Fiction
The Crusaders. By Stefan Heym. (Cassell. xis.) The Dreams. By Anne Sebastian. (Cape. 12s. 6d.)
How often, in noting the " unwritten " character of so much serious- minded fiction at the present time, one recalls the magisterial shock and dismay of Henry James's protest against " saturation " as the measure of value in the new novel of the Georgian period. Even in 1914 the Magus feared the worst from the too expository example of his younger contemporaries. " The aot of squeezing out to the utmost the plump anelliore or less juicy orange of a -particular acquainted state and of letting this affirmation of energy, however directed or undirected, constitute for them the treatment ' of a theme "—this, James gravely and meditatively opined, was an awful portent. A portent it certainly was. As often as not nowadays the intelligent novel seems to be one in which treatment, or a narrative point of view, or the craft of fiction itself, is swamped by an over- flow of subject. In varying degrees three of the four novels this week are examples of the " saturated " or " unwritten " novel.
Mrs. Sarah Gertrude Millin's excuse in this instance is, no doubt, that she is as much the historian in King of the Bastards as story- teller. Thoughtful, perceptive, vigorously capable, with the sort of clarity of mind and feeling that in a woman is often called masculine, her fiction is always to be taken seriously and is seldom without a cutting edge or telling irony. Here, however, in a chronicle of " the tragedy of colour which is South Africa," she has got lost in an obscure thicket of historical reconstruction. The prodigious career and personality of Coenraad Buys, whose descendants today apparently form a colony, of half-breeds in the Northern Transvaal, were worth disengaging for their own sake and for the curious light they cast upon the bloody horror and racial confusion of the Union's beginnings during the decades before the Voortrekkers crossed the Orange River. Mrs. Millin, unfortunately, is too busy piecing together fragments of a scattered record to have time for a great deal more. The book comes to us with a foreword by General Smuts, who describes it as her magnum opus. It is scarcely that. The string of brief chapters is hung with graphic episodes of tribal war and treachery, snatches of Kaffir song and ceremony and hints of Mrs. Millin's recurring wonder at a still half-legendary South African past, but all this, interesting though it is, amounts to some- thing less than a satisfying novel.
The 650-odd large pages of The Crusaders are too many: this is saturation with a vengeance. Mr.... Heym, German by birth, was engaged in psychological warfare as a sergeant in the U.S. Army in France and Germany during 1944-45. He seems to have put into his picture of war everything he knew about it and possibly more. Sprawling and unselective, without any sort of distinction of style, the novel has nevertheless genuine merit in its own specifically American and immature kind it is a better job of work, I think, than the recently published The Young Lions, by Mr. Irwin Shaw, which in some ways it resembles. The bragging G.I. sentiment, that is to say, is taken at its face value, the troops are uninterruptedly woman-hungry, this or that warrior " needs a psychiatrist," and there is the usual abundance of specially brutal and revolting scenes. What distinguishes Mr. Heym's picture from that provided by other American war novelists is the obstinate and extreme emphasis of its wounded idealism. The youthful ex-German Sergeant Bing is altogether too much the hero, but most of the other American Crusaders are the apotheosis of the average and sensual, up to their necks in vanity, greed or corruption. The story does not lack courage of a kind. Its moral questioning is perhaps naive at times and is innocent of a personal philosophy, but something is left over for which one feels sincere respect.
Like its predecessor The Train, The Factory manages to give a lightly drawn sketch of some of the human and domestic common- places of Soviet life during the past few years that is not wholly idealised. The war with. Germany is left behind about half way through, after which there is a suggestion that production at the factory in an unspecified part of the Soviet Union changes somewhat. Diffuse, fragmentary, formless, the novel tells the reader a great deal less than he would like to know about the life histories of the people at the factory, but what it does tell is informed by all the warmth of uncomplicated feeling of an unmistakably broad Russian nature. The director of the factory, the dreamer and magnificent extrovert Listopad, who is the principal hero, is a refreshingly individual portrait.
Dedicated to " the poet Elias Canetti, my great Master," Miss Sebastian's The Dreams. which is soaked in the atmosphere of dreams and pubs, is evidently an exercise in Surrealism. Or is it ? I do not wish to be unfair to a book I cannot hope to understand and to which 1 am not at all attracted. The green-eyed Tobias with a smoky voice, who recounts a vastly symbolical dream to an unimaginable company in a pub called the ' White Ship,' is Day, it appears, to the Night of his bitter and impassioned bank clerk of a brother, Michael. To those who can follow a clue as broad as this the grotesque incident and unexpected imagery of The Dreams, which appears to have been written with some forethought, may seem of greater imaginative validity than they do to me.
R. D. CHARQUES. R. D. CHARQUES.
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