Fiction
Within the Labyrinth. By Norman Lewis. (Cape. gs. 6d.) THREE works in an English idiom that is fairly described as con- temporary ; a period novel in a lively and well-tried vein of romantic story-telling; and a translation of an early work by M. Roger Martin du Gard, author of Les Thibaults. None is a masterpiece— at least I do not think so, though every reviewer, of course, has a large piece of cardboard over his desk inscribed with Arnold's "It is impossible for the living to judge the work of the living." But Mr. Norman Lewis is, I think, a good novelist and is worth watching, Miss Antonia White has a nice if somewhat capricious feeling for comedy of an astringent flavour, M. du Gard did not for nothing win the intellectual regard of Andre Gide with Jean Barois, and both Mr. Cooper and Miss Gaye are accomplished and entertaining in their own very different fashion. A better than average week.
Within the Labyrinth is set in a ruined town in Southern Italy in • the summer of 1945. Sergeant Manning, who has apparently kicked his heels in boredom and frustration of spirit in Iraq during most of the war, is sent to Malevento as a representative of the Security Service. He is the heir to the ages of liberalism in a world of defeat and demoralisation, a well-meaning man whose nostrils slowly fill with the smell of corruption. The avid life of Malevento, the greed, the cynicism, the personal vendettas, the racketeering, the grotesque and sly humours, the subtle Mediterranean tolerances work insidiously upon him ; in particular, he is no match for the impeccable villainy of the marshal of the carabinieri, the monstrous . Altamura, whose ultimate triumph it is to use a drink-sodden and evasive Manning as an instrument of murder. Mr. Lewis unfolds the story with telling justice. He has a fine instinct for comedy of the harsh and ribald kind—the marchesina's attempted love-making and the premeditated and irresistible passion of the opulent Lina are both exceedingly funny—but he has also genuine sympathy. And he writes in a style that is crisp, masculine and vividly individual. Here is Manning's first intimation of the catastrophe of Fascism in Malevento and of personal disaster: "No, there was no renaissance here. No reawakening with joyous wings from the nightmare. The mountains had been in labour and had brought forth a spate of cold ashes. This race of condemned men had started out at birth on a journey across a plain set with desperate obstacles. Some of them had succeeded in keeping their integrity, but even then age and despair had yearly hung a fresh chain round their necks, and now finally the prize-winners, the indomitable survivors, had come to take their reward—this. Happy indeed those that the typhus had caressed with its yellow fingers and laid in their graves. "Something akin to panic fluttered over Manning's entrails as he thought of the wilderness of days to be endured in this place. Each day like the one he had just struggled through ; days of sweat, brick- dust, empty sunshine, blistered walls, yellow waters, parched hillsides. And these days followed by nights doled out hour by hour by the cicada. A scabrous breakdown in the ordinary reasoned flow of existence from nothing to nothing."
A defect in the novel is the too abrupt and slightly obscure termina- tion of several_ scenes, but for the rest this second book by Mr. Lewis has excellent qualities and seems to me to hold high promise.
The Lost Traveller is, similarly, a second novel (I have not read Frost in May), and is, it appears, the result of fifteen years' spasmodic work. It is a pointed and amusing study in the mutual relationships of father, mother and adolescent daughter, often lit by unexpected revelations of character in the dialogue and by equally sudden flashes of intellectual analysis. There are inconsistencies, I think, in the drawing of character, more particularly of both parents, and the later half of the book suffers from a certain dis- connectedness, so that the ending, for instance, does not really belong to what has gone before. Also I do not feel that Miss White's emphasis upon a Roman Catholic point of view, or upon the existence of a Roman Catholic point of view, is imaginatively relevant to her theme. But she has intelligence, quick „perception and humour, and the general idea that we are all separate from one another is illustrated with intuitive delicacy in the shifting focus of Clara's affections. The period-1914 and the early years of that war—and the West Kensington milieu are well done.
Jaunty in mood and all but dadaistically casual in style, peppered' with disarmingly shrewd and truthful observations about life, litera- ture and other matters, Scenes From Provincial Life compelled a fair degree of reluctant admiration from me. Everything, so far as I am concerned, is against it—the young man from Oxford who writes novels, the girl he sleeps with but does not want to marry and who wants to marry him, the friend who is red-haired and Jewish like Swann and who also writes novels, the friend's homo- sexual pasion for a youth who writes poetry, the faintly sniggering note of the earlier pages. Yet Mr. Cooper has wit and humour, good sense and an engaging ease, and is innocent of pretensions he cannot carry off. This is a novel of restricted range, a little arti- ficial in its recurring permutations and combinations of circum- stance, but bright and amusing. Veracious, too.
I have little space in which to commend the accomplishment of On a Darkling Plain, which completes a trilogy of which the earlier volumes were The French Prisoner and Louisa Vandervoord. The story covers the last two decades of the past century, and projects the cosmopolitan Vandervoord family, with the romantically haunted Vinnie at its centre, upon a crowded and animated scene. Miss Gaye's energy and spirit are unflagging. May I pedantically observe that there was no Duma in Russia in 1881, and that the spelling in question is Crabb Robinson ?
Jean Barois was published in 1914. It describes the personal and intellectual history of a scientist and freethinker, an impassioned voice in the Dreyfus affair, who, under the shadow of death, is converted back to the Catholicism of his youth. The story is told almost entirely in dramatic dialogue, and—though the translation is good—makes rather fatiguing reading. But there are passages of rhetorical nobility and the ending is memorable.
R. D. CHARQUES.
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