New Novels IN The Last Resort (Macmillan, 15s.) Pamela Hansford
Johnson has grown in stature, greatly increased her social scope, and covers an impressive emotional range. Her people are very satis- factorily a part of their surroundings; individual and landscape are balanced. Backgrounds, futures, social offshoots, complex and interwoven destinies, all are suggested, invoked rather than described, and out of this rich pother one portrait—Celia's—is brilliantly individual, vital and alive, and a number of sketches have the same candid and quiet air of truth about them. Celia
is a lot of things : career woman, devoted daughter of impossible parents, old maid but not so old—rich, generous, impulsive, lovable, bossy at moments, and with it all the mistress of a man she has long adored, who marries elsewhere; after which—and a depth of emotional vicissitude that can only be lived through, as it were, not described—she marries, eventually, a homosexual. The bones of the tale, though, mean little : its strength lies in the slow cumulative characterisation, the exact observation of a social world where somehow an authoritative morality, a kind of hierarchy of behaviour, emerges without any apparent judge- ments being made on anything.
Such large claims have been made for Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps (Gollancz, 15s.) that I found myself blinking, then reading back, then saying to myself, 'Can they really mean this?' Vigorous, plausible, entertaining, adult—it is all of these. But important?—Hardly, it seems to me. There is a basic un- importance about the mind of Mr. Carpentier grappling with the problems of the soul that gives his skilful and competent work an emotional feebleness, for all its energy. Clearly, Mr. Carpentier is gifted with all the secondary qualities of a novelist-- fluency, descriptive power, entertainment value, technical efficiency with such things as plot, time sequence, denouement and so on, and an inventiveness that can use crucial questions of life and death as tricks in a game of fiction. In other words, I find this Cuban allegory solemn, but not serious; good enter• tainment, if you want a book about jungles and primitive tribes and actresses and revolutions and two mistresses called Mouche (Parisian-style) and Rosario (jungle-style), but not a commentary on the position of man in time, not a satire on modern morality, not a book that enlarges our perception or gives .any emotional satisfaction beyond the immediate time of reading. Or course Mr. Carpentier has talent but not—surely not—the kind of talent he has been credited with. Harriet de Onfs's translation from the Spanish is mainly excellent.
The only thing I dislike about R. Prawer Jhabvala's The Nature of, Passion (Allen and Unwin, 13s. 6d.) is its pretentious title. In every other way it is a charmer; it regards a smart cosmo- politan world with a wistful eye—parties, clubs, tennis, Europeans, dancing, being looked on as utterly beyond the pale of a rich, traditional and straightlaced family which believes in making money and spending it with a modest domestic splash, in a house full of children, in a silent, devoted wife, in food, in jokes, in comradeship, in a bit of bribery and corruption to oil the wheels, in the propriety of daughters, the loyal support of sons. 131,11 education has brought unrest, 'England-returned' sons marry progressive wives, and the favourite and beautiful daughter Nimmi is seen in a restaurant with a young man and must be married off at once in case, after such a scandal, no one will haVe her. Delicate, wide-eyed obserVation of a scene attractively remote from ours; sympathy with all sides, ancient and modern, and a satire as 'deft as it is kindly; the exact, almost pictorial evocation of moments, groups, domestic scenes : these are its qualities; and the style—staid, a little stilted, a shade 'correctly foreign,' like so much Indian conversation—is a delight.
A second novel is almost bound to have an air of anticlimax about it : it is the novelist's adolescence, his inevitably awkward bridging of the middle reaches of fiction, without the compulsive ardour of the first or the maturity he must hope to reach later• And, too, we judge more harshly. Gillian Freeman's Fall 01 Innocence (Longmans, 12s. 6d.), for instance, is quite as Well written, as plausibly presented, as The Liberty Man, and were it a first novel one would no doubt salute a tough yet feminine nevi talent. But its subject is meagre, its presentation somehow tole and wan, compared with the earlier novel. It is about Evelyn, one of those dispiriting English schoolgirls who, at seventeen, have the emotional outlook of eleven, and her American contemporary Sophie who, from eleven, has had the sophistication, at least, of seventeen. Smart and lively and rather carnivorous, Sophie conies to stay, and, seeing Evelyn's quiet, idealistic, rather• stupid father. whose good looks hide an almost pathological ignorance of the world, proceeds to eat him up : which done, she takes an aeroplane and leaves him to his rather absurd disillusion, Miss Freeman's
talent is for the alarming-ruthless, the quiet-
killer but her characters, this time, are weak—her American girl is a type, no More, her situation too abruptly resolved.
The charge of abruptness could never be levelled against Isobel English, whose Every Eye (Deutsch, 10s. 6d.) is a model of well- tailored invention, and whose elegant prose Would give distinction to trivialities. But it lacks the sharp insight of The Key that Rusts, is a minor, almost miniature work whose action has the inevitability, not of destiny or anything of the sort, but of clockwork—tick, they meet; tock, he proposes : neat and charm-
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