Fiction
Before the Deluge. BY Mark Aldanov, translated from the Russian by Emily. By James Hartley. (Nicholson & Watson. 8s. 6d.) The Last Enchantments. By Robert Liddell. (Cape. 8s. 6d.) The Steeper Cliff. By David Davidson. (The Cresset Press. 10s. 6d.)
THE events of Mr. Aldanov's long novel, Before the Deluge, take place some forty years before the year 5917, yet one supposes that the deluge of the title is not the assassination of the Tsar Alexander II, the culminating event of the book, but the revolution that already overhangs society like a Nemesis. The scope of the novel is im- pressive, so impressive indeed that Mr. Aldanov's blurb-writer and (we are told) the Encyclopaedia Britannica speak of his work in the same breath as that of Tolstoy and Dostoievsky. It is possible that when Mr. Aldanov set out to write this book he, too, had Tolstoy in mind : "Suddenly the thought came to him (Mamontov) that he must write a book ; a really great book, by which the world would remember him. . . . Only works of art are eternal. War and Peace will never die." This Mamontov is a journalist, and Before the Deluge is much the sort of book he might .have written. Through the vehicle of his travels and those of the nihilist Hartman we observe Bakunin in Switzerland and Marx in London as well as the revolu- tionaries at work inside Russia, but Mr. Aldanov is not content with that. To enlarge his work he interpolates between his three main themes (Mamontov's love for a circus writer ; the Tsar and his mistress ; the illness and death of the husband of a social climber) essays on such great figures of the period as Bismarck, Gladstone and Wagner. The result resembles less the perfect microcosm of a world that is War and Peace than the memoirs of a journalist put into novel form. Except in the chapters leading to the assassination, when the novel lifts to a new plane of vitality and suspense, the writing has a dullness of surface that may be partly the fault of the translator. Only comparison with the Russian could tell us whether Mr. Aldanov's original description of Marx was as flat as the follow- ing: "Marx was a man of medium height, slightly stooped, his body somewhat larger than it shoulct have been in proportion to his height, with an enormous head. a dark-yellow, sickly-looking face, almost abnormally covered with hair, and extraordinarily brilliant eyes." Any newspaper of the period might have told us as much and as little as that.
Tolstoy's Napoleon is not much more than a puppet, but a puppet that comes into the room with one. Aldanov's great men all move at a distance and behind a gauze of description. Only Alexander II and Dostoievsky have an air of life. Dostoievsky, indeed, with his suffering and his struggling against poverty, seems so much the man himself that the whole interview with him fills the reader with anguish. Apart from this interview and the assassination the novel is undistinguished. Were the publisher to omit the chapters on Bismarck, Gladstone, etc., the remainder as a picture of St. Petersburg in the 'seventies would not be particularly memorable. :The author may protest that such a suggestion is impertinent, but it is a com- ment on the novel that one can make it with no sense of impertinence at all Mr. Hanley's new novel Emily shows the aftermath of events more terrible than any that shook the nineteenth century, but his characters • are not- the makers of history. Emily and her soldier husband are the common people of the world driven to breaking point by the machinations of the great. The husband, John, returns on leave from Burma to find their home has been destroyed in the blitz and their first child has lost his reason in an air-raid. Emily and her second child are living unwanted in furnished rooms in Stratford ; she has existed only for her husband's return, but he is a changed man. He has seen the horrors of the jungle, and, having grown out -of his natural environment, has fallen in love with a girl who has more to offer him than Emily with her unsophisticated manners and tasteless clothes. Emily, who longs to rebuild her lost home, realises she has lost him. Both are bewildered in a shattered world, and their nerves are on edge : "They're smashing the world up. Oh damn the bloody world. You can build the world, bricks and mortar. You can build, but you can't build lives." Told economically and un- pretentiously, the story has passages, such as those that describe the courage of Emily and the little boy in the air-raid shelter, that are almost too painful to read. -" You're not the only one," says the land- lady, "and that'll be a comfort to you. I know it's a comfort to lots of people today.. Even though you've a little boy in the mad- house, so to speak, at least he's living, isn't he, and lots of little boys are not, because they're dead, killed in these awful raids. We have to he thankful for all the small mercies God sends us." To that comfort for our times, little can be added.
Emily, with its chorus of old gossips, is unrelieved tragedy. Mr. Liddell enhances with comedy the sadness of The Last Enchantments of suburban life in the university city of Christminster. He writes of two 'brothers, Andrew and Stephen Far. ingdon, inseparable com- panions who have shared an unhappy childhood and now attempt to maintain together a life of self-sufficient contentment They "enjoyed a degree of felicity and independence which was enough to annoy other people extremely," yet. in spite of themselves, they are drawn into the lives of their neighbours. They have charity, understanding and a tendency to romanticise leavened by the practical wisdom of their housekeeper, Mrs. Preston. The three become the comforters of Mrs. Foyle, whose wretched daughter, married through her mother's efforts and sacrifices to a wealthy baronet, allows the pathetic, deformed old woman to die in the workhouse. Meanwhile we are entertained by the eccentricities of Mr. Waterfield (his tea- party is one of the chief enchantments of the book), the comments of Mrs. Preston and the sight of Miranda Foyle playing a ridiculous Ophelia at the Christminster Theatre—all described with a humane humour rare in these days of inhuman wit. The characters develop for us through their actions and their own comments on events, the brothers holding themselves as best they can, as witnesses apart
until there is forced from Andrew Faringdon the conclusion : "We. are taught not to pass judgement on people—and we know very little about them. But if we may not hate the sinner, we are to hate the sin. On actions we must, if we have any moral consciousness, pronounce at least some sort of tentative verdict, like that of a coroner's court. When I heard of Mrs. Foyle's relegation to the workhouse it seemed the most wicked set I had ever fully realised— things in the newspapers thank God, do not come home to one with such force." This is Mr. Liddell's fourth novel, and his steadily maturing gift for English comedy keeps alive in present-day literature the tradition of Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell. Mr. Davidson is an American writer, and his novel The Steeper Cliff deals with the screening of German journalists in the American- occupied zone of Germany. The hero, Andrew Cooper, a "desk- officer," brings to his job the fanaticism of the civilian, and the novel, which maintains a level of high competence throughout, is interesting to the English reader in the light it throws on the American view of this fanaticism : "We Americans are setting the most rigid stan- dards of anybody. Not because we're politically the most advanced. No, it's psychological. We're Puritans by tradition. We cannot bring ourselves to compromise with evil, not officially. . . . I've been in all the zones. . . . All the others will use Nazis. The French because they're indifferent. The British because they're devious. The Russians because they can shoot them later. The only Puritans
left in the world are the Americans." OLIVIA MANNING.
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