7 JANUARY 1938, Page 31

FICTION

FORREST REID By Dickson. 7s. 6d.) Commander of the Mists. By D. L. Murray. (Hodder and Stoughton. 8s. 6d.)

I HAVE always had a particular liking for pastoral novels—tales like Bevis, or A Village Tragedy, or Under the Greenwood Tree, which possess nothing in common really except the beauty of their setting. But that beauty, being the beauty of nature, springing straight from the earth, is beyond reach of time and change and fashion, is equally fresh in the prose of Jefferies or

of Hardy, and in the verse of the old Greek poet. " The labouring ox, outworn with years and toil, Alcon, gratefully remembering his past works, did not lead to the slaughter- house ; and now, wandering in the deep meadow grass, he rejoices with lowings over freedom from the plough."

I confess that for me even single words connected with farm life and the life of the fields—words such as reaping, harvest, meadow, plough, corn, granary—have a charm that is a kind of poetry. They have in themselves a music that is not wholly due to association. " He leaned on the gate and stared at the straight, crisp, sentinel corn. . . . ' Time it was cut,' said Charlotte. ' Listen ! ' She lifted her forefinger. ' You can hear how ripe it is, if you listen '."

Does not this speech of Charlotte's call up a picture—and not only a picture, but the sound she herself hears ? It is taken from Mr. Gerald Bullett's new novel, The Bending Sickle, which nevertheless is not entirely a pastoral novel of the kind I mean. I wish it were, for I feel that it might have been had Mr. Bullett wished it also. As it is, the rural background is there, though for my taste not sufficiently there. One loses sight of it now and then in the long chain of happenings through which the heroine is shown passing from youth, through middle age, to old age. The novel is a biography, a chronicle of growth and of the flight of years. It is not easy in such a book to avoid jerkiness and scrappiness. It requires a special gift for narrative construction, but this gift Mr. Bullett has always possessed ; it was what struck me most when long ago I read his first novel, The Progress of Kay. In that memorable little tale every word was significant, and within the space of two hundred pages the whole of Kay's life passed before our eyes.

The present book is longer, but it shows the same gift of selection. We first meet Lalage Green, the Vicar's daughter, when she is a fresh and unsophisticated country girl, innocent and attractive, knowing little of life, but scribbling industriously at an absurd and romantic love story. We leave her a grand- mother, an old woman who has lived through happiness and unhappiness, wise and kind, looking over the proofs of this same novel, which is about to be reissued in a limited edition, though more as a joke than anything else. In the interval, twice widowed, she has experienced much. Her first marriage was not a success, but her second was. The War has come and gone, her children have grown up, creating new interests, new problems. The tale is devoid of all machinery. The plot is life itself. And now, when life is nearly over, the effect is of something happy and very human, of a kind of evening peaceful- ness after the storm and stress of the day :

" The sunset is not yet, the morn is gone ;

Yet in our eyes the light hath paled and passed; But twilight shall be lovely as the dawn, And night shall bring forgetfulness at last ! "

Mr. Bullett's novel, in its characters, tone, and setting, expresses what is most attractive in the English spirit : Signor Moravia's Wheel of Fortune presents a striking contrast, for

it is as Latin as the early novels of d'Annunzio, of which indeed it not a little reminded me. It is a very long book, about more or less unpleasant people, but it is an absorbing one. A brooding fatality overhangs the story from the beginning, as if that sombre figure of Destiny, whose shadow darkened all the antique world, were come again to life :

" When to destruction the gods vAild bring a house, They plant among its members guilt and sin."

And it is the sin practised for long stealthily and secretly that in the end brings about the terrible climax, when every veil. is torn down, and the full horror revealed. Signor Moravia is a powerful writer. He has a subtle and analytical mind, though what he is analysing here is chiefly human depravity. His novel is concerned almost entirely with two families in modern Rome—one aristocratic, and the other of a lower social class. But they are connected by a strong tie—on this side lust, on that greed ; and out of these primitive passions the drama is composed—firm, compact, technically flawless. It is ugly, it is criminal, but it grips and holds the imagination with the tension that only a remarkable talent can create. And the final scene has a hallucinatory and nightmare quality it would be difficult to match outside the pages of Dostoevsky. Yet, when the last page is reached, what impression

remains ?

Certainly not one to encourage an affection for humanity. Actually work of this kind, though it is intellectual, is a form of sensationalism ; its fascination is morbid ; it has no spiritual value ; and in substance it is squalid. But then I should say the same about the work of Dostoevsky, and that nowadays would be regarded as a heresy. I therefore commend Wheel of Fortune. It has all the excitement of a crime story and it is much more than a crime story : it is a penetrating study of half a dozen human beings who by some misfortune, or twist of nature, bring out only what is worst in one another. There may even be a philosophy behind it, the philosophy of The Oresteia, since, in a sense, all the subsequent evil has its roots in the crime committed years before by Stefano.

Somewhere, long ago, I read a folk tale in which Death, I have forgotten how, was taken captive by a trick ; and while he was held prisoner of course nothing on earth—neither man nor beast nor bird nor insect—could die. I cannot remember where I read this tale, but Mr. Watkin thinks it is Flemish, and says it is also to be found in France and Sicily'. At any rate he has used it in his novel, On Borrowed Time, where Gramp traps Death in an apple tree, and there compels him temporarily to stay. The chief persons in Mr. Watkin's story are Death (Mr. Brink), Gramp, and Gramp's grandson Pud, the dear little cod. The friendship between Gramp and Pud, half comic and wholly beautiful, forms the nucleus of the tale. Nothing could be happier, nothing more delightful. Without the faintest hint of sentimentality the affection that unites these two is made clear. Their conversations are a joy, and the homely charm of their adventures together contrasts admirably with the more fantastic elements in the story. I wish I could leave it at this, but unfortunately the book has two serious faults which to my mind spoil it. The first is the introduction of a sexual element, the second is Mr. Watkin's taste for improper jokes. I do not mean that these are anything dreadful—merely that they are out of place here, errors in tact, serving no purpose in a story which otherwise would be a singularly charming one. At least that is my opinion. Mr. Watkin, who is a professor of English literature,. would probably confute me by quoting Chaucer and Shake- speare. Yet I should not be convinced. I have no objection to the Wife of Bath's Tale when taken by itself ; it is only that I do not think its particular kind of humour would be successful in, let us say, Through the Looking-Glass.

England, Italy, and America have been represented in the foregoing books ; now, with Mr. D. L. Murray, we reach Scotland. Commander of the Mists is an historical romance, featuring, as the films would say, Prince Charlie. It is a novel of the '45, and a most vigorous and picturesque one. The first chapter, which struck me as rather stilted, is the weakest ; but it improves rapidly—or was it simply that I made rapid progress in Scottish dialect, for I admit that at the beginning I was considerably hampered by it ? There must be a special art in writing dialect, since sometimes I find it easy and sometimes I do not. When it is easy probably there has been a compromise, but Mr. Murray, I feel sure, is a purist. He can tell a story, nevertheless, and here he has a fine story to tell. Also he can create character ; his book has life and movement, with glimpses of a wild km' d of poetry in which a scene is vividly stamped upon the min' d as by a flash-light.