it, and tempts one to toy with the possible advantages

of bestowing on one's own next fictional effort the striking title, Wuthering Heights. This new Emma is a New Yorker, and very contemporary. She springs from the pen of Mr. Louis Paul, who wrote Hallelujah, I'm a Bum ! and the only noticeable resemblance between her and Mr. Woodhouse's younger daughter is that neither young lady—peace to Miss Austen !—is at all what one takes a " bum " to be. Emma Dutton, disconcertingly introspective in the opening pages of her story, when merely being the childless wife of an up- and-coming textile manufacturer, becomes much more enter- taining and is much more entertained when, having made her surprising getaway from marital comfort, she decides to start life from scratch and justify it in her own terms. There- after with amusing ups and downs and pointing of morals, Emma's story is a success fairytale, and seasonably cheering—if you are easily cheered. Our heroine has a good, energetic character which comes as a surprise after her preliminary musings in Madison Avenue, and her tough little girl friend, Sally—pure Joan Blondel—is a dearie. We gasp and rejoice with them in their Coffee Hole adventures, and in spite of Emma's Vassar education, which comes against her in dialogue, we are happy that they make out, and that the textile-manufacturing husband comes so definitely into his own—even at the price of an amazing change of personality.

journey On The Way is picaresque—and how ! Its adven- tures are those usually encountered by the luxuriously bred and disillusioned gentleman who takes to the lanes and hedges. But the gentleman in this case is something of a novelty, so absolute is his pleasure in himself. It is a really very funny book, if you are in a good and indolent humour. It is written in the first person and the hero, gifted creature who can garden, swim, shoot, trace lost Latin ablatives, sing Verlaine-Hahn over the barndoor and quote the fiftieth Sonnet in full—to say nothing of doing as he pleases with English grammar and naming without hesitation the greatest twentieth-century painters, " Orpen, Sargent —"—is unlucky in that his humour is always " lost on " rural hearers ; so is his sarcasm, he tells us repeatedly, and so all his " subtlety of expression." Resignedly I take my place among the hinds. But I really don't think all the humour of this book was " lost on " me.

KATE O'BRIEN.