Fiction

By SEAN O'FAOLAIN

I'll Change the Colour. By Meavo Kenny. (Peter Davies.

7s. 6d.) • •

I SHOULD not like to be the publisher of Three Men in the Snow.

I should, in my delight, want to give away free copies of the book to everybody, for it is impossible to read this charming and delightful frolic without being eager to share it. Happy reviewer, to be able to tell several thousands of people all at once that such a book has been published !

. Readers of Kiistner's first novel, Fabian. a lashing satire

on the pre-Nazi Germany that Hitler set himself—among other things—to purify, must have been struck by the origin- ality of Kiistner's method. Every kind of sexual extravagance

was there slated with the most cruel but also the lightest of rapier-irony ; but there was such a -mixture of agate hardness and boisterous fun in Fabian that it was clearly a gamble whether Kiistner would develop as a fantaikiste or a satiric

realist, and it is still questionable whether he might not do finer things in a motifseSous vein. 'However, he has chosen, for our amusement, fo develop the opposite lobe. Here he sends the two winners of an advertisement competition to a grand hotel in the Alps ; they both appear poor, very poor, and very much out of place, but only one of them is poor, the other being a millionaire in disguise eager for a touch of real life. So far the opening gambit is pure Wodehouse, but that serious undertone of Kiistner develops from the beginning an almost imperceptible satire on the Useless Rich that keeps the whole thing from going off in fizz. Besides, his intellectual -integrity is beyond question—there are no impossible coinci- dences, and every joke is moving somewhere. So : This

brandy tastes like soap,- says the poor man who is unused to cognac. " It wouldn't be good if it didn't," says the disguised millionaire who is tired of it. The only people, remarks the

author in another place, who are well-dressed in a Swiss hotel

are the waiters. To these bubbles of wise folly the story goes on to the complications that occur when the millionaire's

family begin to get worried about him ; but what happens then it would be unfair to tell. It is typical of the light spirit of the book—really much more French than German—that the millionaire decides in the end to buy the hotel because he has been insulted there, only to find, to his dismay. that it is impossible. He owns it already. (Why didn't Bennett, in

The Grand Babylon Hotel, think of that ?) Decoration is one of those cheerfully absurd books that make

me wonder how catholic a good critic is expected to be. Enough, certainly, to avoid being priggish; and honest enough, too, to admit having enjoyed what, by all the rules of High Art, he has no business enjoying. For while Miss Hewitt's book is an artistically immoral book (in the sense that it has no ethic about humour—all jokes being equally good jokes so long as they get across), it is frankly immoral and has no lying pretensions about it. " Lobster gives you nightmares,"

Janet warns Jerry. 4- That's what I like," retorts Jerry. " It's a perfect scream waking up." (Underlined for the obtuse reader by Miss Hewitt—" Just one long scream," agreed

Janet.) Through that kind of humour, and such others as pun, slapstick farce, knockabout, and occasionally genuine

wit, we follow the .not too convincing adventures of the Margit- is of Sesspoole, Alistei Letch, the society gossip-writer, Dicky Brinton home from Africa, Janet the reporter and

Jerry the ne'er-do-well, until such time as we lie back in the hammock—for this is what the Americans call " hammock-

literature "—or are sufficiently invigorated to call for a real book.. In brief, Decoration is ideal for a cruise or a sick-room, honourable in its intentions as one of its own pink-gins-and- angostura, but not to be too closely examined either as to its content or its methods.

Mundos, by the late Stella Benson, is, thank Heaven, another story. Normally an unfinished novel is not attractive, but to avoid Mundos merely because the story is incomplete would be as great a mistake as to -avoid a good 'liqueur because you could only have a little of it. Mundos has, for

one thing, all the pleasantly cynical wit of Miss Benson's earlier books, typified by Lady Cole's mild complaint to her

obtuse husband--`,' devouringly inhuman " she calls him—

that " You can't hivai.'your wife and eat her." It has, too: that faintly remote'attitude to life in which everything seems at first to take on the quality of a happy, meandering river,

dimly lucent as at twilight, sparkling as it goes, but, as the night deepens, changing to an ominous bass. So when, in

Mundos, which is a British possession somewhere in the Atlantic, the native goats begin to lower their horns and the ruling sheep. in the persons of the governor, Sir Victor Cole, and his colleagues, begin to get annoyed, the goats are really more like foolish kids and the sheep more like bleating baa-lambs ; and when Lady Cole and Sani Wylie begin their love-making in the under-plot, it is the rather silly love-making of a pastoral comedy ; but then reality enters with the sensitively drawn character of the dwarf Francis Cole, and Lilla Liu the Chinese • prostitute, the cobwebs of the earlier whimsies blow away. It is a pity that the manuscript breaks off just as these two characters are beginning to develop and Miss Benson to come down from her ironic detachment into the arena. But what there is of it has the essential flavour of a writer who was just coming to fruition when she stopped writing ; and, as I have suggested. you do not need to consume a whole vintage to know that the wine is good.

From three books that deal with more or less sophisticated society, and in a lighter vein, we come in serious mood, in Untouchable and I'll Change the Colour, to, chiefly, the Indian underdog. The untouchable of Mulk Raj Anand is a scavenger, who is insulted by a high-caste Hindu and awakens to a sense of the misery of his fate. His feelings throughout the day are described with pity and understanding as only an Indian could describe them ; and whatever one may feel about the literary quality of the book--.whose chief blemish is that it is too long—the picture it gives is a vivid cross- section of Indian life that (so far as understanding the un- touchable question is concerned) is worth ten books of mere observation from outside.

Miss Kenny's book is also India as seen from within, but here the point-of-view is that of two Swarajist revolutionaries, an Irishman and his daughter. I admire so deeply the last three-fourths of Miss Kenny's book that I feel I owe it to her to be malicious about the opening. for her book is one of those good books that may easily fall into a void and never be rediscovered if she does not continue writing, and writing with much more thought and care. Ten times as I read the first sixty pages I felt like throwing it aside for a mild Amanda Ross or a posthumous Donn Byrne, what with " Brian the wandering singer and Conal, the husband of Sheila, our nurse, the hereditary-piper (sic) of the, Conors Who taught us the Gaelic (sic), the Middle Irish (sic) of the great songs (sic), and the Irish (sic) that is spoken in Galway today,"— and the stilted poetic English, such as withouten, sib, ploy, begat, olden, woman-child, wench, Isle of Erin, and so forth. But then suddenly the whole thing came to life in so amazing a way that I wondered if "Meave Kenny" might not conceal a collaboration between a very bad writer of fiction and a very good writer of fact ; this is the Indian part which is poignantly moving, beautiful, and real and very near to the bone of high drama. Reading it`one forgives all the rhapsodical nonsense that went before, seeing, that the book is really a chunk of biography thrown into the form of an impossible fiction and should be read ratherlas biography than a novel. Whoever reads I'll Change the Colour—the title indicates the story of a fanatically anti-English Irishwoman who, for the sake of her love for an Englishman and her despair of the India depicted for us by Mulk Raj Anand, exchanges hate of England for lost of it—must read, forgetting or ignoring the absurdities that arise from unfamiliarity with Irish life, or such slips as when the heroine, being ten in 1916,- knows five languages, and is up to her neck in revolution before Jallianwallabagh, which, M's; Kenny nnfortunately forgets, occurred some time in 1919. So read-r/1 Change the Colour becomes a most moving and persuasive book, giving, I think, great promise of even finer things to come.