Fiction

Conflict and Contemplation

The Perfume of Amber. By H. Vivian Hamilton. (Blackwood.

Reconstruction. By Ronald Gurner. (Dent. 7s. 6d.)

Cranton. 38. 6d.)

CortrucT or contemplation—in art we must have one or the other : and contemplation is only another word for conflict resolved. This being so, it is a rare quality in the art of to-day ; and the one book in this list which comes nearest to achieving it, Around Broom Lane, fails precisely because there has been no conflict. Calm is obtained by ignoring the exist- ence of storm.

Miss Muriel Hine gives us conflict in plenty. Jenny Rorke has to fight an unsympathetic environment. Child of Costno Rorke, about whom his relations knew more than did his daughter, she found her grandparents' Midland home strange indeed after London. The period of the story is the 'nineties,

when there was plenty of trouble for a girl under conventional care who fell in love with a headstrong and unconventional artist : and Jenny had her own nature to fight as well. Wild Rye is a pleasant, well-told story, and Miss Hine tends her heroine with an affectionate care which is most attractive.

The difficulty about fantasy, especially if it be at only one or two removes from "real life," is to keep it consistent, and prevent the aforementioned real life from butting in. That is why I rate enviously high those imaginations which, having devised a world of their own, reveal an unerring knowledge of its detail. Mr. Hamilton's The Perfume of Amber is not out- and-out fantasy, but it is certainly not real life. It has—I can think of no better term—a slant of its own, from which it never deviates. The University of Phoquesville was in Kent, the Kent which we know : Professor Kindness occupied the Chair of Conchology and Submarine Thalassophy, which we do not know. Mr. Hamilton has a pretty and at times a formidable wit. Will he mind, I wonder, if I momentarily appoint myself to Phoquesville, award him Alpha Plus, and recommend his

thesis to the Risible Faculty ?

Mr. Ronald Gurner has indeed, as his publishers point out, a knack of discovering the less advertized problems of modern life. His new novel deals with one of the War's minor trage- dies. A schoolmaster, whom the War took from his post, returns after distinguished service, full of new enthusiasm. He will give up his life to teaching the lessons he has learned while under arms. He does give up his life to teaching them, only too literally. For the world has moved on. He returns, not to the Croyle College he left, but to a new Croyle College. Faced with a generation anxious to forget what it never knew, poor Roger Carbury is bewildered, loses grip, and goes. Mr. Gurner has already a list of important books to his name. Something

in his writing, from The Day-Boy to the present work, makes me suspect that Wbitgift Grammar School must be rather a

good place for the young.

"The real ` de-bunking ' of war will, I believe, never be accomplished until someone undertakes the task of describing its effect upon the More prominent citizens over military age," writes Mr. Goldring in his introduction to The Fortune. More prominent—and less prominent. I often feel, as I listen to

certain of my elders, a bitter desire to remind them of what they were saying fifteen years ago. It is staggering to see how the opinions even of intelligent and educated men can be manu- factured for them by the newspapers, and in how short a time they may be led from one position to its opposite. (The quickest Press volte-face I can remember, inside ten months,

occurred to certain journals in the case of Michael Collins, but that is by the way.) The Fortune was published in 1917, by Maunsel, of Dublin. It was very well reviewed, but stifled by the booksellers : for it dealt with Easter Week and with Conscientious Objectors. "Only the more foolish of their political opponents" (I quote again from the Introduction) "would be silly enough, to-day, to suggest that their 'War Records' do Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, Mr. Philip Snowden, Mr. Pethick Lawrence, Sir Charles Trevelyan, and other pacifist Labour leaders anything but good with the electorate." That sentence marks the difference between 1917 and now. 'Here, in this book, is the bitterest conflict of all : souls forced by the passion of their creed to resist and face and earn the scorn ot their fellow-countrymen.

" . . . Whereas for a young man to join the Army when wait breaks out is as easy as falling off a log, to refuse to fight requirea every atom of guts and courage he may hope to possess.'

I recommend this novel, to which Mr. Aldous Huxley has

written a preface, as a most important chapter in British social history.

Mr. Norman Giles, an author new to me, has also taken conflict for his theme. William Storm, a quiet man, is moved to murder his wife's lover.

"Katrina was Jan's lover and ho died. She was Stoffel's lover and Stoffel came within an inch of his life. Had that last inch been traversed, would there not have been another spoor in the garden at Dasklip ? Were not those veldschoen you were HO anxious to hides, the ones which trod the garden at Greenendal I" The Whips of Time is vividly and excitingly written. Its

Rhodesian background is well conveyed, and Mr. Giles hat4 considerable powers of characterization.

"I am often grieved at the books written about Ireland by, Irish writers," says Mrs. William O'Brien in a short preface to

Around Broom Lane, "that represent our people in a most unpleasant and, as far as my experience goes, most untrue light." She sets out to redress the balance. All honour to heat. Unfortunately, however, her intentions are better than hei practice. There is no strength in her book, for there has been no conflict. I commend to Mrs. O'Brien the saying of Ireland's greatest writer, that we may not make a false beauty by ignor..: ing all that is ugly. As it stands, her record is as partial as any, of those she deplores. To make it effective would need at least as much art as they exhibit, and in art Mrs. O'Brien fang