Fiction
Laugh at Polonius. By Jack Hilton. (Jonathan Cape. 7s. 6d.)
IN The Sword and the Sickle, Mr. Mulk Raj Anand pursues s further the growth. in self-consciousness and social anxiety of Indian boy, Lal Singh, hero of The Village and Across the Bla Waters. Like its predecessors, this is an informative, touching. conscientious book, and it comes at a time when the least inquiri of us can hardly claim to be totally indifferent to the affairs of In One novel is admittedly an absurdly small peephole on sucn mighty and confusing panorama, yet what this author has to tell the economic and psychological plight of peasants in the 131111 and in Oudh in the years immediately after the war of 1914-18. I imagine, be taken as broadly representative of rural conchu throughout India at that time. We get a picture of desperate pove and of its relation to innumerable subtle, troublesome and dee traditional spiritual states—pride, hopelessness, humour, ratio) laziness and mystical detachment. Courage, too, and flashes of 2 for new ideas and for the promises of ;evolution. Lal Singh returns from the-European War, penniless and with land or reward, to his village. He finds his family tragt scattered, and all he knew in ruin. He had been a prisoner Germany, and while there had met and listened to Indian poll° agitators, and now he accepts an offer to leave the Punjab and to Oudh to organise revolt among the ill-used peasants the Taking with him Maya, his first love, whose unadulterated " liness " of temperament is to be a source of much worry to hun, all his ardour, he joins -a- group of revolutionaries at Rajgarh. questioning but impetuous, he takes his duty to his brothers, peasants,. very seriously, and no one who follows the a
characterising of the very individualistic and wayward group with which he works will blame Lal Singh for his doubts and heart- searchings. He has an interview at Allahabacl with Mahatma Gandhi, whose arrogance and detachment he finds discouraging. When the book ends he is in prison, still passionately planning and dreaming for the peasants, still very sympathetic in his conflict of honesty and self-doubt.
Forsaking the many unanswered and very topical questions of The Sward and the Sickle, readers faithful to an old tradition of the novel will turn with pleasure to the latest work of Mr. A. E. W. Mason. This author is not only a first-class story-teller, but a literary writer who remains true to the graceful, careful style which he made his own many years ago ; and Musk and Amber recaptures the mood of The Broken Road and Miranda of the Balcony. The time is the eighteenth century, the scene England and Italy, the characters a boy of charm ancl aristocratic birth and his implacable enemies, a man and a woman. There are no flashy effects, no tough descriptions ; but a swiftly moving series of dramatic events that convince the imagination and hold the interest of the reader.
Mr. Hilton's book is a descriptive piece, hardly a novel, and it is realistic to the point of toughness. But the toughness is inter- larded—as it usually is—with rather embarrassing passages of sentimentality. Leslie Stott is a mill-boy, the only child of a woman married to a brute who dies during Leslie's childhood. She is a good woman and a good Methodist, and tries to bring up her boy according to her own standards. The results are successful in essential, though not in detail—a theme which, treated more deeply, might have been of great interest. Mr. Hilton gives us the life and talk of mill-hands, thtir love-affairs, dances and outings to Blackpool ; their peripatetic interest in Communism, and their rows with the police. Obviously, it is all founded on first-hand knowledge, but the inevitable dreariness Of Leslie's story—he is killed in the war while his young wife is having his child—is un- redeemed by any vitality in the characters or distinction in the
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