FICTION

A SENSE of futility touches a reviewer faced by a popular veteran. What purpose is served by noticing him? The reviewer's objections can be put down by a faithful public to liver or envy. Both Mr. Priestley and Mr. Macdonell are subjects for advertisement rather than criticism : a trusty

tradesman has delivered the goods again to his own customers. Mr. Masefield is another matter : when the hero of his new novel takes refuge from the thief-takers as a ship's doctor in a slaver at Liverpool, with a murderer as the master, with a bully called Pegg for chief officer, and with a second mate called Mr. Tulp, we do feel some breath of a larger day. The Idea of life as it ought to be is never far from any work of literature, and in Mr. Masefield's adventure stories, as in Treasure Island, we have at least a boy's implicit criticism of a commercial world.

" He was a terrible-looking man at all times, mad, dark, sideways and murderous, but he looked appalling at that moment. He snatched a pistol from the slings with each hand ; he was always fatally swift, swift as a snake, in his actions. The pistols were out and pointed in the one turn of the wrist."

This is only page seven, and our hopes beat high. The hero- in a previous instalment which I haven't read—had been sentenced to death for a murder he had not committed, the murder of his benefactor, Admiral Cringle. He had even been hanged—a situation which would have appealed to the author of The Body Snatchers, but friends cut him down and re- vived him, and shipped him off in the sinister Albicore ' to the West Coast of Africa. There, alas! after a fine traditional voyage of storms and doldrums, and muttered mutiny, Mr. Masefield decides that his novel is not, after all, going to be one of realistic adventure, without exactly deciding what it is to be. Perhaps Rider Haggard had something to do with the white race, the Kranois, the hero discovers somewhere near the middle of Africa (but in the days of Haggard—when geographers had not finished with Africa—it was possible to suspend disbelief), and perhaps Samuel Butler, with the ironic description of the war between the decadent Kranois and the barbarian M'Gai, and I don't know what cautious contributor to Chums, with the shy romance between Yvonne, a French

girl in the Kranish. city, and the hero. The book falls in pieces for lack of decision ; it can't be all true, we feel, and according to temperament we plump for the slaver, with its smell of

dirt and misery, and its murderous skipper, or for the chapters of allegory when the older statesmen hold up the war with the black Nazis (a problem which hardly belongs to Ned's day), or the fantastic melodrama full of fate and coincidence when the hero returns to his own country as a Kranish envoy and the real murderers of his benefactor are hunted down. Mr. Priestley's novel was written for broadcasting: he had to bear in mind that "the tale must appeal to an enormous mixed audience "—and so it would be unfair to complain that the effects are broad, the sentiment lush, and the theme far from subtle, if it were not that all his novels seem to have fulfilled the same conditions. A little out-of-work comedian finds himself innocently involved in an I.R.A. outrage, flees from the police, encounters in a dark luggage van another fugitive, a Czech professor whose permit has expired. They join an auctioneer who is travelling round the country in a caravan with his niece (he provides free entertainment to his customers), and they all get mixed up in a three-cornered fight over the future of a provincial market hall. An American industrial concern wants to buy it as a showroom, the county people—incredible dowagers and retired officers who seem like

most of Mr. Priestley's characters to have stepped out of a revue sketch—want to turn it into a museum, while all the good companions want to preserve it for the entertainment of

the people. 0, those good companions : everyone who pops up in the book, even for a moment, is a " character," which has a tiring effect in a tale which otherwise does not strain

the intelligence : all the good-hearted music-hall types out of how many stories, the simple straight-from-the-shoulder girl with curls (Mr. Priestley's young women always seem to have curls), a young baronet who uses words like " stunning " and " jolly," a scene-shifter who always talks about his dreams, a retired Colonial Governor—reminiscent of the millionaire in City Lights—who is always comradely when drunk and swinish when sober, and the Professor who never opens his mouth without speaking like this : " The Comic has its place beside the Beautiful and the Sublime. In the true Comic there is a large element of the Unconscious. . . ." Usually he is meant to be funny and sometimes, one feels uneasily, profound,

but one suspects that his chief function is to cover the paper with so many hundred words. The dialogue all fulfils that function—long, loose, repetitive, it is tied to the characters, like the balloons in a caricature, by certain easily recognisable characteristics, which have long ceased to bear any relationship

to real people. Mr. Priestley lacks literary tact, and an inoffensive, if ill-composed story would have been the better without the pompous suggestion of "significance." We cannot really believe that the Dunbury Town Band represents so

much.

"The tune came alive, and people of all colours and custom, seemed to come out of ;heir dungeons and mud-huts and slums and ghettoes and stifling workshops and dark factories and . . and . . . and . . . and they marched out of cities and across deserts. . . ."

It is a confession of failure when an author has to point out in so many words the moral of his story.

Mr. Macdonell's is an even more unremittingly jolly book :

a series of insulting letters addressed to a young woman by a man escaping from her wiles in a Dutch plane. This simple plot gives an excuse for a sprightly travelogue which remind, one a little of Hollywood's Peeps-at-foreign-countries in Technicolor. It is full of blithe words like " chaps " and " Bobby Browning " (meaning the poet): the fugitive, who ideas obviously correspond closely with the author's, dislike, cosmetics and what he calls " feminine posteriors " and " organ-grinders " (he means Italians) and garlic: he likes France and wine (there are little passages of boisterous Belloc) and Greek literature. At the end of the book Mr. Macdonel I turns as serious as a Wurlitzer organ, writing of the artist and whitehot flames and the love of woman. GRAHAM GREENE.