FICTION

By KATE O'BRIEN

The Duchess of Popocatapetl. By 'W. J. Turner. (Dent. 7,, 6d.) The Duchess of Popocatapetl, like all the work of Mr. W. J.

Turner, is addressed to the intelligent. Its appeal is exclu- sively cerebral ; moreover, it is erratic, arrogant, sceptical,

and covers its irrelevantly chosen course with a very grace- ful gracelessness that dispenses with formal resolution— indeed, is its own resolution. And it is, on the whole, a thrice blessed gem of a book, for which we should all be

most truly thankful.

Wherever one comes on Mr. Turner's work, poetry, bio- graphy, journalism, or what you will, one picks it up with always the same infallible anticipation of pleasure. The reflex

to his name in print is as certain as that of Pavlov's dogs to red meat. But though I had heard much of his novels, Blow for Balloons and Henry Airbubble, it happens that I have not read them. Therefore when eagerly I began this third, and found that it was apparently going to be a some- what laboriously ironic Arabian Nights affair, or Persian fantasy, I was considerably disappointed—that being the sort

of thing that I don't like at all, even if it's good. And here it did not seem to me particularly good. However, there are only about ninety pages of the near eastern joke, wherein are sketched the eccentricities of James Blow the first and James Blow the second. On page ninety-eight, when James Blow the third—our hero, or half of him—gets to Cambridge, round about 1911, the book really launches itself, becoming, and remaining, brilliant and delightful.

Thereafter it is a commentary on contemporary English life from the 1914 War to, roughly, the Munich conference. This commentary flows through the forms of fictional biography, autobiography, surmise, dialectics, satire and straight descrip-

tion. It takes English society entirely from the point of view

of the intellectual of our time, recording the fashions and changes through which intellectual society has gone within three decades. But primarily it manipulates the reactions of two men within that somewhat esoteric society upon each other, and their responses to a variety of emotional and intellectual encounters.

There is no story, other than that of growth and thought. James Blow and Henry Airbubbie, two friends so well differ-

entiated and so accurately tuned to each other as to seem to the reader to make up between them a formula for the true and complete intellectual, open their personalities to each other through note-hooks and long conversations, and to life

in general by contact with a brilliant company—Massingham, Sassoon, Ralph Hodgson, Francis Meynell, the Woolfs, the Hindeys, T. E. Lawrence and many others, all marched past here by the author to receive from him a gracious and pene- trative appreciation which is by no means the least valuable thing in the book. There arc delightful sketches, too, of the late J. W. N. Sullivan, and surely many will recognise in the duchess herself a true, warm portrait of a famous hostess of the Left not long since dead.

I had thought when reading this most pleasurable book that the easiest way to review and commend it would be to quote from it liberally. But now, turning over its pages, I do not feel that this is the best way to do it service. Cer- tainly there are sentences that can stand alone, for content and shapeliness—but the ideas flow in and out of each other with so much of the ease of really good, unpretentious con- versation, the wit is on the whole so much more pliant than sharp, the scepticism is so non-malicious, and the theses thrown up are developed with such absence of ostentation, that to chop around might be a well-intentioned clumsiness. For my part, I think I took particular pleasure in the chapter called " Intellectual Exercise " where Father Hopkins is so sympathetically discussed, the chapter called " Conversation at the Duchess's " and the three short chapters which con- clude the volume. But it is a book to read again—most unusually provocative and wise.

Goodmorning Midnight has a great deal to be said in its favour, but it is a novel of a kind so very modish as almost in its moment of appearance to be already out of date. This may seem, perhaps indeed is, an unfair thing to say of a

performance so full of the especial talents of sensibility, but Miss Rhys could almost certainly have eliminated the hint of suspectness that lies over this book, had she at second reading struck out certain technical tricks of sentimentality—repeti- tions, for instance, of floating phrases which, even at their original appearance had contributed nothing. Dots,. too. Miss Rhys is, for a sophisticated writer, oddly dependent on dots. These weaknesses give a smudge of impermanence to a sad story of misery and introspection.

The heroine is a hard-up, lonely, disillusioned woman of middle age, addicted to alcohol and acute melancholia. She returns, in the first chapter and by the bounty of a friend, to spend a fortnight in Paris, where all the loves, losses and starvations of her youth were staged. Within the fortnight she makes many actual encounters, and also meets again, in this café and on that park bench, the ghosts of her painful past.. She is also made to accept the fact of old age advancing.

The atmospherics are beautifully done, and every character is brought to life with economical ease. Miss Rhys has great powers of bitterness and of humour, and she engages the reader's concern—though sometimes in protest against senti- mental flicks—for the desperate, small, personal agonies over which the heroine treads her narrow, frantic way. The whole effect is femininely acute and painful, and the end very pitiful, very bitter.

My Cousin Justin is an uneven, curious book, which begins well and which, while by no means fulfilling the promise of its first pages, manages somehow to keep us curious enough to get to the end, in spite of frequent exasperation. It is a story of two cousins, boy and girl, whose childhood is spent happily and poetically in their grandfather's house in Donegal, and whose after-life is a series of disillusionments, not very dearly planted, at least in the case of the wearisomely misan- thropic Justin. But the early pages do present attractively the Protestant, Liberal society of Northern Ireland, a people not often written about. The family of Justin and Louise are Huguenots, for the most part excellent, cultured people who feel and understand the Protestant-Catholic tragedy of their part of Ireland, but who are eliminated as a class in the " troubles."

Louise, who tells the story, is a steady, sympathetic character, who loves Ireland, becomes involved with the rebels while a student and journalist in Dublin, and marries one of them, Egan O'Doherty, whom she had known when they were both children in Donegal. Justin, while at Oxford, makes an unfortunate marriage with a rather decent poor girl, who becomes involved with the Black and Tans and is shot in her bed by Egan, who had been to the War in the English army.

Soldiering has a terrible effect both on Egan and Justin— and the ineradicable bitterness in their souls is presented in wearisome drinking scenes. But Louise adores her wild Egan, who has only to crook his finger for her to do his will in everything. He leads her a terrible dance, and so does Justin, for whom she has always an unresolved adoration. In the end, after a long endurance test, a search for her errant husband and a vain attempt to make him live with her again, she goes home to the old house in Donegal, finds Justin wait- ing for her calmly there—he had always said that she would come to him—and becomes his lover. It was a long and ex- hausting way round for the shortest way home, and the book's main trouble is that the two chief men are preposterous and unreal bores. But many of the minor characters are well drawn, the heroine is pleasant and modest, and the background of childhood and tradition is tenderly drawn.

I did not care at all for Holiday Adventure, which con- cerns the mild mishaps and pleasures of a foolish little Scottish typist from Glasgow, who sets out to have a holiday with a flighty, vulgar aunt in Birmingham, has a romantic episode on the way, gets there, puts in a most curious time with a crowd of very uninteresting oddities, gets home virgo intacta to Glasgow, and embarks on flirtation with a third male fancy. It is a nudgy sort of book, with the old folk being idiotic about what it is to be young, &c. The writing is undistinguished.