3 JUNE 1938, Page 36

FICTION

By KATE O'BRIEN 8s. 6d.)

Shadows Around the Lake is the English version of La Riche Miraculeuse, by Count Guy de Pourtales, a novel which has been awarded the prize of the Academie Francaise and, the

other day, the Heinemann Prize in England. The first thing to say is that the English version has been done very well indeed by Mr. Geoffrey Sainsbury. I read the original book some months ago with attentive pleasure, and now this week the English, and therefore am surprised to hear from another reader that some thirty pages of the French novel are missing from Mr. Sainsbury's translation. Surprised, because I did not miss those pages. (It is true that some months separated the two readings.) But I am puzzled to know why any cuts were made in so grave and good a book, and I wish I had the French text at hand now, in order to trace the excisions.

For this novel is an important piece of work, poignant,

intelligent and uneasy with nervous understanding. Since it is the history of a rich, proud family undergoing the post- climactic decay of its identity, it will inevitably be compared to The Forsyte Saga, but such comparison is only superficial for many reasons, but mainly because John Galsworthy was by

nature a novelist, whereas Count Guy de Pourtales is not. A deficiency which is both losS and gain to the latter in this instance. Gain on the whole in our captious day. The refusal here of imaginative ease and its resultant shapeliness, indeed the

incapacity to produce these advantages, is symptomatic of our time, and sympathetic to it. Indeed this book has exactly that autobiographical malaise which Galsworthy, compelled by

technical serenity and precision, so remarkably eschewed. Galsworthy, like him or not, did in his best work ride his own

conceptions as by the rules a novelist should, but here is a writer almost drowned, almost undone by material which nevertheless he understands and knows to a nicety. That imperfection, if noble enough, can dwarf perfection is a truism which eternally perplexes the creative, and Shadows Around the Lake

is only another instance of the comparative triumph of failure. It is one of those works to which nerves and intelligence assent on every page, but which never attains the passionate climax of the work of Art.

It is profoundly interesting. Its people are the aristocracy of Geneva ; its period 1890 to 192o. Calvin's shadow darkens

the Haute Ville, formulating human nature to an exaggerated, particular pattern. But Rousseau's dangerous contradiction also

overtook Geneva ; Voltaire and Benjamin Constant had their say, and the fastidious spirit of Stendhal flowered on the French side of the lake. Here in this book is a grave and well-founded attempt to record as they vanish certain dilemmas of human nature arising from so potent and perilous a harvest of influ- ences ; here is a picture of a highly particularised tradition at the tragic moment when like other traditions it disappears into our collective European chaos of vulgarity. The uneven story is mainly of the childhood and young manhood of Paul de Villars, scion of a great ruling family of the Calvinistic Rome. He is cosmopolitanly bred ; his family had taken blood from English, French and German sources ; he is a musician ; he is emotional, romantic, intelligent and Calvin- istically inarticulate ; he is presented diffidently and is always, even at his most irritating, both credible and sympathetic. The main theme is the clash of his ego with its sources and his

attempt to resolve himself through two loves, and through his experiences in music and in war. (He served in France with the Allies, and the pictures of life, death, muddle and hell on the Western Front are admirable.) The two women he loved stand out with particular clarity from a host of elabor-

ated characters which somewhat crowd the book. Louise who was afraid of feeling, maddening, egotistical, dreadful and yet very real and attractive, is almost excessively contrasted with the quick, passionate Antoinette whose senses rode her sensibilities to her perpetual exasperation and at the cost of recurrent misunderstanding between her and the fidgety, sensitive Paul. Certain of the love-scenes between these two, though quite noble and inevitable-seeming, do never- theless create in the reader such irrational embarrass- ment as may arise when in life an intimate confession is unwisely, even if gracefully, unloaded. The abortive scenes with Louise have, on the other hand, the easy truth of art, and the last ghastly conversation between her and Paul in a lunatic asylum a few days before her insane suicide is a masterly presentation—sad, sordid, heart-breaking and even intermit- tently comic as such agonies can be.

There is no room here to dwell on the minor characters. Nor on the nostalgic brightness with which scenes of childhood are enhanced ; nor on the careful establishment of Geneva itself, lake, mountains, rainy streets and chiming bells. It is all most impressively done—emotion recollected in not quite enough tranquillity. But perversely the more memorable for the sense of frustration that hangs about its workmanship. To sum up, this is an uneven, melancholy book to be recom- mended with confidence to all who can face the sad implacability of tradition and who desire to re-examine in honest light the wearisome and unending war of intellect and emotion.

After Shadows Around the Lake other novels, some more competent than it, seem boring. Cancel All Vows has a theme which one approaches with full sympathy—the tragedy of Germans exiled from Germany because of their refusal to adapt themselves to the Hitler ideology; But the pity is that so just and tragic an inspiration has here been made somewhat wearisome by a competent kind of incom- petence in the writer. This appears in the first page in the presentation of Julius Bergmann, the German law student, afterwards lawyer, who has lost a leg in the War of 1914-IS, and whose irremediable bitterness against Germany and Nazism, is the chief story. All depends in this book on our understanding, our patience, before the maddening character of Julius. Nothing that the author can do on the side— and she has created a whole gallery of sufficiently credible and pathetic minor characters—can neutralise the claim she makes for her very difficult central character. Julius should be, indeed in a measure is, gritty, scratchy, and maddening. But he should be finally tragic, and he is not. Indeed he is not even pathetic. It is admitted that against the boisterous charm of Marthe, his girl, his sneers and self-pity have an antiseptic harshness that frequently promises the emergence on to the page of the true essence of defeatism, but the miracle does not happen. We are never moved by our unhappy hero, and often, alas, we have to remind ourselves when we feel inclined to laugh disgustedly that he was disabled in one of our idiotic wars. This should not be. Bad, peevish, selfish and impossible, he should hold us by his essential pain, and he does not. His suicide should purge us through pity and terror, and it does not. So much good writing—and some not so good—is wasted, artistically speaking— though any work which calls attention to what Hitlerism means to the world in loss and savagery and cruelty is, hit or miss, a book to welcome.

They Drive by Night is a hard, desolate thriller. It is tough and very competent and can be commended to all those who are not yet weary of the " no-adjective " technique, and who derive their best entertainment from the desperate goings-on of the hunted and the inarticulate. It is all about the violent misfortunes of an ex-thief called Shorty Mathews who, calling on a prostitute friend and finding her dead in her bed but still warm, leaves his finger-marks about her possessions and gets the law on his heels for the crime. He takes to the road on lorries, and the chief interest of the book lies in its presentation of the robot-like, lonely life of lorry-men, their girls, their " caffs," their fatigues and responsibilities. The plot is complicated, and quite exciting.

Crippled Splendour belongs to a genre that always has its steady quota of admirers. It is a well-written historical novel, slow, elaborate and—so far as the man in the street may judge —very carefully true. It deals with James I of Scotland, poet, musician and tragic king, and although it is that kind of readable novel which of all kinds I find least readable, I was surprised at my real interest in it, and I salute its knowledge and competence.