FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN Out of This Nettle. By Norah Lofts. (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.) Long Haul. By A. T. Bezzerides. (Cape. 5s.) The Thought-Reading Machine. By Andre Maurois. Translated by James Whitall. (Cape. 5s.) Rebecca. By Daphne Du Maurier. (Gollancz. Ss. 6d.) The Soul of Cezar Azan. By Alun Llewellyn. (Arthur Barker. 7s. 6d.)
FIVE new novels and all readable—i.e., all stories which this
reviewer believes she might have read to the end, even if it was not her job to do so—that is an unusual haul. And all the more unusual in that no one of the five is either a great book or the sort of thing which is bound on sheer entertainment value to sweep the libraries. No, here you have five sound, professionally done novels, any one of which is almost certainly a good many people's bedside cup of tea.
My own favourite among them is Out of This Nettle. This morning I was trapped into outlining its plot, to while away for someone what seemed to me the awful boredom of trout- fishing. " It must be very long," he said when I ended. " If that's the merest sketch —." It is very long, but if the fisherman was bored the fault is mine, not Mrs. Lofts'. She tells her eighteenth-century adventure story very well indeed, with a patient, sustained vitality and a minimum of tiresome- ness. Colin Lowrie is the son of a Jacobite who was badly wounded, and ruined, at Sherriffmuir. He himself, born in 1729, is of some service to another Jacobite chief after the defeat of 1745, and has to fly from Scotland, taking ship for the West Indies where he is sold as a slave to a tobacco-planter on the island of St. Crispin. After ten years in slavery he uses the island disturbances of the Seven Years' War to effect his escape from the plantation and, with coincidence's long- armed help, he gets to Virginia and freedom. After some ups-and-downs there he becomes a tobacco-planter, is ruined by blight on his crop and, saved from absolute ruin by an at-first-mysterious-seeming sale of his sinister plantation, says good-bye to the last of many women who had loved him, and sails for Scotland to find the stones of his father's broken house, and fulfil the Lowrie destiny which has always haunted him. An adventure story lifted, but not sentimentalised, by a hint of spiritual Odyssey. Mrs. Lofts' chief merits are : (a) her dialogue, which is twentieth century, and the occasional anachronisms of which are not half as irritating as a pelting of " Egads " and " Fie, Sirs " would be ; (b) her characterisation, which arises more convincingly than might be expected out of somewhat picturesque action ; (c) her evocation of atmosphere. This last ability makes capital reading of the slavery period. The miserable life of the slave-cabins, alleviated by the negro response to " preachings," music, corn-brew and love, is excellently done, and is, I think, the most memorable part of the book, and the negro-songs which are quoted have great beauty and character.
Lowrie is successful with women, and although he is the narrator of his own story, he manages the record of his loves without seeming absurd himself. Variety of love-experience is to be expected in so coloured and perilous a life, and Mrs. Lofts captures our interest not merely for Cassic, the young negress, and for Sadie, the Virginian maid-servant, but also, more improbably, for the brilliant, fantastic Eulalia of the last chapters. So she must forgive those of us who do not believe at all in the episode of the little Sister of Charity. Which is not to say that its facts are impossible, but simply that, as worked in here, too nicely calculated as destiny's implement of spiritual growth, it is no more than a perilous novelist's device—by no means a fatal anguish. Still, even here and right to the end, through all Eulalia's whims and extremities, good writing and narrative ability carry us without noticeable effort to the four hundred and forty-fifth page.
Long Haul is the short story of a short life. Nick Benay and his brother Paul are truck-drivers on the road between Los Angeles and San Francisco. They are paying, or not paying, for their truck by instalments. They haul loads— of oranges, lemons, potatoes, butter, salt—on commission. But when they are in luck they buy these loads outright and sell for what they can get at the end of their journeys. To make their overheads and some sort of living at this game, which is menaced by every kind of catch, dishonesty, glut,
competition, climate and physical risks, it is necessary for them to live a nightmare life of fatigue and discomfort. Naturally the dominant dread is of falling asleep at the wheel. And in this sharp, restlessly moving account of such a way of life, Nick Benay's end is clear to us from the beginning. For, like so many of the heroes of present-day American writing, he is not so much a man as a symbol, and he is placed before us so that he may suffer the extremes in destiny of that which he symbolises. Long Haul is a book of a significant type. It is both tract and drama. It depends for its effect on two things—documentary accuracy and a passionate feeling for life's value to every living man. It stages the battle between man and his enemies, time and place—the latter inevitably winning. This is always a sure-fire story, and often, as here, a moving one. And even if we sometimes tire of the uni- formity which its formula imposes on figures of fiction, we cannot deny either the legitimacy or the efficaciousness of such method of comment on human life.
M. Andre Maurois needs no bush in England, but this reviewer admits without a blush that she was not enthralled by The Thought-Reading Machine. It is about a French professor and his wife who, spending a year at an American university, become involved in the invention and afterwards, in America and in France, in the marketing of an instrument called a " psychograph," which could make " psychograms " or records of our " streams of consciousness." The use and abuse of this instrument are manipulated with mild irony by the author and illustrate, somewhat washily, a few personal comedies and one drama, and in the debates for and against the invention, which catches on in America but flops hopelessly in France, certain good and true things get said. But the joke is forced. Our human conflicts are both more comical and more significant when we fight fair, when no one loads the dice. And in any case, as one sensible Frenchman in the book points out, our reveries are no more the truth about us than are our statements and actions ; they are only " a complementary part of the whole truth." So neither the device nor our author's play with it can lead us very far in satire or discovery.
Rebecca is a Charlotte Brontë story minus Charlotte Bronte, but plus a number of things which the latter would not have paused for. Descriptions of meals and comforts, sentimental passages about scenery or dogs, little passages of dialogue which misfire, or, more unfortunately, illustrate characters in ways unforeseen by the author. But Miss Du Maurier's plot is undoubtedly the kind of thing which the three girls of Haworth Parsonage would have liked to thrash out as they paced the dining-room arm-in-arm after Papa had gone to bed.
A little mouse of a girl, very young and nameless and telling her own story, is companion to a vulgar American woman on the Riviera when the latter forces her attentions on a certain Maxim de Winter, Englishman, " Socialite," and owner of a famous show-place in the West Country called Manderley. Maxim's wife, Rebecca, had been tragically drowned in the sea near their home ten months before the story proper opens. He takes the little mouse-girl for drives, and she falls in love with him. He proposes marriage, and in a very few days after they are man and wife. They have a successful honeymoon, and return to Manderley. And to Rebecca— who haunts the minds of everyone about the place, apparently, and who in particular haunts the terrible housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, who adored her, and uses every trick to torture the new little mouse-wife. The latter is, to Miss du Mauricr's credit, a real and quite touching fool, falling into every possible booby-trap. Horrors and misunderstandings arc piled up courageously—and the author has a very neat surprise up her sleeve for the moment when you may be growing a little weary.
The Soul of azar Azan is a sad but colourful story of an unfortunate boy of Avignon who becomes a bull-fighter of sorts, in a shabby quadrilla which fights only in the French arenas. The love-hate conflict between him and Eladio, the boastful matador, is the book's chief theme, and is tragically resolved in murder and suicide. Novelty of setting and character give freshness, but the plot is inevitably in melo- dramatic convention, and the French bull-fights, lacking Spain's tragic third act, are only bull-baiting, and detract from the significance of the passions involved.
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