Fiction
Jenny Villiers. By J. B. Priestley. (Heinemann. Ws. 6d.) A House in the Uplands. By Erskine Caldwell. (Falcon Press. 8s. 6d.) DECEMBER being upon us, up rise the tried and trusted writers of best sellers, saddled and groomed by perspicacious agents and pub- lishers, with their pieces for the occasion designed to scoop the Christmas stakes—and who dare blame them?—Mr. Priestley with his own variation on A Christmas Carol and Mr. Mackenzie with a conscientious piece of good cheer on that, of course, funniest of all topics, the food-and-drink shortage. Their publishers have done them proud in the matter of paper, binding, jacket-design and, in Mr. Priestley's case, woodcut embellishments, so that one would only have to glance at these books in the shop to know at once, without reading a single page, exactly for whom they would make the ideal gift. Reviewing them is a work of supererogation ; but the books have been sent to me, and I must say something about the contents. It is an embarrassing task. Mr. Priestley's Scrooge is a middle-aged dramatist, Martin Cheveril ; we meet him tired and ill and sunk in a mood of cynical pessimism. The action takes place in the green-room of an old theatre in a provincial town, where Cheveril's sardonic play, his farewell to the theatre, is about to open. The actors feel there is something wrong with the play, and beg him to alter the last act : it is too despairing ; but no, he insists that it presents a true picture of human life. Alone in the green-room he overdoses himself with a sedative, and is snatched away on the time-circuit to be a witness to the brief and pathetic life-history of Jenny Villiers, who has acted in this very theatre in the eighteen-forties, has been loved and forsaken by her leading man, Julian Napier, and died of a broken heart. All this, in some obscure way, restores Cheveril's belief in life, so that he is transformed into an optimist, re-writes his last act, engages a young actress he has previously refused to see, and closes a deal with a stockbroker friend for the running of a whole chain of theatres. This sounds bad enough ; but wait : there is a distinct suggestion that the young actress is none other than Jenny Villiers in a new incarnation, while her young husband . . .
"Still staring, Cheveril got up and walked across to him. It was no hallucination. When all allowance had been made for the
Air Force uniform, the browner face and shorter hair, and the cleaner, trimmer look of the young man, this might be Julian Napier over again."
There is also an old-fashioned lady's glove, relic of Jenny, which keeps dropping out of a showcase to the floor of the green-room in ghostly and challenging manner. It is always intolerable when clumsy hands seize upon a theme which above all needs delicacy and subtlety of treatment, yet it is not so much the insensitiveness as the sheer silliness of this in- credible story which transfixes one. Is Mr. Priestley serious? Hardly. Is he merely irresponsible? Not deliberately. He is a teller of tales' and he is looking for a panacea—any panacea which will save him from the terrors and rigours of a tragic view of life. But he cannot find one, and splashes heavily in a shallow sea of intellectual contradictions and absurdities. This book will satisfy not even those multitudes who are athirst for the very illusions Mr. Priestley would so much like in all sincerity to spin out for them.
Whisky Galore is insipid, tasting like the third or fourth rinsings of what might have been stimulating once, a long way away or a long time ago, but has now become a wraith drained of all body. If we are to believe Mr. Mackenzie whisky is the fuel which makes Scottish islanders run : without it they are quite immobile. In 1943 the whisky shortage is making itself felt. Alarm and despondency. Then a cargo-boat with 5o,000 cases of whisky, bound for the U.S.A., runs aground. The rest you can guess. There are people who roar with laughter at the simple mention of the word "whisky," I understand. But would their laughter extend itself through 260 pages, I wonder ; pages of jocular realism unredeemed, as it seemed to me, by the true farceur's manipulation of situation into comedy? Seldom have I read a light novel that was heavier going.
The last two novels, it is pleasant to say, are in a different class. Mr. Masefield has given us a plain, unvarnished narrative, written in the form of fictitious reports from a Byzantine envoy in the Britain of the Dark Ages to his Emperor in Constantinople, concerning the war between the Christians of the West and the encroaching Nordic heathen under their King Pedda. The story is quite simple and straightforward ; there is little description or attempt to build up atmosphere and not much subtlety of characterisation, but plenty of action of the robust non-diamatic kind. It is all very pleasant and rather boyish. A House in the Uplands is a skeletal novel or novelette of passion and degeneracy in the Deep South. Mr. Cald- well writes dramatically and even poetically, but the book has a thinness of texture which results from his inability to enter imagina- tively into the full significance of the events he describes. He is no psychologist, and there is something automatic and doll-like about the movements of his characters, which robs them of credibility: their actions are insufficiently motivated. The result is a good enough tale, written without obvious falsity, but signally lacking in under- or over-tones of any sort. It is rushed at the end in a manner which suggests that the author had begun to lose interest at page 167.
D. S. SAVAGE.
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