Fiction
Escapade. By Rex Warner. (Bodley Head. 10s.)
Tots is a piece of exquisitely fine fooling, such as will be enjoyed by everyone who is not incurably serious. The genial and yet veracious idiocy of Mr. Warner's characters and the wild extrava- gance of the scenes in which they play their preposterous parts have endeared the book to me from the first lines of'the first chapter to the ludicrously luscious ending. Mr. Warner writes with a chromatic virtuosity, a nerve, gusto and emphasis which make the fantastic behaviour of Mrs. Helpless and the Colonel, of Boo the black and of Canon Breather, and all the rest, more vivaciously plausible than so many of the people who are presented with any amount of laborious
perspicacity by the ordinary plodding novelist. The whole thing is— and is meant to be—tremendous fun, but there are many sportive and ingenious quirks of erudition, and a lot of excellent writing.
Undoubtedly the fantastic events which take place in Mr. Warner's absurd village and the agreeable madness of those who live in it have farcical quality which is perhaps a trifle too sustained; perhaps the bulges and loops of the caricature are sometimes unworthy of the draughtsmanship which is evident in the best, and the larger, part of the book; perhaps the wide-eyed imbecility of that alluring and ebrious pilferer, Mrs. Helpless, alternates too incongruously with her capacity for whisky and logic and the acquisition of portable trifles—to say nothing of a very large brown cart-horse. But all this, after all, is a radical part of Mr. Warner's good joke, which I will not incautiously explain and so spoil the reader's delight.
In one sense the action is controlled by an event of the greatest importance—a village cricket match. It is not every man who it pleased by satires upon this curious and austere pastime, and 1 suppose there are people who •may regard Mr. Warner's hilarious fun as a joke which borders upon sheer blasphemy. For my part find it richly amusing, with many novelties of wit. All the crazy threads and webs of Mr. Warner's fantasy are spun and woven into the strange, villainous and uproarious events of this match, where the rivalries and the plots of tradesmen and of customers give rise to fouls and fancies of every description, Major Feather knowing well that a dispute with the umpire, Mr. Clear the butcher, would seriously effect his week-end supply of meat. For all I know, this is how cricket is always played in villages; at any rate it is vastly entertaining. The cricket, with all its cricketing jargon, is the real climax of the book; and Mr. Warner's delightfully impossible tippling gangstress, riding sideways upon her great brown horse, disappears in a suitably squalid crepuscular scene, with a whiff of whisky and a well-sozzled Irish companion.
It is easy enough to conceive this kind of burlesque, but not so easy to keep it up for nearly 190 pages; and this is what Mr. Warner has done with enviable success. A strange diversion for the translator of Euripides. But this gay little book is not only brisk, witty and inventive; the satire probes deeply into the silliness of our times, and Miss Parkinson's "League" has a counterpart in the field of inter- national politics, which are themselves assuming the lineaments of a
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