Ficti on - By WILLIAM PLOMER

The Croquet Player. By H. G. Wells. (Chatto and Windus. 3s. Od.) Jost. By Rudolf Kuhn: Translated by Marion Reid. • Hodge. 88. 6d.) Sand Castle. By Janet Beith. (Hodder and Stoughton. 82. &I.) Prelude to Christopher, By Eleanor Dark. (G011ins. 78. 6d.) Duet In Discord. By Elizabeth Garner. (Arthur Barker. 78. 6d.) Italian Summer. By Wilhelm Speyer. Translated by Chris- topher • Dilke. (Bles. 5s.)

Ma. WELLS'S little fable of The Croquet Player may be taken, whether he wishes it or not, as a good argument for croquet playing, or fiddling while Rome burns. A young man, closely attached to his aunt (" the Miss Frobisher of the Woman's World Humanity Movement "), gives us a description of himself and admits that he is "possibly natuiaily just a

little inclined to be what the Americans call a sissy." He goes on to relate how, while he and his aunt were staying at a French watering-place, he was buttonholed by an

Englishman named Dr. Finchatton who had gone mad while practising in the Fens and now felt, inclined to unburden himself of his obsessions. A prey to .nameless. feats, the

doctor, with the help of an alienist, attributes them part& tO the influence of his surroundings and partly to "a contagion in our atmosphere, a sickness in the very grounds of our lives, breaking out here and there and filling men's minds with a paralysing, irrational fear . . . a world epidemic."

The cave man, we are reminded, has cropped up in us again,

and very soon "there will be no choice before a human being but to be either a driven'. animal or a :stern devotee to that

true civilisation, that disciplined civilisation, that has 'never yet been achieved. Victim or Vigilante." After being thoroughly lectured by the uneasy Dr. Finchatton and by Dr. Norbert the alienist, the croquet player feels that he has "had enough of this apocalyptic stuff" and saunters off to play croquet, in the alleged sunset of civilisation, with his aunt. Clearly we are asked to regard him as a Victim (though he seems less of one than the haunted doctor), but if our Vigilantes, Samurais, Fascists, Communists, &c., were a little fonder of croquet and a little less fond of theories about "a disciplined nobody would wish to victimise such a-modest and well-behaved person. And there is after all something to be said for taking one's hoops, or fences, one at a time.

That moat people have to do so is made clear in Jost, a Swiss -prize'. novel , which achieves a rugged sinipliCity. A first novel, said to have taken twenty years to write, it tells of n Switzerland that tourists know little or not at all, and shows .the effects. upon a farming. family of changing con- ditions, the _coming of .inclustrialisation, the `corruptive power of money, the infiltration of new ideas, and the weaken- ing of Catholicism: Herr Kuhn's. knowledge and love of

his country and his people are equally deep, he treats his characters with something like reverence, avoids the heavy mannerisms of some saga writers, and does not keep rubbing his read,er's nose in the good red earth. There is a filial

touch in his portraits of .Jost,' the stout-hearted- farmer, and his noble wife Christine, while in Jest's brother Canon John

we have that uncommon thing, a sympathetic drawing of a genuinely religious But the book is centred less on Jost than on his son George, a dreamy and_ rebellious boy with considerable force of character who has to face all sorts

of unsettlernents from within and Without. and is Only saved in the long rim by the deep love that exists .between him

and his patents; and between him and Angelica, daughter of

the local industrialist. To say that he is saved means ihart he has a naturally creative disposition which might easily have been wrecked for want of Outside support,- and his alliance with -Angelica seems to imply n .'pOisible harmony between the old order and the new.

