Fiction
The Herr Witch Doctor. By Sarah Gertrude Millin. Heinemann 7s. 6d.)
Nebraska Coast. By Clyde Davis. (Collins. 9s. 6d.)
The Herr_Wirch- DOM)", is a very serious, indeed a desperate, book. It is written, as is usual with its author, with all possible coldness, sobriety and attention to facts; it is compact of a pitiless kind of pity that, extenuating nothing and offering none of the bribes of imaginative grace, claims nothing less- than full con- sideration ; and, that given, it establishes in us an anxiety that does not pass when the book is closed—anxiety before the un- ravelabie stupidities and vices of man, which are deadly tudes, of course, but are here assembled with terrible, cold vigour in one small report of the doings of black man and white. It is impossible to read or reflect -upon Mrs. Millin's book with other than a heavy heart ; it is impossible to derive the coldest comfort from it—save perhaps in the reflection that the thing has been so well done. The pathology is good indeed— but where are the physicians?
The story is intricate. It revolves round the internal politic of an African tribe dwelling in a northerly corner of the Union, close to the border of what was once German South West Africa. The regent of the tribe, backed by the witch doctor, proposes to block the lawful succession to power of the young chief, and the two are subtly encouraged in this by the local German " missionaries," whose job it is to win the Bagarmdri tribe to worship of the " new white god," Hitler. In this nucleus of Nazi work we_are shown the whole Nazi plan for Africa—the years covered by the story are 1934-39—but are also shown its utter cruelty, its complete imperviousness to every value not dictated by Berlin. The succession to the chieftaincy is nothing save to the tribe, but the emotions and manoeuvrings it creates help the Germans to gain command over the vain, dangerous mind of the witch doctor, winning him to curiosity about white magic and " the white god." Meantime, as he toys with promised extension of his powers, he stages a ritual murder, for he needs the blood of " two bucks without hair," i.e., two human beings, with which so to enlarge the shadow of the regent that it will dwarf the shadow of the legitimate chief. His terrible ceremony goes through. It is described with precision and clarity. It brings woe and confusion on the tribe, lands the witch doctor and others more worthy in gaol, and, fertilised still by German whisperings of power and support, spreads darkness over darkness.
Meantime against all the flood of ignorance, innocence, greed and cunning, two helpless figures stand—vainly set on helping the black people. One is himself a black, a brother of the r" warring chieftains. He is educated, and has all his life km intoxicated by dreams of Prester John, and of there one di! arising another Prester John, who will restore all Africa to the Africans, and teach them how to be free, proud and self-reliant. The other, to some extent his mentor, is an Englishman with some black blood in his veins—a curse which seems to defeat his rgost courageous moods, and to be, apparently, for those who posses it, a profoundly unmanageable affliction, alike when they confront black men and white. Not all the Christianiry of this clergyman, nor all his love of his humblest black brothers, can eradicate his unresting self-consciousness—and IA ner° render him 'useless both against native weakness and Ganno
et
strength. The book ends in sharp irony, with the con-ers.on " Prester John " to Nazi ideals, and the immediate pracnag defeat of these by the Union's declaration, in September, 593?, that if stands with England and the democracies. TL;' book! not an entertainment, nor is it, by usual standards, a ,n'Y good novel. But it is a cold and terrible document, and : stirs uP anxieties from which it is only idiotic to fiinth. The other three books listed above are all definitely -ntertall'i ments—simple and readable, and having in common kind of good sense that makes them better than their types. \ e!?r45; Coast is.a homely, lively account of the adventures o' a tall! which, led by Father, sets out from the Eastern State to seu, in the Middle West. Period eighteen-sixties—slang Ina35. and very attractive. Father is a very pleasant, lively ,hara' ' and he leads his family only a reasonably friendly dam. with adventurousness—on which in any case he makes go( s, m rig
goodnaturedly greedy way of his time. Reap the Wild Wind has a silly title, and a- sillier wrapper, but though it has its silly moments it is, in fact, a spirited, informative story of life- on the Florida Keys in the early nineteenth century, and of the fortunes made and lost there by the " wreckers," whose job it was to salvage cargo-ships flung up on the reefs. Miss Strabel seems to know her background, and has taken trouble with it, and her self-willed heroine is, in fact, more engaging and true than such young ladies often are. Tom Tiddler's Ground is up to date the best that has come my way of the novels everyone is writing about the village !and the evacuees. For one thing, it has a near-melodramatic plot ; for another, its author really understands snobbery, and can take hold of it without getting stung or betraying herself. Also, except in a few bedroom passages, she writes a very credible, everyday dialogue, and her humour is pretty and goodnatured. Kam O'BRIEN.
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