Fiction
Lord, I Was Afraid. By Nigel Balchin. (Collins. 12s. 6d.)
Silver Nutmeg. By Norah Lofts. (Michael Joseph. 12s. 6d.) Mrs. Mike. By Benedict and Nancy Friedman. (Hamish Hamilton.
10s. 6d.) Georgia Boy. By Erskine Caldwell. (Falcon Press. 6s.)
MR. NIGEL BALCHIN'S new work, which, as its publishers tell us, " cannot be described technically as a novel at all," =old neverthe- less be impossible to fit into any other literary category, and so may take its place as a kind of novelist's extravagance, or off-time exercise. The blurb presents it with a certain solemnity : " The subject is one on which the author has meditated and worked for ten years. . . . Mr. Balchin has composed a kind of super-play, using the device, of the theatre on a scale that transcends the possibilities of any theatre. . . ." and in so far as, jaded blurb-readers, we accept thi, kind of fanfare we accept it here ; for Mr. Balchin has written good novels, and we await more and better from him. But in this " super- play," this long, dissertative. non-novel, he speaks, without apology or diffidence, for his own generation, "its nature, its faults, virtues and direction if any." Against this theme he raises for measuring stick the terrible Parable of the Talents, from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Chapter 25. Perhaps he understands that enigmatii. parable ; but, understood or not, it offers a wide field of surmise, if little comfort, to the problems of the self-conscious. So, although no less confusing here than it has heretofore seemed to some of us, it may have symbolical appositeness • it may even carry some con- cealed comfort in regard to the pathetic, wordy persons we are asked to examine in this long work.
There are seven main characters in Mr. Balchin's new book. But the only two live ones turn up in the epilogue, when the seven have the undeserved good fortune to meet Methuselah and his pet brontosaurus. The seven, to return to our muttons—my goodness, what muttons!—are people, male and female, who, having been babies or children during 1914-18, have to knock about, in and out of each other's flats and beds, in the years of their early maturity, and whilst waiting for 1939. These seven speak, soliloquise, cantillate, what-you-will, with an awful monotony and in repetitively solemn situations, for Mr. Balchin's generation. Your reviewer, older than Mr. Balchin, was nevertheless around during the years he deals with here, and knew well enough the period characters and habits. That she would not have chosen such symbols as these seven have established to speak for her memories of that time is neither here nor there ; but one may express surprise that Mr. Balchin, in his other fictions a deft and delicate ironist, here chooses to suggest that in his heyday he and his more or less doomed con- temporaries offered no more field to an observer than do a row of well-groi.vn peas in a pod. True, he differentiates externally and in terms of such plot as there is ; but even then only within the range of one class, and of one preoccupation which is the immediate and smaller satisfactions of the self. He lets them behave with vary- ing degrees of incoherent decency or fussy sub-decency in the ordeal to which at last they come. But the incoherence is due to no lack of effort at self-explanation from one and all. Words, words, many tautologous and dull. This is a dull, sad document, and lies as heavily as the average War Memorial on what had once been the wild, volatile spirits of the too many who are gone too soon.
Mrs. Lofts' new novel has the attraction of being set in the far-off and romantic Banda, the isle of spices: it is concerned with the eager, adventurous, often unscrupulous rise to power of the early colonists, the secret rivalry and sometimes treacherous collusion of the European nations for the riches represented in the nutmeg, the exploitation of native by white man and the revolt and retaliation of the former ; and, within this tale of public greed and aggrandisement, with the private development of a woman, the heroine Annabet van Goens, who comes to the islands as the " glove " bride of the richest merchant of the colony and finds there, not only her husband, but her health and her love for another man. The course of this love, springing from an encounter of a few days and thereafter nourished on nothing but imagination, is not altogether convincing, and the final act of the heroine, her heroic murder of the leader of the natives, an evil done in the " cause of mercy and justice, in the right spirit to prevent greater evil," does not seem to be either quite credible or quite in character. " The very loathing of what she did made the blow one of unimaginable violence." Is the consequence, one wonders, very likely? But this, perhaps, is to cavil unnecessarily : novels have to get finished somehow, and what more suitable than to finish a tale of greed, rapine and slaughter with a blow of unimaginable violence? Mrs. Mike is a very simple story—simple in manner—but treating of such courage, endurance and resourcefulness as seem by no means simple to us pampered dwellers in cities of the temperate zone. Its situation is Hudson's Hope, a point in the fur-trading Arctic belt of Canada ; its time the first decade of our century ; its narrator, Mrs. Mike, sixteen years old when she marries her " Mountie," is an ordinarily reared Boston girl. She tells the story of her first years of married life with clear and innocent realism ; she fills it with good detail about the habits of badgers, wolves, etc., and with knowledgeable, sympathetic observation of Cree and Blackfoot Indians. Humour runs gently and sentiment is old-fashioned, ex- trovert and true ; and the courage of the heroine and her friends, so much under-written but so well proportioned to disparate events, illuminates the whole. A simple story—this reviewer reaa every word of it with zest and pleasure, Georgia Boy is a tiny little book of short pieces by the famous American writer, Erskine Caldwell—humorous episodes of boyhood with " my old man," " Ma " and the coloured man, Handsome Brown, for cast. They are monotonous pieces, lacking in variation of fun, but they seem incontrovertibly true to their kind of life.
KATE O'BRIEN.
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