&S'and Castle is also concerned With a family living under changing conditions, and it . affords good, clean, comfortable

family reading.' It belongs to a type of novel that was mass:

produced a year or two /ago : • local boys`make good, a chance shot at Sernjevo :rings round the 'world,- giaridfathei dies in

his sleep, and a new generation has already popped up and is knocking at the door. Somebody remarked the other day that we already have a cotton-mill-school and a woollen-mill

school of fiction. Sand Castle belongs to the cotton-mill school, and Miss Beith traces the lottunes of two sons of an impoverished laird Who c-iine to 'Manchester in 1889 to seek their fortune with the firm Of -Applehv;Whose director has a charming daughter named gnnisis lItias:Beith has obviously taken pleasure in felling this rather -conventional story, which is a good example Of its type,: Lancashire and love have their ups and downs_, the Ship'Canal is opened, there are bicycle picnics, the Boer War break out, Annis functions as daughter, lover, wife and Mother-, the old man dies, the mill is closed down, the old home is sold up, and already a younger

generation is carrying on the torch: " I-1 thought I might writeI don't want much money. I—I want to—to create something of my own,' said Colin shyly."

But he grows out of that nonsense and is happily allied to Grace "in the January of nineteen thirty." By now, let us hope, they have a little cavalcade of their own.

Miss Dark and Miss Garner prefer to give us peeps at patho- logy. In Prelude to Christopher there is an unfortunate

Australian lady named Linda with green eyes and damp- looking hair, who is a good deal crazier than Dr. Finchatton. Miss Dark does not allow us to forget Linda's trouble for a moment : it is as if, with a pen in one hand, she is continually tapping her forehead and pointing at Linda with the other. Linda married Nigel, a biologist-by" training, a i` piactical idealist" by nature, and a eugenist by choice. When young

he Made the fatal mistake of founding one of those Wand colonies which nearly always turn out so badly, and the story opens years afterwards when he is lying in 'bed; after a bad motor accident, with Linda still in the offing; besides his anxious mother and a eupeptic hospital nurse named Kay who is in love with him. The story produces such an impression of stress and strain that Nigel seems like a badly damaged rag- doll being worried by three female terriers, each possessive in her own way.- Possessiveness again is largely the theme of Duet in Dise-old; aThook not to be recomiriencled safely to well-brought-up persons over sixty, some of whom may -find it embarrassingly intimate. Here the story is told in the first person by a woman in the.forties who has been infatuated

with a youhg man' in his twenttesj and it is 'addressed directly to him as if it were a letter: Caiol, a SCotchwoman who has seen the last of two husbands, lives in self-imposed exile in a highly coloured West Indian setting, into 'which comes Tony, an Australian novelist. The ensuing love affair quickly reaches a climax, but Carol is over-intense, Tony cools off rapidly, and in their isolation little things grow unduly important. "YOU do badger me so," says Tony with some justification, but the remark makes Carol wince and

brood. Miss Garner relates the characters to their back- grounds as well as to one another, and the book might be worth reading just for its Caribbean decor, though the close-ups of tropical vegetation and of the humours of native life are perhaps a little too extraneous to the main theme.

We have been treated-to so many semi-political or socio- logical novels lately that we have grown :rather unused to these studies of private emotions. Italian Summer, a long

short story, is a product of the well-known German romanticism about Italy. The narrator, a .playboy with money, has some difficulty in getting away from Berlin, and when he gets to'Itly, in company with one Dorothea, seems rather languid. He is languid on the coast and languid at San Gimignano, where he spends Much time in the company of another girl named Aglaia. Later a third appears in the shape of Enrica, the wife of a count. Enrica does not interest him so much as a woman who skims past every afternoon on an aquaplane, and whom he fails to recognise as Enrica herself ! You see the idea ? The power of illusion in matters of love. Finally Aglaia reappears, and it turns out that she was Miss Right after all. But it does not seem to matter very much, for the playboy is not much more than a solemn lounge lizard. The tone of the book may be indicated by a , -quota- . tion :

"Then, as soldiers of -Society, we would conceal our ennui under the uniform conversation of this century : 'Were 'you in Paris M the spring ? Have' you ever carried out your plan to go to New York ? Will- you be in Rome in the autumn ' Finally perhaps I wool I ask 'Etes-vous het:rouse-I"!