FICTION
By E. B. C. JONES St;--nge Houses. By Cora Jarrett. (Heinemann. 7§. 6d.) Panic Spring. By Charles Norden. (Faber. 7s. 6d.) Six Days Grace. By W. R. Burnett. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) Night Ofithists the Whippoorwill. By Sterling North.. (Cobden- Sanderson'. 7s. 6d.) JAI Capitana. By Luis Oliveaga. (Robert Hale. 75. 6d.) , As its sub-title, A Romance, indicates, StFange _Houles: has a fantastic' theme. An elderly; idealistic woman Celled Miriam Breen, wife of a Wall Street millionaire, pays a succession of visits to a doctor for electrical treatment, for which she is put to sleep by a drug. The doctor is a psychiatrist ; and, unknown to her, he uses her while she sleeps for mysterious eXperiments, entailing a third party. This third party, whom Miriam has never seen, is a young Follies girl of low extraction and look morals called Dolly. On the same afternoon that the doctor dies of heart-failure (shock ?) Miriam awakes to find herself encased in a body not her own. She succeeds in convincing her husband that she is really still Miriam, and he brings her to another psychiatrist, one Clifford, for advice and help. The main part of the book concerns..CliffOrd's efforts to esiab7 lish the woman's identity by memory and other tests, and to satisfy himself that Breen is not trying to suppress an elderly wife in favour of a beautiful young mistress. Why, if this was the case, Breen should have consulted him, is not made clear. Clifford does so satisfy both himself and one of his assistants, and, having 'traced Dolly (no* inhabiting Miriam's font% attempts a reversal of the transforming proCeis. This is apparently a partial success—only partial, in that Miriam dies. My " apparently " relates to a further twist which Miss Jarrett gives to the story, and Which is in in opinion a serious mistake ; in her desire to give the screw one more turn, she stretches the elastic of suspended disbelief too far, and mine snapped. Miriarn's death should have been the end.
The story of which I have given the outline is told with great elaboration. The author, who precedes it with a preten- tious foreword and quotations from Hawthorne and Poe, obviously had Victorian romances in mind when she con- structed her complicated machinery. The narrator never meets either the Breens or Dolly ; she hears the story as it develops, from the lips of her friend Vera, who is Clifford's housekeeper-assistant, and also from Clifford, from his girl secretary Darcy, and from Sinclair, a journalist hanger-on. But the narrator is not a clear glass through whom we see the drama ; with her love for Vera, her affection for Clifford, her morbid concern with their and Sinclair's and Darcy's amorous relationships, she takes on a good deal of substance, and emerges as a middle-aged, intelligent, extremely sentimental spinster. Thus the book is in three planes : the plane of the initial drama, that of the investigators, and that of the narrator. This device, which was probably intended to give richness of texture, while removing the incredible central event to the middle-distance, makes the book unnecessarily laboured. It is, however, very exciting in parts, and would probably be at its best when read aloud. The narrator's sentimentality—the gloating quality in her preoccupation with other people's worries—is not, I think, intentional ; it is the result of the cult for sensi- bility among women writers, American as well as English. The dialogue contains echoes of Henry James ; and his brother William is invoked in the foreword—irrelevantly, since the postulated swapping of bodies has nothing to do with the well- established phenomenon of dissociated personalities. Strange Houses really has much more in common with Wilkie Collins than with the psychologists. The only modern touch is everybody having to be in love with someone.
