New Novels
THOUGH not necessarily, as some people might claim; artistically immoral, propagandist fiction tends to be tedious, and it is a measure of Edith Pargeter's skill. and of her passionate con- viction that A Means of Grace (Heinemann, 15s.), a frankly propagandist piece on the evils of propaganda, is as untedious as, on the whole, it is. The critic of such a book is at a dis- advantage, for his instinct is to jump in and slash, not at its fictional competence (which is considerable), but at its facts; and Miss Pargeter, by telling us for 350 sdlid pages that all suspicion or criticism (of Iron Curtain methods) merely shows us to be the victims of propaganda and hysteria, has rather gone and cut the ground from under our feet. Whatever we say must be suspect; yet small protests did escape me, now and then, as 1 read on. For instance, Miss Pargeter, having described how an Iron Curtain don is dismissed from his post, blandly excuses the business by saying: 'In England a hovering treason charge would certainly be enough to get him removed from the vicinity of the impressionable young.' But would it, in the way she describes? Would a don here, her lvanescu's equivalent, after having a single letter sent him from abroad opened and examined for Communist hints by MI5, be dismissed the next morning by his academic superiors, permanently and irrevocably, to a lifetime of manual labour and suspicion, not to mention the threat of worse things if he were ever to twitch again? Miss Pargeter clearly believes in her not very cheering thesis that we're all as bad—or as good—as our neighbours, and her theme, the separation of the world into two halves, is worked out in an overlong but moderately exciting tale of star-crossed lovers in separate halves. She is a brave writer, one who obviously loves to get hold of a contentious bone and worry it; but her courage seems to me both admirable and dangerous, that dazzling, hypnotic sort that blinds its possessors into certain sorts of nonsense. But as fiction her book is convinc- ing, if dour.
Beasts and Men, by Pierre Gascar (Methuen, 12s. 6d.), I put next, because it is the only other book of the batch with a European situation and the peculiar European (as opposed to Anglo-Saxon) form of seriousness, even dournesls again, in the face of modern life that only Miss Pargeter, of the week's other novelists, seems, in some measure, to share. These short stories, translated from the French, move in a sort of trance of suffering, life in them seems not to exist without physical pain, squalor, and discomfort, cruelty, terror, and all the unfaceable horrors of war on the doorstep as we have never wholly known it, the civilian battlefield we find it so hard, in this country, to admit. Their power is undeniable, but as tragedy they seem to me to fail by reaching a point where suffering turns to madness, and the human situation is lost in the clinical, the case-book.
A conventional novel on a much-novelised theme (the pioneer- ing Englishman), Maurice Callard's The Splendour and the Havoc (Cape, 13s. 6d.) starts off with disadvantages. Echoes of other novels, other fictional places, voices, and situations, intrude in the first pages, and Mr. Callard seems unsure, himself, of how interest- ing his story is going to be; but gradually it turns out, though un- original, not unimpressive. A civil engineer and a doctor have been putting new life into a desolate patch of Jordan, building a darn and a hospital in an Arab village. The doctor dies, leaving the less dedicated of the two both freer (for he now has money to escape) and more tied (for he now has obligations to the dead) than before.
Never wholly involved, yet unable, for all his temptations, to leave.
he grows the doggedness, the kind of weary unacknowledged courage to carry on from day to day without much hope, reward.
or thanks—the eternal, unheroic pioneer left in the everlasting and unblossoming desert; ate Englishman overlaid by the Arab, the man who, trying to encompass two nations and two loyalties, in fact finds himself homeless. His mistress, gradually defeated by the place, leaves him; the desert encroaches further. A stock theme has been enlivened by strong, sincere and always masculine treat- ment.
One man against the world is also the theme of The Deserter, by Lowell Barrington (Heinemann, 13s. 6d.), an American first novel in which the hero sets out, after seven years in prison for deserting his post in battle, to look for the only man who can clear him, and finds him a hopeless lunatic. The first half has good moments and
a strung-up, eerily effective atmosphere, but the mechanics of the story are shaky, the plot is full of eyebrow-raising coincidence, and a love story abruptly introduced and ineptly handled bungles the second half. A certain angry fire about it saves it from complete absurdity.
Two love stories lead the week: The Facts of Love, by Stanley Wade Baron, another American (Seeker and Warburg, 15s.), is rather oddly named, I feel, the main and most attractive thing about it being the way jt never quite states a fact, but leaves you to understand, through bits of seemingly negligible evidence, what has been going on, without ever telling you point-blank. A comedY of Anglo-American manners, it has the advantage, from our point of view, of showing us ourselves through Mr. Baron's cool but friendly American eye—British types, but splendidly new-minted, like Widgett the art critic with his 'narrow, long, active nose,' or Croyden the playwright, who was ,'a specialised British phenome-
non, like pantomime or music-hall,' but, 'of course, miles higher,' or Mrs. Croyden, like a Sargent portrait, 'elongated, purposeful, intelligent, and yet somewhat wan.' A story of enormous grace and assurance, it moves with an apparent artlessness that makes the writing of good comedy appear as easy as falling off a log.
Girl in May, by Bruce Marshall (Constable, 13s. 6d.), though less polished, is more original, a love story quite unlike any other —childish, hilarious, cosy, offhand, in patches profound, and managing beautifully to hit off the relationship between a boy and girl, both seventeen, who really do talk and behave like credible
seventeen-year-olds The hero is destined for the Episcopal Church but ends up a Roman bishop, the heroine, a schoolgirl called Bumpie, is expelled for inviting him, up the traditional knotted sheets, to a midnight feast in the dormitory. It is a kind of itiniu- spheric tour de lone . I have seldom felt so much inside a particu-
lar world and atmosphere. isnuul Qt,i(a-V
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