FICTION
Py E. B. C. JONES They Came Like Swallows. By William Maxwell. (Michael Joseph. 7s. 6d.) Swastika Night. By Murrzy Constantine. (Gollancz. 75. 6d.) Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. By Clarence Budington Kelland. (Arthur Barker. 7s. 6d.) Tim only one of this week's books which can be considered in the same breath as novels which are works of art is Mr. Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows. To start with, the publisher must be commended for producing a story whose length is determined by its own requirements, not by the current idea of the length of a novel ; I think, however, that it should have been priced at five or six shillings. Its length
is exactly right for what its author sets out to do—to portray a small family, the shape of whose existence is determined by the strong character of the mother, who is also an intelligent woman. The Morisons are well-to-do, well-educated Ohio Americans, and have two sons, one of eight, very young for his age, and one of thirteen. The time is during the Great War. Bunny, the younger boy, catches Spanish influenza, and infects his mother, who is pregnant, and who dies of pneumonia. The story is divided into three parts, the first told from Bunny's point of view, the second from his brother Robert's, the third, after the mother's death, from Mr. Morison's.
At the outset Mr. Maxwell handicaps his book. Part One is called " Whose Angel Child ? " from a question put to Bunny by his mother, and it is some pages before the reader discovers that far from being a sentimental or even an indulgent parent, she is ironic and level-headed. The method of introducing us to the family through Bunny's mind is another handicap : the perhaps inevitable ingredients are some of them too familiar. Since Miss Sinelnir's Mary Olivier and Mr. Mackenzie's Michael Fane, how many sensitive brats have felt that Papa was hostile, have gazed at marks on the nursery ceiling, have noticed Mama stitching at something and suffered a jealous pang of fore-knowledge ? But in They Came Like Swallows the qualms of incipient boredom
are soon allayed : the moment Mrs. Morison's character takes shape, we know that she is a remarkable woman and that the book is worth finishing. The• dialogue is brilliantly selected to reveal her quality, and one really believes in her and that when she dies her family lost its compass-point, its certainty. This short book is serious, moving, individual and complete.
Sea Way Only is about the Merchant Service, and the fresh- ness of its subject-matter for most novel-readers, the way in which we are shown the problems which beset, for instance, the officers of a liner loaded with idle holiday-makers, is a great recommendation. The telling is straightforward ; there is no Conradian mystification, no atmosphere, and very little description. It opens when John Coke is Chief Officer of a large cruising liner. Mainly as a result of carrying out his duties, he arouses the enmity of a passenger who is a journalist,
and who maliciously involves him, and therefore the Line which employs him, in unsavoury publicity. The good command which has just been offered him is withdrawn and he is sent East as skipper of a notoriously dirty cargo-vessel. How he endures and wrings advantage from this misfortune, how he combats his difficulties, how by grit, hard work and ability he finally reaches the top of his profession, is related in the subsequent three hundred pages. The high spot of the story is a shipwreck, and the many other excitements include a fire at sea ; these incidents are very well and soberly told. Where
pure action is concerned, I have no fault to find with Mr. Jordan; he is lucid and convincing. But when dealing with
personal relations, and in his portrait of Coke as a whole, he is sentimental. Coke is a maiden's dream : brave, enterprising, genial, conscientious, perfect with subordinates (who adore him), loyal but outspoken with superiors (who respect him),
possessed of unerring judgement, unfailing resource, iron self- control and a genius for navigation. He is altogether to3 good to be true. This idealisation and the emotional love between him and his daughter (whom he too often, with manly terseness, addresses as " Old lady ") give the novel a pervasive saccharine flavour. I look back with positive relief at minor characters who enjoy venial love affairs, lose their tempers and show cowardice. But, for those to whom unnatural sweetness and nobility are not repellent, Sea Way Only is highly recommended as an interesting and eventful novel.
Swastika Night is by the author of a memorable book called Proud Man. Its theme is even more fantastic than that of the earlier book, and it provides less scope for Mr. (more probably Miss) Constantine's psychological insight. As the blurb says : " It is the seventh century of the Hitlerian Era. The Nazi Empire extends over the whole of Europe and of Africa and the Japanese Empire covers Asia and the Americas." Hitler has become a god, women have been degraded to almost animals, and all books, records and monumcnts of the past have long ago been destroyed in the (apparently successful) attempt to establish that there have never been other and different civilisa- tions. The chief persons are von Hess, a member of the German ruling class, Hermann, a young agricultural employee of his, and Alfred, an English aeroplane engineer on pilgrimage to Germany. In Alfred the germ of free thought, of taste for truth, has stirred ; he is secretly non-conformist, and tries in vain to interest Hermann, who loves him, in his ideas. Von Hess feels drawn to Alfred and, lacking a son, reveals to him his family secret. This consists of a manuscript book written by an ancestor and handed down from father to son—a sort of tabloid history of the world as it was before Naziism. The von Hess heirs all being dead, the old man confides the precious book to Alfred, to study and preserve. Alfred conveys it to England and dies in its successful defence.
This scheme required an author of Wellsian powers of invention. Miss Constantine not only fails to make her world of the future convincing, she has even failed to imagine Alfred in a way which would arouse our interest in him as a descend- ant of present-day man. He speaks often to Hermann of an " unarmed rebellion " which might succeed where armed revolts have been crushed ; yet he shows himself, in conversa- tion with von Hess, quite forgetful of this notion, and is childishly bloodthirsty and immersed in the current ideology. And this, instead of seeming the sort of human inconsister.cy to which we are all prone, strikes one forcibly as being due to inadequate grasp on the part of the author. The same sort of weakness and naivete runs right through the book. Unlike Proud Man, it is a very immature work.
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is a lively, sometimes amusing trifle which bears no relation to reality, and is much inferior to the film which was taken from it. The film was rich in inci- dent, invention and even emotion ; the book is poor, its texture thin. The wise simpleton, his tuba and his birthday-card jingles are there, but the farmers, the trial and the Press campaign are absent. The heroine, instead of being a sob-sister, is secretary to a comic diva, and the interest is meant to be centred in a murder of which she is suspected. The book is chiefly remarkable as showing what a scenario-writer, a director and a camera-man can do when presented with one well- conceived, picturesque character.
Down The Proud Stream is an amiable but pointless tale of the Devon countryside at the end of last century—the sort of tale in which the weather is always fine and the labour of market-gardening always easy. The Crooked Coronet is a volume of wise-cracking short stories, too long-winded to be up to Mr. Arlen's best efforts in this genre, but suitable for taking in a punt with a box of sweets—to be fair, it would match peppermint creams better than caramels. It is queer to remember those parts of Piracy where Mr. Arlen explored the bleak wastes of a society beauty's interior life, and then to read : " My cousin Pullman says that young Tommy passed the day in an agony of spirit which could easily have found him a place among the Great Lovers of History."
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