FICTION

. By FORREST REID Rose Forbes. By George Buchanan.(Constable. 75. 6d.) Sugar in therAir. BY E. C: Large. :(Cape. rjs. 6d.) • highland River.' By isTeil M. Gunn. (The Porpoise, Press. 75. 6d.) Nothing is .Safe_:.,_By E. M. Delafield. (MacMillan. 75. 6d.) Carnival at Blackport. By J. L. Hodson. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) Spanish Prelude. By Jenny Balloa. (Gollaricz. .Es. 6d.) WITH his second. novel Mr. Bnchanan takes. a step forward. Rose Forbes is a better book than A London Story becauk it has more unity of purpose and interest. It is the study of an Irish girl, and the opening scenes—Country and town—are laid in the north of Ireland : then, after the tragic ending of her first romance, Mr. Buchanan brings his heroine to London. The portrait of Rose is the chief feature of the novel : indeed it is everything. The people she meets—friends and lovers— only interest us in so far as they contribute to the shaping of her life. Rose herself, moreover, at first sight is in no way remarkable : she• is reliable rather than brilliant, thoughtful rather than clever. But both mentally and spiritually she has the capacity for development, and it is this growth of mind and character that forms the theme of the book ; when it is accomplished, when Rose has reached maturity, the novel ends. Possibly Mr. Buchanan presents her the more sympathetically because in not a few respects her point of view seems to coincide with his own. The ultimate stand- point is a form of stoicism. Rose starts on her career, trustful, expectant, unarmed except that she has courage ; she reaches final and complete self-possession through the collapse of one dream after another. The way is hard ; perhaps she is more than ordinarily unlucky ; , certainly nobody she meets is worthy of her. Her early and imprudent marriage to -a young reporter is cut short after a few months by his' accidental death, yet even in that brief period he had failed her. There follow a reluctant, half-hearted love-affair ; a. marriage Made without love ; then a second affair ; and in none of these does she lose her sense of loneliness, find even an approximate happiness. It is not her fault, not the outcome of her temperament, for obviously she is the kind of woman who is made 'to be the mate of one man only, and to be happy in his happiness and in her children's. "The biography of an unknown woman," Mr. Buchanan calls his book, and one feels that it must be the biography of many women. Rose is an individual, but she is also a type, and not, one suspects, a rare type. She is the perfectly normal woman, kind and simple-hearted, who happens never to meet the right man. Her mistake is that in her yearning for companionship she yields to the wrong one, hoping for the best, trusting to find qualities that are not really there.

Mr. Buchanan has worked out a technique of his own. He tells Rose's story in a series of brief episodes and impressions, and his economy of phrase ' is remarkable. It is not the method I happen to like best. I prefer a richer texture, a fuller and more leisurely treatment, and a rhythm more slowly moving. Still, I think I can see what he is after—an elimination of the redundant, a naked, almost mathematical precision.

Mr. Large is a novelist of quite another school. Sugar in the Air has Much Of the exuberant vitality and inventiveness of an early Wells romance. Sunsap '—sugar extracted from the atmosphere--is the chance discovery of Pry, a young engineer working under the supervision of Dr. Zaareb, a famous scientist ; and the` novel is the history of' Sunsap '- its firSt making; the experiments connected with it, and its final marketing. The enterprise is international, and it fails, not because Sunsap ' is a fraud, but because of the plots zni jealousies, the greei and stupidity, of company-pro- moters, business men andsalesmen. Only Pry and Zaareb ire' honest ; the rest are simply "on the make." Mr. Large has enatial gift for stoily:tellIng, a vivacious style; and 'he can create chafactei. Hia book is -rich in observation and humour. There is_ no love-making ; women play - but a minor ,part 'in the -tale ; but there is' plenty of action, and a continuous battle of wits and wills in a world of modern indus- trialism. On the possibility of Pry's invention I hazard no opinion. To me Mr. Large makes it credible by making his scientists convincing, and if they talk a good deal of shop in

the earlier pages, it seems quite genuine shop, and certainty promotes the „right atmosphere. One may read the book

merely as an exciting yarn, for it is that ; but behind it thee is also a criticism of big-business methods, in -intelligence

alert and ironic, yet refreshingly free from cynicism.

Highland River, though it is more my kind of book than either Rose Forbes or Sugar in the Air, I felt might have been better had it been shorter. Parts of it are very good indeed, but it is uneven, there is too much repetition, and certainly to

much philosophising. In form it is an imaginative auto- biography, shifting backwards and forwards in time, and with the river itself now an actual river, and now treated half syni- bolically. Kenn is the small boy who lives near it; fishes in it and swims in it : a middle-aged Kenn tells the small Kenn's

story, and too frequently drops that story th show glimines of his later career, and to muse upon life in general. For it is the freshness of the open-air scenes treated realistically, the quaint pictures of Highland life in the background, that give the book its charm. Mr. Gunn remembers well and writes well. The boyish sports and adventtires come to life again as he recalls

them—the poaching, the fishing, the lighting of heath fires, the bird-snaring. The portrait of' the mother, too-, is admirable,

and all that world of an older generation, its customs and

traditions. It is a very homely world, yet it has strangeness. The people themselves are strange, curiously reserved mil undemonstrative ; Kenn cannot remember ever having been

kissed, by his mother. There is a similar _strangeness in the attitude towards religion. - All are religious, Yet few of the mothers of families go to church. Kenn's Mother never in her life sat "at communion table, never broke the bread nor dig* the Wine . . . She believed herself unworthy and accepted her condition in the calm spirit with which she had turned away from the back door and gone to the front to see the worshippers drawn into the church."

And the older Kenn sees in this

"something Of age-old Custom.' She need ndt go ,to 'church and yet no harm will come to her. In man's spiritual aspiration, she is forgotten or ignored. In his ascetic moments, she is reea darkened with passion, soiled with the pain of creation, bearing the burden of sin . . . beyond the ethic of each age and every age, as life -itself is." V.

Nothing is Safe brings us back to, a sophisticated world. I think it most unlikely that Miss Delafield can have read What Maisie Knew, but if she has, it was courageous of her to choose a situation so similar to the situation in that book, and to present it, as Henry James also presented it, entirely through the con- sciousness of a little girl aged ten. Like Maisie's, Julia's father and mother have been divorced, have each married somebody else, and, like Maisie, Julia, when not at school, stays now with one parent and now with the other. Of course, the novels have only this formal resemblance. The interest of Henry James's masterpiece was largely a moral one—the contrast between the spiritual fineness of the child and the flashy vulgarity of the people surrounding her. The interest of Nothing is Safe is less subtle. Julia is_ quite able to adapt herself to her surroundings ; she gets on very well in b

establishments. Her problem consists in the-possession of a

neurotic and more sensitive brother, and it is on her efforts to shield him that the plot really turns.

Mr. Hodson's Carnival at Blackport is the story of a season at a popular English watering-place, with its lodging-houses, entertainments, side-shows, and all the rest of it. Mr. Hodson takes us behind the scenes, among the promoters of these joys ; and, since he has a light touch and a keen sense of the comic, his book makes pleasant reading. A thread f tragedy runs

through it, but gaiety predominates. Gaiety does not pre- dominate in Miss Ballou's Spanish Prelude, which is all about

modern Spain, with heaps and heaps of local colour. Miss Ballou is the winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellow-

ship, hut I -found her style so- exalted that after reading .fifty pages, I read no more.