New Novels
The Wonderful Country. By Tom Lea. (Heinemann. 15s.) The Devil that Failed. By Maurice Samuel. (Gollancz. 12s. 6d.) MR. LEA is fascinated by the problem of courage. His earlier. novel The Brave Bulls was a gritty and exciting treatise-on courage in the bull-ring. In The Wonderful Country Mr. Lea has spread himself ; he deals now with the way that a man faces up to himself and his environment on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1880's. In leaving the bull-ring, he has however lost a deal of the tightness, the breathless- ness that made the earlier book memorable.
For Mr. Lea is not just post-Hemingway ; he is also post-Stage- coach, the John Ford film which established the high-grade Western cycle of which High Noon is the most recent example. It is to be expected, therefore, that The Wonderful Country should read like the book of the film that has not been made—yet. It contains practically all the ingredients that ever went to bake a Western cake : Apaches, Texas Rangers, the coming of the railway, the Rio Grande, a loyal big-hearted horse, treacherous Mexicans, a cavalry outpost, a drunken judge, a revolution : everything except a mortgage on the farmstead.
1 The hero, Martin Brady, who has been a gunman in Mexico most of his life, wants .to go straight and join the Texas Rangers. In between the thought and the act he is plunged into a welter of gaudy circumstances South of the River. Brady is the typical Hemingway character : inarticulate, eaten with self-doubt-and sounding more like a phrase book than anything else when he is speaking Spanish. His fundamental conflicts are with himself, as a product of the environ- ment, at a tight-lipped spiritual level, and with the manifestations of The environment in terms of Indians, thirst, bribery and bullets. 'Although Brady wins through before the end-titles it is the country itself, so big, so lazily magnificent, that steals the—I want to say— picture. 1 In the Western myth violent action has always been necessary in order to give man some kind of stature. Without the violence even the man of courage, like Brady, is no more than a speck against the sweep of the desert and the curve of the sky.
" The stars came out and they saw them between the black boughs. They heard the wind in the pine tops and the water moving on the dark rocks. The trouble of the world,' Justo said, comes from the hand of man. The sierra is not troubled. I have thought about it. The sierra is too big for the hand of man. I carry mescal from Bacanora over the summits to the towns thirsty in the east five and six times in the year, and I see the sierra always in peace. It has the wild beasts, yes. And the wizards and some things of magic. But the affairs of men are small in it.' "
Mr. Lea writes well. He knows the country that he is writing about and once he gets away from the standard wooden characters of the myth, his descriptions of sights and sounds and smells are fresh and powerful. It will be interesting to see whether he can throw off the separate weights of Hemingway and horse-opera and produce the very good novel of which The Brave Bulls gave high promise.
Mr. Samuel is the antithesis of Mr. Lea. The action of The Devil that Failed is claustrophobically confined to one room. The writing has the kind of particularised clarity that is encountered in dreams. It is a remarkable little book, an extended nightmare of a joke, one of those cosmic jokes that Kafka so enjoyed. (He couldn't help laughing out loud you remember, when he read The Trial to his friends.) The situation, Mr. Samuel urges, is straightforward enough ; and it could happen to any of us : you wake in a strange room and find that you are thirteen feet tall. Mr. Samuel explores this, situation at clinical length and with cunning ingenuousness. Is it really true ? Are you a victim of gigantism ? Or are you (even more horrible perhaps) being held prisoner for unfathomable purposes by midgets ?, Mr. Samuel heightens the terror of the situation by making his giant a pedantic and cautious person (a university professor) who notes everything down with appalling lucidity. His relationship with Dr. Sertorus, who is in charge of the Sanatorium in which he finds himself, with the nurses, Miss Dirack and Miss Arkoll, and Sertorus's assistant Bethlen are developed with certainty and economy. The difficulty of physical and mental adjustment to this nightmare world is the whole of the book. Does peace, as Dr. Sertorus claims, lie in acceptance ? Or does it lie in the continued attempt to master with one's mind a•state of affairs which, although proved to exist by every emotional process, cannot but be rejected by reason ? It would be wrong to give away the solution to this wry theorem. I myself found it the only unsatisfactory thing in a remarkably original book.
Mr. Lodwick has written a long and rambling novel, the longest and most complex that he has yet produced. His usual angry hero, this time a minor official in the Consular Service, stalks broodily through 445 pages, maintaining an irritable chastity and a violent incoherence to the end.
Mr. Lodwick has a very real talent. His eye for character is unfailing and his ear for dialogue is acute. He has, when he so wishes, a genuine feeling for the economic situation. Unfortunately though, Somewhere a Voice is Calling is lacking in organisation. A kind of intellectual's Rebecca, it is the story of a man haunted by alternating love and hatred for his first wife, tormented by doubts about his second, and generally unable to live at peace with a world in which every apple he cuts open contains a maggot. Mr. Lodwick is usually concerned with violence and this book is no exception. For him the war remains the final expellence and, however much he tries to escape from it, the experience remains present : " ' Oh, the war, the war . . . the bloody war, it's all so long ago,' said Thornton. ' That's where you're wrong, chum, it's always the war ; only some people dig their heads in and pretend that they can't see it.' " There are whole passages in this novel which are more excitingly written and more clearly felt than anything Mr. Lodwick has done before. But to set against them there are shifts and evasions in the plot which are quite unworthy of him. He lavishes considerable care on the creation of a sinister Dominican Father and then loses him in an abrupt change of scene. He makes great play with the manuscript of an unfinished novel by his first wife, which then drifts away page by page into the Mediterranean without our ever knowing what was in it. And one feels sometimes that this is a willed careless- ness, that Mr. Lodwick is a Lewis Carroll baby who knows it teases.
In his ability to create raffish characters—Barry Keating in this book is an excellent example—and his ability to convey the atmos- phere of the more ash-canny side of the Mediterranean Mr. Lodwick has few equals. And there are signs here and there that he is beginning to work off some of his anger. As it is, Somewhere a Voice is Calling leaves one with the impression of patchiness ; yet still with a belief, strengthened rather than weakened, that he will soon write an
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