FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN
Jonathan North. By J. L. Hodson. (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.) 7s. 6d.) Family Ties. By Marguerite Steen. (Collins. 8s. 6d.) Their Chimneys Into Spires. By Kathleen Wallace. (Heine- mann. 75. 6d.)
MR. HODSON'S new novel is 575 pages long, and it weighs— well, I'm no good at these guesses and I never win the cake at the bazaar, but it must be about five pounds avoirdupois. You can imagine therefore that a reviewer jibs more than once before beginning it—particularly as a few turns of its pages reveal it as the sort of book often read before, the care- fully elaborated life-story, from Lancashire coal-pit to Rolls- Royce, mansion, and every kind of chairmanship, of the classic North Country " card."
Nevertheless, Jonathan North, once begun, is more likely than most novels to be read to the end. Mr. Hodson, an accomplished novelist, knows that if he wants to take his time over a slow, full portrayal, he must justify such inclination by planting in us as quickly as possible, and without our being immediately aware of it, the main emotion which his chief per- sonage is to exact from us throughout the story. And here he accomplishes that. By the end of his first short chapter the thirteen-year-old Jonty, dirty, quick-witted and egotistical, achieving his plan to quit school and become a seller of cough-drops, has managed both to attract and to exasperate us —and to do both things much more definitely in six and a half pages than can the average hero of fiction in a hundred and six. And as his powers of attraction and exasperation are to be the joint reason of all that happens to this unusual boy, the story of a character thus moves forward at once, carrying us with it.
The plot, though lively enough and bright with character- istic twists, runs mainly to type, and need not be recapitulated —its chief originality being that Jonty does not get the pit- manager's daughter to marry him when they are young, but meets her and wins her in middle age, when she is a nursing sister, and he, rich, married, is " the oldest second lieutenant " in the '14-18 War. The period covered by the whole story appears to be from about 1887 to 1939, and within that span we are asked to follow Jonty through many shady places, as insurance agent, real-estate dealer, war profiteer, theatre owner, newspaper proprietor, &c. Not all of these manifestations of his go-getting personality are worth the care and detail lavished on them, nor is there anything particularly fresh or amusing in their questionableness. What does keep fresh and amusing, however, is the hero himself. Jonty is both better and worse than his own money-making adventures, or his own love-affairs. He is conceived largely, as a man of unusual sweetness and coarse- ness, unusual wit, generosity and egotism—and we keep cn hoping for really unusual events to arise and test his vitality and contradictoriness. But actually only one thing overtakes Jonty which is too big for his imagination, and which there- fore shows him up at his most interesting. The War, 1914-18. The first two years of it are grist to his vulgar mill—but suddenly the terrible thing fastens on to his sense of fraternity with man, and he goes into it and sees it—at Messines, at Passchendaele.
I think that perhaps the War passages are the best of this good book. Some time ago we read a great many realistic War novels, and now perhaps, as we get ready for " the real thing," they are not being read. But as I read Mr. Hodson's sober and compassionate evocation of scenes from a slaughter which, they tell us, is "nothing to what will happen now," I could only marvel, as every reader will, at our collective in- sanity and beastliness. Yet, pointless as such marvelling may seem, it is good for the soul, I believe, to read just now as attentively as possible, the things that living men remember of a European war. And here we find very terrible memories, gravely and tranquilly set down.
We find a great many other good things too—good fun, good dialogue, lively, sustained character-drawing. All the customary ingredients of the big, picaresque, character novel, here used to build up such an honourable and well- balanced piece of writing that we must wonder why we thought we had grown tired of its kind. From " Burnham " to Vienna, from the Ship Canal to the Danube—from Mr. Hodson to Mr. Pumphrey is to change from cowheel pie to cocaine. This little slight first novel, Pink Danube, is probably written by a babe, but it is not for the consumption of babes. Neither would I advise it for the very old, who always have quite enough to say about the rising generation without being handed such copy as they will find here. But the right reader of this book—and he is not on every bush—will say that Mr. Pumphrey has done very well in this merciless presentation of a certain section of cosmo- politan Viennese society round about -1932-33. He gives us what he, apparently, found in Vienna himself, when sent there from Eton to study music and German. His picture, empty of moral virtue, save, of course, in its own excellent satirical effect, is refreshingly demonstrative of the literary virtues of wit, economy and characterisation. Not least does Mr. Pumphrey succeed in that really difficult feat of presenting himself, the "1 " of these inglorious goings-on. Without mincing matters, and also without the more blustering kind of self-projection to which young American novelists have accus- tomed us, he presents this young Etonian as vain, foolish, idle, gossiping—only too willing a prey of the fishy society he lands up in. His attempt at a love affair, or rather he himself within the attempt, is very neatly guyed, and his idiotic exit from Vienna rounds everything off on the right note of dismal ab- surdity. A promising book, but certainly cocaine to the general.
Crossing the Danube, or so I imagine, we find ourselves in a big country called Carolia, which is nowhere on the map, but is an Axis Power ruled by a Nazi dictator called Stecker. Learn to Love First is an exciting, topical story of political crime and punishment, well hung on the kind of plot which one must not give away. The mechanics are good, the charac- terisation serviceable and the denouement exciting and satis- factory. It is really, I suppose, a sort of border-line thriller, with political propaganda well loaded on, and with Wrong and Right in their just places, respectively in the seat of autocracy and under the people's red banner.
Family Ties is another kind of moral tale, a lesson for wives. Christian, wife of Simon Crome, is very good, very attractive, very pleasant and lively and non-frumpish, very much loved by her husband and children—and yet she seemed to me, and I think her author intended this, to be exactly everything that a good wife should not be. Which makes her interesting, and gives a certain sustaining novelty to the rather pedestrian plot. Because there are all kinds of bad wives—in fiction, anyhow. There are all the different kinds of bad bad ones—some of these being easy enough to read about; and then there are the few varieties of good bad ones, who usually make heavy going— the ones, I mean, who are too maternal, or too domestic or too sensitive, or something. But Christian hasn't any of those latter excesses—she is just a very good wife who keeps on failing to use her vestige of brains on each occasion when she should—except the ultimate, the saving one.
As her husband, Simon, is a much harassed publisher who manages to get into more than his share of trouble—I truly had no patience with the blackmail adventure; was Simon born yesterday?—it was interesting to count the knocks he had to take from his nice wife's witlessness. The sustained close-up of their marital troubles, gently and wittily done by Miss Steen, is the chief point of the book, but there are a good many characters and side-interests, and light appears to be thrown on the " book racket."
Their Chimneys Into Spires is about a crarming group of people, with spaniels and little sons and enchanting houses in Chelsea, who took a nasty shake over the Czech crisis last autumn, but pulled themselves together and managed to get steadied in time to enjoy Christmas. With the exception of "Nana " and a charwoman there isn't a plain-looking woman in the book, or anyone likely to do a bit of shopping in Oxford Street. That is why I thought that perhaps Miss Dodie Smith would not have written it, if she did write novels. But when, turning a page on this thought, I came on a pious reference to Mr. Gielgud on the rocking-horse, I saw that there is an affinity. In any case, in the last chapter, the author coolly steals the second best joke of Call It a Day.
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