FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN
IT is alarming to notice that each of the five books to be reviewed this week costs eight-and-six pence. Seven-and-six is already a large sum to gamble on the far too -hit-or-miss chance of a readable novel, but the extra shilling is surely an exaction almost never to be extorted. However, one at least of this expensive half-dozen is a work which -those who -buy novels —but who admits the impeachment ?—may be content to leave on their shelves for posterity `to turn over curiously. What Hath A Man?by Sarah Gertrude Millin certainly does no dishonour to twentieth-century fiction. Whether or not this one or that one likes it is another question, but nobody, whatever his personal tastes in theme, -character or philosophy, who is detachedly, interested in good writing, can deny its clear literary ,value. Its story is the life of an Englishman of the wealthy middle class, born in the early eighteen-seventies and dying- just the other day. Henry Ormandy, the only child of elderly parents, is nervous, reflective, clearminded and` priggish. He is also emotional and of a religious turn of thought. Under the scorn of his rationalistic and strong- minded father, his need of God takes him into the Catholic Church in boyhood, and for life ; his need to be of use to humanity takes him, via hero-worship of Rhodes, into the Chartered Company and to work in- Rhodesia. Mrs. Millin, sketching with. a speed and-skill earnestly to be-commended-,to ambitious panoramic novelists the relevant history of Ormandy's time and giving us, among other tours de force, a brilliantly lighted portrait of Rhodes himself, concentrates soberly on the uneasy growth and sad, acceptant decline of a man who is as interesting and good as he is stiff and troubled. The plot is all of frustration, and of the persistence, no matter how encased and outwardly thwarted, of essential character and essential hunger. Useless to recommend the book's high, cold quality to all corners ; useless to quote from its frosty wit, its effortlessly turned observations. The work has too much steel in it for the general—but it will stand without popular acclaim, and some readers will remember it always. And to those who, attempting it, do not like it, one is quite content to say the equivalent of what the custodian in the Uffizi Galleries said to the carping lady tourist : " Madam, it is not the pictures which are on trial here."
But for almost all in search of entertainment PrOmised Land is a safe bet. A really lively and amusing bit of work, and incidentally an awful warning. It deals most informatively with Hollywood's first eighty years—from 1857 down to last year. It is history wrapped up in a satirical, variegated and sometimes quite disturbing novel. A family of Cornish origin called Laurie—dominated by the formidable Evangeline, " Ma," whose ruling was that " lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine "—arrived in California via Kansas, and propelled by Ed Laurie's longing to grow oranges and lemons, in time to buy a few acres in a very obscure temperance settle- ment called Hollywood. Ed, though he makes a good fight for them, does not have his citrus orchards ; the time-spirit and " Ma " take charge—and the Laurie history is an unfore- seen and grim one. Ed's two daughters grow up to be extraordinary creatures, with terrible destinies ; his son makes out after a fashion, and is happy, and unsuccessful, at the dose of the book. There is a host of characters, all inter- estingly done, but " Ma," a very terrible, silly and interesting old woman, plays lead a la Marie Dressler from beginning to end. The whole long story makes astonishing and admonitory social history ; its satire has muscle in it and is clearly directed, its wildest assertions ring truly and the author's underlying good feeling towards humanity gives value to the absurd and horrible things he has to record. Promised Land is entertain- ment with .a fierce and purposeful kick..
0 Absalom! is a long and carefully detailed story of the lives of two men born in Manchester of poor parents in the 'seventies of the last century._ Told in the first person by one..of them, it traces their careers, both successful, their marriages and paternal joys and sorrows, their disillusionments and whirlwind- reaping. The scheme is ambitious. The narrator climbs, through closely-recorded processes, to success as a novelist and playwright ; his friend, O'Riorden, fanatically devoted to Ireland and bitter against England, becomes a wealthy furniture designer and interior decorator. Each has a son whom he loves somewhat exaggeratedly according to his nature, and in the boys' tragic ends—Rory O'Riorden dying for Ireland in the patriotic struggle and Oliver Essex, the narrator's spoilt, golden- headed darling, being hanged in Strangeways Gaol for a very mean murder—the author asks us to find an inevitable Nemesis for too much and too blind paternal passion. It is a question whether we feel the inevitability of the tragedies—but the book, covering a wide field in time, and moving between Manchester, London, Cornwall and Ireland, is sober, sound and richly filled, and will undoubtedly find hosts of admirers.
In Sleep in Peace Miss Phyllis Bentley invites us to a less large, less wide-flung, more humorous and perhaps more pedestrian analysis of the generations. The tale is of York- shire and of two families, well contrasted as to types, and skil- fully interlocked in destiny. The Story of the Hinchliffes and the Armisteads, both deriving their comfortable way of life from Yorkshire's wool trade, is worked out gravely, from the 'nineties of the last century to the . death of King. George V. The conflicts of youth and age, the- anxieties - of middle age, and all the eternal humours and difficulties of family life are set down with Miss Bentley's usual authority,..and if one some- times feels, pursuing the too steady beat, that this is a type of novel of which a sufficiency has now been written, there is, nevertheless, in this author's well-drilled pidse a particular drive of thoughtfulness which more than justifies her some- what over-familiar theme, and which leaves us grave and impressed at the-last page. - - - - - --- Swiss Sonata is a difficult book to assess. It is a first novel, and if that means that its author is a really young woman —I mean in her quite young twenties—then undoubtedly there are promise and talent here to be acclaimed, in a thicket of over-writing. But if the author- is anywhere near thirty,. this book is by no means to be excessively praised. Because fake- exuberance and parade of what is supposed to be pro- fundity carry, alas, at twenty-nine a very different revelation' from that 'which they flaunt at twenty-one. At twenty-one, if there is vitality in the artist, there is bound to be a frequent failure in selectiveness, but as the precious third- decade spins out, criteria must be altered, and work must bear other marks than our somewhat exhibitionist will to write it.
This narrative of the goings-on of forty-eight, girls and seven mistresses in- a finishing school in Lausanne begins well with a very good description of the school's location, and of the circumstances by which Amelie Tourain, its present head- mistress, was forced into a position for which she knows herself to be entirely unsuitable. But thereafter, through forests of uneven writing, through pages of telescoped bio- graphy, indeed by every sort of longest way round we become tied up in a few really trivial situations, some of which Angela Brazil would know how to despatch in one-third the space they take here, and some of Which would probably shock her. But then, as Miss Brazil's heroines might say, the Pensionnat des Ormes -is a very " rummy " school. All the nationalities are there, and they behave as all the nationalities appear to be behaving everywhere at :present—hystFrieldly, brutally, deceitfully or sentimentally. The . heroine. of The h,00k- everyone's heroine throughout a quite impossible Canadian girl called Vicky Morrison,- whom- one reader at least found officious, pretentious and even- leis bearable than her romantic admirer, Mary Ellerton, the games mistress. When these two got together, either on school problems or on Life, spelt with a capital, one had to hope that Gwethalyn Graham is very young indeed—because it will be a thousand pities if the true feeling she reveals forlandscape 'inct_atmo- sphere, as well as her genuine power to delineate those characters from which she withholds somewhat her 'personal tenderness, should be sacrificed in surrender to pseudo- thoughtful emotionalism.Cin- the iiipiesicons gathered- from this hook one hazards of • Miss ralaain that either she writes, in places, -_very much s too well for her that age, or . on The whole. ihe'does not write well enough far- it.
Previous page
