Fiction
INFLUENCED, as one inevitably is, by the literary fashions of the day, the novels I find hardest to assess fairly are the gentle, moral, almost allegorical ones. Being devotedly fond of Victorian children's books, I nearly always enjoy these while I read them. And then afterwards I become torn with doubt, wondering whether it wasn't only- in childishness that I enjoyed them, whether the author didn't perhaps write with the very intention, to put it crudely, of pulling a fast one on the reader. Some, of course, which to mention would be invidious, are clearly phony from the start, and belong to the same refined contemporary culture as kiddies and suites and garden gnomes. But there are others that please by a simplicity that seems to enshrine truth—until one starts to wonder whether truth is, indeed, as simple as all that.
I am nearly sure that A Horse for the Island is both honest and good. Certainly I greatly enjoyed reading it (but that's no criterion, because I often enjoy the most awful trash), and it does seem to me considerably more subtle in its writing and imagining than is custo- mary in this class of book. It is the story of Limore, an island off the Venetian coast, in the early years of this century. When it begins, the island is a simple place, barbaric and self-sufficient ; the people from the mainland are foreigners, and Tarloa, the peasant who starts to farm and brings a horse to the island, must walk as precarious a social tightrope as a negro in a town of white men. Then the Chunt comes to drink Tarloa's remembered wine, discovers the possibilities of the island, and brings to it the prosperity of a popular summer-resort. The island changes, and the life of the people changes ; and I think the author would like us to believe that the impact of these changes on the people is for the worse, though I don't think this is so, for their life before prosperity was brutish and now it is vulgar, but the fundamental good and bad remain the same. The entire story is very pleasantly told, and what I found most memorable was the terrifying unnatural spring when the waves froze in the harbour and life nearly died - this seemed to embody a deep real dread. It is both selective and yet true to life, this book, and if the people tend to be over-consistent, this is not stylistically improper on so foreign and restricted a stage.
Tracy's Tiger, a very short book for the money, is a more doubtful proposition. The young man Tracy has a tiger who is really a black panther and whose name—though this we don't discover till the last word—is Love. The tiger and Tracy live together in New York (" What makes the lamb love Mary so ? ") and the shallow allegory holds its water and the reader until the day when the tiger becomes visible to the external world, and, after being not unreasonably shot, creeps away wounded, a hidden menace. It is now, when reality strikes fancy in a manner the author cannot make acceptable, that the whole thing becomes whimsy of a usual and silly kind—although even then I can't but be sorry for the wounded shabby tiger.
The Blue Hussar is of quite another order and in a far more fashionable idiom. It's a difficult book to get into because of the narrative device the author has chosen. His characters are all in or connected with the Blue Hussars, a French regiment made up of ex-militia, ex-Partisans, ex-all-sorts, who occupy the Rhineland at the end of the last war. Each chapter is told by a different character who, though they eventually differentiate themselves, share a com- mon, presumably the author's, style, and so for a long time remain very hard to tell apart. The story is principally that of Francois Sanders, a tough intelligent likable man (rather a modern French Mr. Rochester) and his affaire with Rita, the German girl, that eventually leads him to the now commonplace literary realisation that he must find his way back to humanity. " Civilisation, father- land, religion—these words mean something "—which is, after all, just what Petain said, though both Sanders and -his creator would recoil from such a sponsor. This book can be recommended with fair confidence to the intellectual reader, because it is a novel of ideas and situations well-described and stimulating to consider.
For really light reading, No More Champagne might well fill an idle hour, since it is often funny and always informative, despite an excruciatingly arch style. It's the narrator's account of an official journey in the Empire in which her husband travelled as secretary to a likable English V.I.P. and wife. Miss Varley's impression of Australia being very different from and considerably more convincing than Nevile Shute's, this can safely be categorised as one of those books that makes one thankful to live in England.
MARGHANITA LASKI.
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