Fiction
A. Finger in Every Pie. By Rhys Davies. (Heinemann. 78. 6d., 3
Anna. By Norman Collins. (Collins. ros. 6d.) The Fighting Littles. By Booth Tarkington. (Heinemann. 8s. 6d.) The Miler and the Slain. By Hugh Walpole. (Macmillan. 8s. 6d.)
A DASH of liveliness comes very refreshingly indeed into the present slow run of fiction, so let us be properly grateful to Mr. Rhys Davies for the gusto, extravagance and variety of his new collection of short stories—A Finger in Every Pie. Indeed to goodness' the English novel and short story are much indebted just now to Anglo-Welsh writers, who are a chief source of whatever freshness or hope may be found in these long-suffering, over-used forms.
There are eighteen stories in this new collection, and seventeen of them are about Wales, the Wales of miner and peasant and miners wife and miner's child. The eighteenth, which is the longest, is called Queen of the Cene d'Azur, is set in Nice in 1933,!and is an J. exercise in the Isherwood manner. It is 'a successful story ; in his exposition of the perversities and miseries of some Nice-addicts the author skates clear able of sentimentality and of desiccation. His manner is just warm enough, nicely balanced in irony and good humour, for the piteous and comic encounters he has to narrate ; and the atmosphere of Nice, its pinkness and light and floweriness, is used as a brightly consoling decor, and may indeed rouse in some readers a brief, unregenerate nostalgia for the bad old pleasure- seeking past. But the Welsh stories contain no such menace • they are wild, funny, passionate and in various moods—but their unifying atmosphere is of the slagheap, the Calvinistic pulpit and the kind of drunkenness induced by enormous quantities of beer. They are uneven stories but each one has a good, individual idea to it, if all are not equally well worked through. The ones I liked best– Charity, The Dark World and The Pits Are On The Top—are the least original in theme perhaps, but they have a curious tender quality, and seem to escape the "folk" source which one feels to he imperfectly assimilated in some of their fellows which are more UP. roariously passionate or funny. But all these stories have a clear entertainment value, and all are written with skill and with free imaginative grace. Anna, by Mr. Norman Collins, is a Book Society choice, and
an elaborate, large tale of the love-adventures of a Rhineland girl who runs away to Paris after her lover in 1870, gets caught up in the Franco-Prussian war and, never returning to Germany, has a succession of carefully detailed experiences, dying at last, a quiet, respectable old widow, in Cheltenham. Mr. Collins has assembled his detail well ; he gives the reader a very good, concise account of the Siege of Paris and some e;cciting and moving battle-pieces ; later in the book he writes effectively of life in a convent in the South of France ; and he is very good indeed, and quite funny, with English country-house life in the i88o's, as seen through the surprised and rather stupid eyes of his heroine, now a governess. But a major defect runs all through the work, in that one can find no vestige whatever of life or character or meaning in the inept, slow heroine, even whose much-stressed physical beauty seems throughout as sleepy and unilluminated as the rest of her. It is an unhappy failure in a careful, ambitious piece of work.
In The Fighting Littles Mr. Booth Tarkington is again making use of a formula that has served him well in Seventeen, the Penrod books and Alice Adams. But as the Littles themselves so frequently say, what of it? If he can present an old theme against an up-to- date background with an occasional twist of originality, and can thus compel from his reader those occasional startled laughs of sheer unreasoning amusement—what of it? Let us be grateful to him, to the adolescent members of the Little family and their noisy, idiotic and engaging friends and accomplices. Of course, one is either amused by the American extravagants or unable to smile at them at all. Take, as a test, the dilemma of Filmer, aged fifteen, sent down town to find his sister's Chow—the dog having understandably fled after being forced to take part in a charade which necessitated dressing him up in "grandmother's cute little old taffeta basque." The only formula that presents itself to Filmer in his search is an inquiry as to whether anyone has seen "a reddish kind of Chinese- looking dog dressed up like Old Times." The impact of Filmer, his sister and his sister's boy-friends on the older generation is formidable ; it is also, in a light-hearted way, an accurate hit in the very centre of the target.
In presenting a story of horror and terror it is essential that the horror and terror should convey to the reader a sense of their in- evitability. This sense is wholly absent from The Killer and the Slain. John Talbot, telling his own story, merely asserts that an unpleasant boy named James Tunstall possessed, from schooldays on, an irresistible power over him. But what this power was and whence it arose remains forever unaccounted for and forever uncon- vincing. The story, such as it is, is implicit in its title. Talbot ia driven to murder Tunstall, whose evil spirit thereupon enters him and drives him to commit a second murder. Even the most un- sophisticated searcher after goose-flesh sensation will be able to fore- cast the whole trend of Talbot's trip down the road to Endor from
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