New Novels

The Pursuer. By Louis Golding. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) Freedom, Farewell. By Phyllis Bentley. (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.) No Retreaf. . By D. J. Hall. (Harrap. 7s. 6d.)

The Glasshouse. By M. Barnard Eldershaw. (Harrap. 7s. 6d.)

WHEN a writer " pulls it off " after he has " laid it on " one calls his work a tour de force. In so much as Mr. Louis Golding has, certainly, laid it on thick in his new novel, The Pursuer, and succeeds in making us read_ to the end, between curiosity, growing horror, even disgust, admiration

for the tenacity of his hold on his own central idea, admira- tion for the way in which he at least believes in it—all of

which means that he has, to that degree at any rate, " pulled it off "—one may say that The Pursuer is a tour de force.

In so much as one never quite believes in the central idea . . . Two young boys could, and often do, come to hate one another with what in their adolescence they might call an

6* undying hate "—that is credible and makes a good beginning for this macabre story. But that two young men should keep it up with such an extravagance of emotion, and that two grown men should continue to wallow in their hate to such a point that one of .them with -cold; deliberation sets out to dog the footsteps of the other, rain him- in business, seduce his fiancee, and the other, having shot him, spends his last years in flying all over Europe from his avenger or his ghost, is not, naturalistically speaking, to be believed. .0ne willingly suspends one's. diibelief for anything between .1.frartda and Jekyll and Hyde. The cards are on the tabl'

honestly fantastic. But here one is asked to believe naturalistically. These two youths, like the modern novelists in Miss Susan Mitchell's phrase (and the phrase hits off Mr. Golding's method), are like two little boys who are not merely content with stealing the jam but smear themselves all over with it as well. The negligent reader will approve— he need not labour his attention to observe what the two little boys are doing ; but the obviousness of it will appal the more discriminating.

There is no question of " laying it on " in Miss Phyllis Bentley's modestly ambitious historical novel. It sets out to cover some forty years of the most exciting period in the

history of Rome and Roman expansion, and if there is so much to be told that much has to be conveyed by jerky transitions—Miss Bentley likes to present her record in indi-

vidual scenes without comment—the chief characters, Sulla, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Cato, Brutus, Cassius, Antony and Octavianus, do stand out as recognisable and typical human

beings. Her title Freedom, Farewell indicates that she is not entirely partial to Caesarism, and her plan emphasises that : for she opens with Caesar proscribed by the dictator Sulla

for his sympathy with the democratic party, and ends with yet one more dictator, Octavianus, the adopted son of the last one murdered by Brutus in the name of liberty. Two things we miss, however—a sense of the political ethics of the time which would have deepened the background, and, if we could not be given that, a greater penetration in character study. Miss Bentley is, in brief, rather prosy. What Pater called " a personal sense of fact " is missing— the thing that makes art out of historical data. The chapter on the triumph of Pompey at the beginning, or the big scene of the assassination and the subsequent events at the end, both sadly pedestrian, are typical : " Caesar was dead. Liberty lives once more I ' shouted Brutus hoarsely, waving his blood-stained sword.

A riot followed. Rome took sides. Antony fled to his house. Brutus would not allow him to be pursued. The conspirators retreated to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline in face of the fury of part of the mob. Thither Cicero sent them, &o. . . ."

It reads like a page of a text-book ; the author has not made it personal to herself, any more than she has anywhere -made the scenery—content instead, for example, with such hackneyed words as. " a landscape as unfamiliar as it was striking " or

" the sun was descending to the glowing west."

No Retreat is absolutely modern, even if its, theme is an

old one. It is one of a certain type-of book which 'reviewers like least of all books to have to review--ealmest, entirely sincere, without question competent, but, unlike the great oil- driller in the story, somehow or other not releasing a jet, not drilling down to a nerve, not quite convincing. A young man feels that in the complex world of England he cannot isolate himself in order to possess himself and goes to work

in a Roumanian oilfield. Here he meets a variety of people,

loves a peasant girl, has one or two significant experiences, the biggest being a conflict with Bercovici, a Communist agitator, who drives the workers to sabotage : he comes to a conclusion that apparently satisfies him : " We're all one, Andrei, here and everywhere. The gulfs bp., tween men are not of kind, but of time and experience."

which is annotated by his friend Stavrache's " It may seem unpoetic, but one cannot go on being a beautiful savage in a world of aeroplanes and motor-tractors. Beauty will come back again, born of culture."

It is not an amazing discovery, though that would not matter if the internal world of experience that produced it had been vivid and intense. A reviewer reads such a book without pleasure because while admitting that it is far more sincere than the mass of novels that achieve an easy success, he can only say that it does not achieve its effect.

The Glasshouse (i.e., the passengers' quarters on board ship) achieves its effects without difficulty—very pleasant, merry, acid, melancholy-sweet effects that Mr. Hall would doubtless consider not worth achieving. It is really a necklace of

short stories with the " glasshouse " as the thread and the passengers the beads. Sometimes as in " Nightpiece " the collaborating authors strive to reach a mood of some sig- nificance : more generally their sketches are like little

figurines cut in‘blocks of champagne ice, clever, impermanent. Avery pleasant book, but definitely lightvieight.