Do not be put off Panic Spring by its sounding like an imitation South Wind, for Mr. Norden is not an imitative writer. True, it is about an island in the Mediterranean, owned by an elderly em-financier, who lodges stray Europeans in his villas; and true, one of them is a queer Russian doctor. But the island was Mr. Norden's way of evading that frightful problem which confronts the novelist : how to devise a frame- work, how to get his people going in appropriate surroundings, how to accommodate his ideas and perceptions. The little isolated world of an „island bcings together last the people Mr. Norden wants, and no others—they are norexiciunbered with relatives and employer., When -he. wants to show:in:an in reEtion to such, he dacs- a throwback,- as what francia_ (why the masculine form ?) tells Marlowe her life history, and as in the chapter called "Walsh." Walsh is a young man who makes his living writing jazz songs, and we are let into the secret Of his memories of the two years he spent in an English village with a girl whose „death ended the idyll. Except for a bad bit of ultra-purple on page i i8, this chapter is strikingly good. Panic Spring has no plot, and there is no development of Character. It is filled with scenery, sea-bathing, locals (induct. ing two old monks. living on top of a cliff); concerts on the financier's gramophone, MarlOwe's attempts to write a boo!: on quietism, and the Russian's impressive excursions into the macabre. The schoolmaster Marlowe is the least convincing of the persons. When we first meet him, he is held up in a hotel in Brindisi by the Greek revolution : "The number of English missionaries had increased. . . Strange, bread-like faces ! . . . Tea was almost exclusively served, and muffins were at a premium. Marlowe, with the impartial boredom of an umpire, watched and prayed."
We never again get such a sharp impression of him, and his qinetism is hard to believe in, since he preserves his intolerance. But the book is highly entertaining, and Mr. Norden is a young writer to be watched.
The next two novels on my list are, like Strange Houses, American. Six Days Grace is about a Governor of Ohio standing for re-election against a radical opponent. In order to secure the wavering farmers' vote he provokes a riot by a "Beware the Reds" speech and a threat of martial law. The ruse is successful. The point of the book is the nature of this man—a liberal, decent as American politicians go, not corrupt, but whom ambition drives into the Fascist position.
Unfortunately, Mr. Burnett makes Read Cole a wooden figure, just as unreal and thin when we are shown his private life and thoughts as when he is bombasting on the platform. The dialogue is partly at fault. "I'm tired at night. I'm getting old," says Read, who is forty-two. "This November weather gets Me a little. My old wound's paining me right now." He never comes alive, and so the present-day dilemma of liberalism which he is supposed to embody is not presented in a way to interest us. The minor characters, too, are stock figures.
Night Outlasts the Whippoorwill describes a large Wisconsin village during the Great War. The population is -largely German, and there is the spy-mania, the smug patriotism, the hun-baiting, the hounding of pacifists, with which England also disgraced herself. It contains some clever sketches : for instance, Gretchen, the phantasy-hugging flapper, is well done. But there is an air of second-hand emotion over the whole, as though the author had read too many novels. There is also too much sweetness. Thus, even the grimmer incidents;, such as the German butcher's suicide, fail to bite. It is genial but not at all an outstanding book. Mr. (or Miss): North is one of the novelists whom I would recommend tu draw characters strictly from life, and to shun the noticeably: brave, gay and "sweetly imperious" like the devil. He is wanting in objectivity. Good feeling is not only not enough, it is positively noxious where the faculty of direct imaginative perception is poor. The nearest he comes to the art of the novelist in this book is in his portrayal, of how the boy Christopher and Early Ann drew insensibly together. This incident carries conviction.
-'La Capitana, not too skilfully translated from the Spanish, is a story of the present war. Amparo, a maid in the employ, of an ex-judge's family in San Sebastian, has been seduced by a young aristocrat called Fernando, He leaves the country, and her employers shelter her during her pregnancy. Like so many illegitimate babies in novels, hers dies. When the revolution breaks out, Fernando returns as a red "comrade," and it is partly his broadcasts, partly the influence of her brothers, which convert Amparo to an interest in politics.
She changes in a few months from a childish creature to a firy of the barricades—a transformation which the author has not sufficient talent to make convincing. The blue) states him to have remained ." politically impartial " ; but his bias, as well as the naive and melodramatic colour of the book, are shown by his making Fernando become a Communist, not from conviction but for the sake of Russian gold, becoming at the sznie timer_adckted to nameless oigies_endsocaine.
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