Fiction
Winter Quarters. By Pamela Hansford Johnson. (Collins. 8s. 6d.) Tranquillity. By Winifred Peck. (Faber and Faber. 7s. 6d.) Ridiculous Dictator. By Marjorie Coryn. (Constable. 8s. 6d.) Prophet by Experience. By Jack Jams. (Rich and Cowan. 8s. 6d.) MISS PAMELA HANSFORD JOHNSON is a novelist with considerable talents. She can tell a story smoothly, she can create character and situation, she has an ear for dialogue and an eye for the dramatic : not the least of her gifts is a sense of fun. Winter Quarters is both ambitious and entertaining it can be warmly recommended to the
bulk of the novel reading public and should gain the author many new admirers. Most contemporary writers of fiction have had a shot at the genre, most easily described as Grand Hostelry ; for while Miss Vicki Baum was by no means first in the field, she does at least earn the palm for popularising this form of the novel, of which both Winter Quarters and Tranquillity are very readable examples. Miss Johnson boldly, and with a considerable measure of success, makes the camp of an anti-tank battery, with many of its members and various civilians, mostly from an adjacent village, her stuff of fiction. The characters are numerous and varied ; even commonplace or boring types are so shrewdly employed that they really do contribute a share towards the success of the whole. The themes are blended expertly and are kept in skilful progress towards the natural climax of the book. So much more could be written in praise of this lively novel ; but after laying it aside the critical reader
will ask himself why he cannot use the term good-without qualifica- tion? Is it the form? A Room With a View and Mrs. Dalloway
are but two brilliant examples of its excellence. Miss Johnson has a weakness, common among novelists, she allows herself the generous attributes of a fairy-godmother, bestowing an amiable but misguided sympathy on most of her characters ; but those who like gilt on their ginger-bread will be delighted.
Much of the above is applicable to Tranquillity, though Lady Peck expresses herself with rather less assurance. Here the scene is a nursing-home in a distant suburb of London. Less than twenty- four hours covers the time scheme. Tranquillity is run by the three Misses Brown, and houses mostly elderly patients suffering from incurable complaints, driven under its pleasant roof by the exigences of war. For effective contrast there is a young ex-service man with a tiresome heart, and a maternity case in the shape of a beautiful young moron, who is the wife of an airman : various members of the nursing staff help to complete the cast. Much happens between the opening and closing scenes : perhaps too many of the problems are solved by the expedience of an air-raid. Lady Peck writcs with gracious and unfailing sympathy for the ailing, the unwanted and the elderly, whose plight has been made so difficult and bitter by the present conflict. Hers is the plea of a sensitive realist, fully conscious of the world of changing values. She does not blink at facts, but she does remind us, again and again, with gentle yet firm- insistence, that the only life worth living is that of the indi- vidualist.
The French RevolUtion has long provided romancers with fascina- ting material. Here the stale convention has Undergone many a change, but owing to the author's style, shades of the Scarlet Pim- pernel are inevitably recalled : "So they looked at each other across the elegant luxury of the breakfast-table, those two great lovers about whose heads a virtue-sickened people saw the tender halo of romance, towards whom the heart of a whole love-starved nation yearned hungrily. They looked at each other across the glass and the silver and the fine white linen, with hate and fear and contempt in their eyes." Jean-Lambert Tallien and Theresta Cabarrus are but two of the many vignettes decorating the central portrait of Maximilien
Robespierre ; others include Damon, Desmoulins, Saint-Just, Carnot, 7 Fouche, the younger Sanson, Couthon, Eleonore Duplay, and Cecile
Renault. This novel covers the last months of The Terror, opening just before the arrest of Danton and his friends, and ending with Robespierre adjusting his silk stocking, as he lay waiting on a wooden table, for his journey to the scaffold. A prefatory note tells us: "The following is a work of the imagination, and makes no C pretence to be either history or biography. The author has attempted to do no more than present, in a variety of interrelated scenes, the psychological drama of the first of the modern dictators." The author's method lacks perspective: instead of drama we get melo-
drama, and why was a triumph which sent Herbert and his friends to their death on March the 24th left out of a record which opens only three days before? Such an omission is less than just to the. supplanter of Damon.
Prophet by Experience is a cheerful farce from America. Hybo- lates Hoolock, having lived in a cave as a hermit for fifteen years, rashly writes a few lines of appreciation to the editor of a shiney illustrated magazine. The proprietor sends his star team off to make a capture. Williams and Crandall, besides being suitably tempera-
mental highlights of journalism, are also husband and wife. By some means or other, they are to inveigle the disciple of Thoreau to New York, in order that his impressions of modern life can be
secured for an astonished world and to the glory of Birdseye. The author, alas, flogs his situation too energetically, which causes the usual over development ; the results, if rather crude, are not without
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