Fiction
A Step to Silence. By P. H. Newby. (Cape. 12s. 6d.) A Place to Live. By George Buchanan. (Faber. 10s. 6d.)
Now Barabbas, one might say, was a cipher. He is described variously as a murderer, insurrectionary and a robber, and his role in the Gospels is no more than a foil at one crucial moment to the divinity of Christ. Released from crucifixion by the orthodox on the ground of his comparative respectability, he vanishes as suddenly as he appeared. But can we let him go so easily ? The distinguished Swedish novelist Par Lagerkvist sees in Barabbas our own ancestor. " Fie (too) was chosen, one might say—chosen to escape suffering, to be let off." Seen thus, his character and fate are near enough to what survives of the twentieth century to demand elaboration.
Par Lagerkvist's Barabbas feels obliged to watch the crucifixion, but he does so with distaste and a complete • bewilderment at its voluntary nature. He goes back into the city, and makes a painful effort to understand Christ and his teaching from the ,apostles.
But his dislike of voluntary suffering is not greater than his - understanding of love. When a Christian girl, Who has been his mistress, is martyred, his only reply is to stab one of the Scribes who is stoning her, He finds no solace in debauchery, and, returning to his robber-band, fails to regain his old assurance. Condemned to the Roman copper-mines of Cyprus, he is shackled to a Christian in the same way that his mind is held to the crucifixion. He alter- nately admits Christianity and disclaims it according to the needs of the moment, and, when he finally tries to associate himself with it in Rome, he acts so clumsily that he achieves the crucifixion of a large number of Christians as well as himself.
This brief story is told at a depth which can only come from 3 close and forgiving insight into the most ordinary and fundamental weaknesses of human nature. There is no rancour, but no ignorance. The only apostle to be directly introduced is St. Peter—himself tormented at this moment by his triple attempt to dissociate himself from his condemned Master ; but Peter's conscious torment is, of course, on a different plane from the insensibility of Barabbas. " Who hasn't," the latter reflects, " let somebody else down in one way or another ? " Although his own problem lies here !lc, cannot even recognise it. The story moves on with an ease which conceals a pattern of themes and symbols so interwoven that their
impact is not separable, but merges into the whole and leaves an impression of depth and truth to which one must return.
While Barabbas touches the Bible and flies off, as it were, at a tangent, Mr. Asch in Moses takes the more laborious course of re-interpreting the story of Moses step by step for a wide audience. Accepting the authority of the Old Testament in almost all respects, he nevertheless calls freely on his own imagination to fill in gaps, to explain obscurities, to justify much of what is repugnant, and in general to glorify the figure of Moses in a more intimate and popular manner than is allowed by the stark brevity of the action in Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Much of this work is vividly accom- plished, above all in the Captivity and the first scenes of the Wilder- ness, but 1 felt a certain falling off in the later stages where, it is true, the original itself loses clarity. In the final scene on. Pishgah, where Mr. Asch adds a supplementary vision of his own to the sight of the Promised Land, one feels that altogether too much is added. Apart from this it would be fair to complain that Mr. Asch allows himself to be driven somewhat furiously by his zeal—in his shabby treatment of Akhnaton, for instance, and in the villainy he paints so thickly on the faces of the Midianites and any other victims with whom we might sympathise. But if these are artistic sins, they are of a kind which Moses himself would perhaps have forgiven.
The last three novels on this list are strictly lay in their subject- matter, but each has an excellence bound up with the intense and widely differing vision of its author. In all, it is the vision which counts, rather than the story. The world Mr. Newby opens up in A Step to Silence is so special that it can hardly be attributed to the " training college for men teachers " which it ostensibly describes. On the one hand we meet people more than usually rooted in the real world. Their conversations have an inconsequence which is at the same time charming and profoundly realistic ; their behaviour, which is no less inconsequential, seems to procedd by the mysterious logic which lies hidden in people we have known for a long time. On the other hand these same people are larger than their circum- stances and larger than life ; they threaten to take off at any moment, like Kafka's characters, into regions of arbitrary endurance and villainy. But we wait and nothing happens ; the magical bicycle-ride subsides into a normal homecoming (" They had had a wonderful day ") ; the villain marries the heroine, and the only effect on the hero is to send him into the Royal Air Force. We are in a world of explosions constantly deferred and admirably described. We are absorbed, bewildered and left.
Mr. George Buchanan in A Place to Live shows that he has lost nothing of the quiet glowing brilliance which marked Rose Forbes. No frontal description introduces us to his characters ; they insinuate themselves layer by layer, so that our interest grows with each encounter until it would be next to impossible to put the book down„ And, again, this hold on us is won, as it were, from thin air, for Mr. Buchanan's seaside hotel, his political campaign, even his bombing run over a submarine, are without special interest compared with the unfolding of human character as he sees it. He is brief in spite of his subtle, sidelong approach, and with this disarmingly modest attack his hold on us is strong.
Miss Cecily Mackworth's world in Spring's Green Shadow is an unlikely amalgam of Wales and Paris—unlikely, that is, until we see that her own vision might be formed of what is wild and dark in Emily Brontë and what is clear and controlled in every French novelist. Her story of a Welsh girl, who has to rid herself of the one good memory of her childhood, is ruthless, clear-cut and TANGYE LEAN.
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