Fiction

By GRAHAM GREENE 8s. 6d.) Five Silver Daughters. By Louis Golding. (Gollancz. 8s. ad.)

Ir is not mere selfishness on a reviewer's part that makes him eye a fresh batch of very long novels with suspicion and feel that they require more than a short novel to justify their

length. There is a vulgar popular fashion at the moment for

the long novel, and an author who allows himself to be swayed, however unconsciously, by the popular demand cannot be too

harshly condemned ; for any serious novelist must have an unremitting consciousness of subject, which will prevent him enlarging his novel by any incidents, characters or dialogue not vitally necessary to his theme.

I do not know whether the long novel is fashionable in Russia as it is in England ; but certainly the length of the two first novels on my list can hardly be defended on artistic grounds, any more than Mr. Golding's can, though they are infinitely more readable, the first because of the originality of the subject, obscured by an appallingly bad translation, the second because of the interest of its setting.

Semi-Precious Stones is the story, told in the first person,

' of Okromeshkov, a technical expert in the U.S.S.R. He is a relic of the individualist past, who pays lip service to Com- munism, but is only genuinely interested in keeping his highly paid job in the Semi-Precious Stones Trust, a Trust which he knows to be an expensive luxury. He is a man of Iago's cunning, though without Iago's metaphysical force of hate ; his tortuous brain recognizes the good he secretly opposes ; there are times when he yearns towards it, but he has been conditioned by a capitalist past ; he is hopelessly bound by

the shackles of his mental laissez faire. He worms his intricate way into the confidence of his Communist chief, and his passion for the obscure and crooked method is contrasted rather unconvincingly with the childlike trust of the Com- munist. His private life, his wife's affection, is mined by the

same attitude of mind. If the novel had stopped here, the essential theme would have emerged clearly ; instead, the novel is confused and unnecessarily lengthened by the intru- sion of a second theme—the Communist's unwitting relations

with a girl whose father was a minister of the ancien regime. The story becomes mysterious and rather absurd. A painter

called Mon, whose identity and purpose never become quite clear, spies on everyone indiscriminately, talks in aphorisms, and commits a murder for which the technical expert is tried.

As the expert is acquitted, the trial, and presumably the whole incident of the murder, is only introduced to allow the official view to be stated by the Prosecutor :

" Okromeshkov is the new and most dangerous phenomerim in our life, he is the secret destroyer, who works in the most delicate field of disintegration of the human mind and corruption of the moral foundations of our reality. Okromeshkov teaches us with what maximum of vigilance and sensitivity each class-conscious proletarian must regard the people around him, and learn to reeog- tine his enemies, laying no trust in their Soviet covering."

The schoolboy style of the translation does not help to clear the general confusion.

And Quiet Flows the Don, not much better translated presents the life of a Cossack group in time of peace, during

the war with Germany, and during the civil war. Only great literary skill could have made the barbarities of the Cossacks' life credible, without apparently falsifying them, to readers of another race. The broad-bottomed sensual women, the lust in the hayrick, the rape in the barn, the birth under the hedge : one knows what Lawrence would have made of these.

The author's nostalgia for a less intellectual life would have touched the figures with unreality ; they would have ceased simply to exist ; they would have made claims on our allegiance. The fact that they do simply exist with no hint of condemna- tion or sentimentality on the author's part is the chief merit of this careful and sometimes exciting chronicle.

But the life of a group is not by itself a subject for a novel ; a subject has to be definite and compelling enough to impose

a form. Joyce when he took a district as his subject in Ulysses was forced to limit his subject by confining the action in time

and by rather arbitrarily imposing a classical framework. But Mr. Sholokhov's novel has no unity of time or place ; we follow the Don Cossacks from their village to the front, from the front to Petrograd, and the small recurring sections of natural description (the Don in spring, summer, autumn, winter) is too mechanical a device really to impose on the story a sense of unity. It is a weakness that the incidents we could least happily dispense with, the tragic love story of Bunchuk, the Red agitator, and Anna, the girl in his machine- gun section, beautifully conveyed, as it were, between the

revolutions of the cartridge belt, between the executions and- the street fights, touch only in their beginning and their end

the fortunes of the Cossack villagers who are Mr. Sholokhov's main theme.

There is no obvious reason why this novel should begin or end where it does. There is no lack of economy in the treatment of each incident, but the incidents themselves are too numerous. If there is a pattern, which I doubt, it is lost in the acreage of carpet. Surely Zola's tedious pilgrimage through the mining areas, through the sacred grottos, through

the butchers' shops, an ignoble Tolstoy, painstaking and insensitive, should have demonstrated once and for all that verisimilitude is not enough for a work of art. George Moore's criticism of War and Peace applies to all novels which try to present an illusion of life without sufficient selection : " The reader must be a very casual reader indeed if he fail to ask himself if it were Tolstoy's intention to transcribe the whole of life. His intention seems certainly to have been to include all the different scenes that come to pass in civilized life. . . . The book is long, but even if it were three times as long many scenes would remain unrecorded, and we can imagine Tolstoy waking up in the middle of the night regretting that he had not included a yacht race, and another night awaking, screaming : I forgot High Mass.' . . . For a writer never tried harder to compete with Nature than Tolstoy. Yet he was a clever man, and must have known that he would be defeated in the end."

But though verisimilitude is not enough, a novel, even a novel written like Mr. Golding's purely for entertainment, cannot get on without it. Mr. Golding's novel is as long as the others and has less excuse for its length. The reader looks. in vain for subject or form, even the negation of chaos that veri- similitude imposes. The lives of the five daughters of a Jew called Silver enable Mr. Golding to present a revolutionary. drama (scene : Russia), a financial drama (scene : England), a drama of high-class debauchery (scene : Germany), but this is not a subject any more than the rather elementary trickery by which the story opens and closes in the same Doomington parlour can be called a form. There is no intrinsic reason why there should have been fire daughters. One is forced to the conclusion that Mr. Golding wanted to write a Big Book ;

otherwise he might have been satisfied with two or three daughters.

A reviewer feels a natural unwillingness to condemn a book which may have represented a very long labour, but Mr. Golding indicates that his novel, more than twice the average length, was written between November, 1932, and May, 1933. This speed may explain the pages and pages of loose, easy dialogue which serve no higher purpose than the tilling up of so much space, the general slackness and inefficiency of the style. At a certain level of farcical comedy Mr. Golding writes well : unfortunately, he continually strains towards a higher level. In moments of pathos, misery or passion he does not retain his detachment. The style becomes very heated and out of breath :

" In that same moment the accomplished beast in her sprang out to the primitive roaring of the beast in him, . . . Their hands closed upon each 'other like two quite separate animals. They were carried to the bed as one object on the wind of their lust. Each tore at his own clothes and the clothes of the other, till they came ripping away like newspaper.'•'

Really, I appeal to Mr. Golding : has he ever tried to rip away his clothes like newspaper ? The whole book has the same wild, humourless unreality, as if an inhabitant of Mars were trying to describe the activities of men on insufficient and often erroneous information. It is only just to Mr: Golding to add that, though this specimen of his style is a fair one, my opinion of it is not shared by the Committee of the Book Society, for they have chosen his novel as the book of the month.