" Friends " in Fiction
MR. MarraAse has achieved another triumph. Nowadays, when good fiction is so plentiful, reviewers are tempted to use superlatives indiscrinainatively. But in all seriousness we support the publishers' verdict that this is a " great " book. It is remarkably individual alike in theme and style. "Dating from before the post offices, the railways and factories, the theatres and museums of a modern town," says Mr. Mottram, "the banks of England are the only considerable group of public buildings we have produced since we left off building cathedrals -and castles." And the banking system, as devel- oped and reflected by three generations of Dormers, is the real hero of Mr. Mottram's new novel.
Readers familiar with Norwich and Quaker history will easily identify the originals of Easthampton and the Dormer family. No doubt there will be speculation as to how much is fact and how much fiction. One thing at least is certain : Mr. Mottram,- in following the fortunes of a famous firm of East Anglian bankers, has not only given us an absorbing story in the conventional sense of the word, but has inter- woven with it a particularly brilliant and convincing picture of changing conditions and fashions in England from 1813 until the close of the Great War. The characters of the three Dormers themselves—each so representative of his own period—glow with life ; the domestic and social back- ground of their careers is sketched in with extraordinary fidelity and charm ; and the Victorian age as a whole, moving on through its successive phases of promise, fulfilment, and disintegration, is envisaged with a wonderfully clear eye for essentials, and described with a delightful blending of sym_ pathy, humour, and irony. There is just the right touch of sentiment and fantasy in the author's investing with con- tinued life the first Mr. Dormer as he hangs after death in his heavy gilt frame on the wall of the bank, gazing down, now with satisfaction and now with fear and perplexity, upon its strangely growing and altering activities. And for sheer descriptive skill, we doubt if anything better has been written in our time than Mr. Mottrara's account of Jubilee Night in Easthampton, and of the' George Inn' fire that threatened the safety of the bank which the third Mr. Dormer had come to regard as being inviolably secure even from an act of God.
G. T.
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