Fiction
Mildensee. By Naomi Royde Smith. (Macmillan. 8s. 6d.) Ticky. By Stella Gibbons. (Longmans Green. 75. 6d.) The Dead Look On. By Gerald Kersch. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) A Place In The Sun. By Frank Fenton. (Heinemann. 9s. 6d.) The Quick Brown Fox. By W. R. Burnett. (Heineminn. 8s. 6d.) Rabboni. By Susan Miles. (Dakers. 8s. 6d.)
Mildensee is divided mainly into two parts, with a short epilogue forming- Part Three. Part One presents us with the middle life and the closing career of a very famous woman violinist, period 1939 ; Part Two shows us the girl that woman was in 1899 and how she began to be a great artist ; Part Three binds up the girl's first great emotion with the fame and memories of the woman in the hour or two before she dies. Thus we have a compete and shapely story made vivid by variety of setting, tempo and period, but 'held together by one major emotion. The sort of novel that gives great pleasure to many readers and allows full scope to Miss Royde Smith's high technical accomplishment. Captiously there- fore, I suppose, I regret that it is so complete. The theme of audacious ' cious youth beginning, with violin or pen or what you will, and with first love hovering with its eternal threat to capsize all, is always a full story, and in skilful hands—such as have taken hold of it here—can be made to touch and satisfy the heart, ,and the tidyings-up of after-life are actually beside the point. For it is natural and true that a young person should believe himself a genius and that others should believe it, too ; and out of that recurrent state of affairs the novelist's pure business can flower again and again. But to turn out to be a genius is .a very different case, and places on the writer an onus of proof that is almost certain to overload what should only be a delicate stoi-y, full of question, with the arguments of artificial, circumstantial proof. In other words, should- riot a novelist 'have enough courage, to stay in the centre, in the true domain of his story, which in ihis case is simply the faith in the heart, the dream of genius, the delicate, impossible possibility? I make this quarrel, because, having found Part One of Mildensee unlikely, slow and a bit ariificiat, I loved Part Two, with its bright and tender pictures, landscapes and interiors, of life forty years ago in the beautiful Calvinistic town on the lake, with its excellent and happy character portraits, its unashamed romantic fragrance, and its true, fastidious study of a gifted girl on the brink of life. And I wished it had stood alone, untouched by Park Lane and by pretentious great houses in Surrey and the fittings and conversations that belong to ordinary novels.
There is always charm to be found in the writing of Miss Stella Gibbons and very often wit as well. In this Victorian pastiche she gives us much that is charming, a good deal that is amusing and a little that is witty. It will commend itself particularly to the readers—either now or long ago—of Ouida, Miss Braddon and Florence Warden. The satire is faint and gentle, but nowhere strikes a false note. It is a story of The Regiment, The Ladies and The Lower Classes—is, in fact, a modest little satire ostensibly directed against the past, but to which the more perceptive of those living in the present may not be wholly insensible.
The Dead Look On, by Mr. Gerald Kersch, is dedicated to the memory of the people of Lidice, and supposedly reproduces the facts of that appalling outrage. It is written in deep sympathy and with care, and it is dreadful. But somehow, in his love for the people of the Czechoslovakian village, Mr. Kersch has made them too arty-and-crafty to be true, too bright, dewy and unreal to carry their side of the awful story.
A Place in the Sun might have been good, but has missed fire.. Its merit is that it is sincere, and that the conception of the cripple who was intended by nature to have an exceptionally fine physique is followed out consistently. The simplicity and kindli- ness of the near-innocent is a difficult theme, however, and is here treated with a banality that robs it of depth and colour. Rob, who is a highly skilled fisherman, goes to California, lives by himself, fishes, and has an emotional encounter with a girl, frail in both senses of the word, who sings for a dance-band, drinks herself insensible at times, gives Rob a little happiness and then is taken from him. Experience develops his understanding, and he goes home to his brother Sam and to the home-town girl with whom he used to fish in childhood.
Novels about " tough guys " are normal form now—there are a great many of them about. But some guys are tougher than other guys and some writers are more powerful than other writers. Mr. Burnett, author of The Quick Brown Fox, ia, not powerful at all. His tough guy is an amoral young man who bluffs his way into undeserved publicity. The shadow of a forthcoming retribution hangs heavily over every page, but when it falls the author shirks the issue shamefully, leaves us to infer what happened and draws no conclusion of any kind.
I do not know what to say about Rabboni. When a novelist is so clearly on the side of the angels—and Miss Miles writes with a frantic, distracted compassion of the terrible hungry 1930's in Wales, of London in 1936 with war and misery stalking the whole future, and then again of Wales once the war had begun—one can only desire to praise. But this book is shapeless, of a ghastly literary pretension and every way unlucky and preposterous. Yet the author does not only treat of the most bitterly unfortunate, but she wraps her whole work in symbols and imagery of the kind connoted by her title, thereby putting her very extraordinary prose outside the reach of mockery. Were it not for these two difficulties
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