FI-CTION .
By FORREST REID
Le reel nous sert ci fabriquer tant bien que mal un peu d'idial. C'est peut-etre sa plus grande utilite. It is a tenable view, but I should be surprised if it were Mr. Walter Allen's. There is a moment in Innocence is Drowned when a schoolboy, suddenly glancing up, realises that the master who has kept him in detention is not his enemy, that he also is a prisoner, and a rueful smile of recog- nition passes between them. It is the briefest of passages, yet because of something charming in it, un peu d'ideal perhaps, it stands out from the rest of the book, which is a rather depress- ing, though extremely well-written study of a working-class family in Birmingham—a father, mother, and three ions, of whom this boy Sydney is the youngest. The father is dying of consumption ; the mother is an overworked drudge ; the eldest son Ralph, who has supported himself by scholarships, is in his last year at the university ; the second son, Eric, has a job at a jeweller's. It is all real, as real as can be. The coughing, the spit- ting into handkerchiefs, the haemorrhages—Mr. Allen spares us no detail of the physical aspect ; and into the relations between his characters, and his picture of their private lives; he seems equally determined to allow no glimmer of sentiment to enter. The clever Ralph is weak and neurotic. He has become engaged to a girl who attracts him sensually, but whom in most ways he dislikes. Eric prides himself on his toughness, and is already absorbed in his first tentative experiment as a blackmailer. Sydney, the most promising, also is tough, but he is still too young for us to foresee how he will turn out. And the technique of the story is atnirable—firm, clear, clean. The entire action takes place within three days, ending dramatically on the even- ing of the third, with a sudden knocking at the street door. It is extraordinarily effective. They are all there except Eric. Three sinile knocks—ominous, sinister. "Mrs. Gardiner wondered who could be visiting them at this time of night. 'Time you were in bed, Sydney,' s);te mid." They are the last words of the story, but it does not end with them : we know 'what has happened, what is going to happen, and in imagination carry on the scene. Mr. Allen was right to leave it like this, but only an artist would have done so. We can make our Own ending and, if we are optimistic, hope that from the shock that is coming good may emerge—at least so far as Sydney is con- cerned. The book is a first novel, and an unusually promising one. I did not care much for the characters—largely because I felt that they did not care much for one another. On the other hand, they live, and sympathy and charm were doubtless unlikely to have flourished in the surroundings Mr. Allen has described.
Miss Catherine Meadows' Friday Market did not produce upon me this effect of simple and immediate reality. It is clever, it is exciting, it is ingenious, but perhaps because 'I could not help associating it in my mind with a celebrated and comparatively recent trial, it left me not wholly persuaded. Actually, as Miss Meadows herself points out, only certain technical details from the trial in question have been borrowed; the place, the persons and the story, are all fictitious. But that was partly my difficulty. A crime of passion is easy to realise, but it is not at all easy to realise the state of mind of the commercial murderer, and I am not sure, nor do I feel that Miss Meadows is quite sure, into what class of criminals Alfred Bealby ought to be placed. The murderer who murders for profit is sub-human, but I should think essentially in possession of his reason. Miss Meadows makes Alfred insane, and at once places everything on a more 'comfortable basis, while at the same time opening a loophole for doubt. "He's as mad as a hatter," decides Dr. Cotswold during her last interview with him, thus eliminating at a stroke all psychological problems, and leaving only a normal world into which a homicidal lunatic happens to have strayed. But Alfred's second murder was definitely commercial—planned and carried out coldly and deliberately.
Miss Meadows, I admit, constructs a plausible case. Alfred commits his first murder on a sudden impulse, almost, one _ _ -,inight say, by accident. Not the slightest suspicion is aroused 'and, to his surprise, he himself is untroubled by any sensk.
• of guilt or feeling of remorse. He is not at this stage, I take it, mad • insanity resulted gradually from the consciousness ot power. that followed, transforming the natural egotist into an ego-maniac. At all events, this busy, respectable, and not unpopular solicitor, living in the Cathedral town of Clench, commits his next murder in cold blood and because he wants his wife's money. He seems definitely mad when he attempts his third, and there is even something comic in his indignation and sense of personal injury when it fails. Nobody hitherto has had an inkling of the truth : now Dr. Cotswold gra'Sps it ; but because she is fond of Dolly, Alfred's daughter, does not immediately make it public, and a little later there ii no-need to do so. I may be giving the impression that Friday Market is a thriller. So it is, I suppose, but there is a love story in it too, and, since only Alfred's share in the novel is seen through Alfred's eyes, in spite of its main theme, the general atmosphere of the book is neither sordid
nor unpleasant. , .
In Mr. Arkwright's Marriage nobody is exceptional, and the subject is one out of which either a comedy or a tragedy might _have been made. Mr. Hodson; because he is a realist with a sense of humour, leaves-it somewhere between the two. Mr. Arkwright is absurd, but at the same time he is pathetic. At the age of fifty-eight he marries a young and lively widow, Kitty Donovan, who is Irish, and was once reception clerk in a Dublin hotel. Kitty is a good sort in her way, but that way is distinctly not Mr. Arkwright's, and the marriage goes wrong from the beginning. Mr. Arkwright is fond of birds, and his dog Judy, and music, and his old bachelor friend Joe Bates, with whom he plays duets : Kitty is chiefly interested in horses and young men. She marries Mr. Arkwright because she is easy- going, and he is kind and has plenty of money and seems really to have fallen in love with her : she quite intends lo make him comfortable. She does not, for instance, ask him 'to give up Judy or the birds or the duets with Joe—in fact it will be much bctter if be clings to his. old habits and hobbies, since she feels pretty sure that she will cling to hers. Unfor- tunately Mr. Arkwright does not see it like this:" He has itn idea of mutual companionship, of shaking off some twenty-five years and sharing in all Kitty's pursuits. This entails a goOd deal of physical discomfort, for Kitty is fond of active and outdoor amusements, and it is easier to shake off the years in imagination than in fact. So Mr. Arkwright is compelled to compromise, and anyhow he can't make Kitty regard him as a contemporary. She does her best, but he remains for her simply the nice old thing she happened to meet on that cruise to Madeira. Then she gets to know the famous dirt-track rider, " Red " Jameson, and Mr. Arkwright's romance is over. It is not a tragic ending, though Kitty departs for Australia with "Red." Joe, however, remains, and Judy and the birds and the music : in a link while all will be much as it had been before. The story deals with simple, ordinary people ; nobody is in the least heroic—except perhaps Mr. Arkwright himself when he takes up horse-riding—but nobody—not even Kitty's wastrel brother -Dennis—is disagreeable.
With The Song of the World we abruptly abandon realism, and I should advise those who know French to procure the original text—not because I have seen it myself, but because it is plain that the author is everywhere working for a poetic effect, which this translation fails to reproduce. The scene is a country of forests, mountains, and rivers, the characters are mere symbols, the story is a kind of Sensual hymn to nature and the primitive urges of life. Never have I read a book in which there were so many smells and so many descrip- tions of naked bodies. "What a mania you have for stripping yourselves ! " remarks the little hunchback to a group of his friends, and it is true. The novel is held together by the . simple plot of an adventure story into which the physical scenes of human birth and coupling and fighting are woven, though actually the 'animal life is hardly more important than the vegetable, or the life of the river. It is all one, and the French version may be impressive. Clothed in English, the whole thing struck me as turgid and rhetorical.
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