WE'LL SHIFT OUR GROUND By Edmund Blunden and Sylva Norman
The advantage of a collaboration such as. We'll Shift our Ground (Cobden-Sanderson, 7s. 6d.), we may suspect, is that one author can cope with the hero, and one with the heroine, and that each can when necessary stop and jeer at the other. Chloe, scampering through France after Duncan, is described with feminine toleration—and then, smack, comes a plain word of masculine disillusion. Duncan, dreaming and drawing a war-time France, is suddenly epitomized with a disinterested but quite feminine viciousness. And so it goes on, odd but entertaining, and shifting its ground on every page. The book is hard to classify. It is something like a broken-winded Sentimental Jou7ney, remotely like a guide-book, and some- thing like an all-too-Platonic (in the magazine sense) dialogue. It is not a novel : so, for want of a better category, it must be put into that invaluable overflow department known as human Documents. Duncan and Chloe set off, separately and secretly, for the Cassel in France, and meet, thanks to the waiter, over a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape in the dining- room of the Hotel du Sauvetage. From then on, they try to separate ; but, as neither of them wants to do so, they.are none too successful. One blames Chloe chiefly : there was that occasion when she and Eugene ran after the tram in which Duncan was escaping : but Duncan did turn up in Perigueux, where Chloe had gone of her own initiative and a certain curiosity about the prolific archaeologist. One cannot coherently summarize this book, simply because it does not cohere. Duncan, dreaming over altered battlefields, has moments worthy of Mr. Blunden himself ; and, sandwiched among the banalities and infuriating pions of two characters who are uneasy about each other, are descriptive and perceptive passages which could hardly be bettered. What- ever it is, We'll Shift our Ground is a difficult book to skip.
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