FICTION

By LOUIS

MacNE10E

Invasion '14. By Maxence van der Meersch. Translated by Gerard Hopkins. (Constable. 8s. 6d.) Three Bags Full. By Roger Burlingame. (Jonathan Cape. 8s. 6d.) The Sisters. By Myron Brinig. (Cobden-Sanderson. 8s. 6d.) The Porch. By Richard Church. (Dent. 78. 6d.) Olive E. By C. H. B. Kitchin. (Constable. 78. 6d.) Women Also Dream. By Ethel Mannin. (jarrolds. 7s. 6d.) Spring Horizon. By T. C. Murray. (Nelson. 78. 6d.)

THE first three of these novels are chiefly valuable as history. Invasion '14 is an exceptionally interesting type of war book, being a very detailed presentation of a district in Belgium during the German occupation.. Like a proper history it has,no hero and no plot. By the end of the book we are very well acquainted with a remarkable assortment of characters ranging from the saint to the skunk but most of Whom are, as is natnral, very much betwixt and between. It is a horrifying book, all the More so because it is not a deliberate experiment in horror, nor in any way over-written, but is a careful record by. someone who has lived through the scenes which he describes. The anno- sphere on occasions is curiously blended of the sordid and the macabre, but full justice is done to the sheer hand-to-mouth prosiness of living which persists through all -adventure and all calamity. Especially memorable are the pictures of the plight of the manufacturers asked to produce goods for the enemy, of the women who for various reasons took to sleeping with Germans, and of the unpopular local characters whose cnemies turned the War to feed their private spite. There are many examples of courage, the patriotic courage of those .who ran underground papers and the individualist courage of the smugglers. There are precise and terrible descriptions of prison, of a fratricide, of starving men murdering a horse. Lastly, there is the squabble for decorations when the War is over. All this is excellently portrayed by M. van der Meersch and the translation keeps the sharpness of it.

The two American " history-books " are lighter reading. , Three Bags Full is a massive family chronicle running to five generations. First we have a Dutch pioneer who at the end of the eighteenth century helps himself to a lake in New York State. A settlement springs up quickly, and his family are, of " course, the aristocrats. But one branch of the family goes to the bad—in their morals, their finances, and even in their surnames. Instead of Van Huyten they become Hooten. They are warned off the sacred lakeside turf but continually and exasperatingly reappear. Then in the last section of the book we get the inevitable drama, the novelist's nemesis. A daughter of the Van Huy-tens falls in love with- a son of the Hootens. The Hooten, however, makes good and even restores his name.

The most interesting part of this book is the last, where a vulgar rich man from outside buys himself into the Van Huyten town and proceeds to bring it up to date. Tragedy for the Van Huytens, all except the hero and heroine, who realise that motor-boats on the ancestral lake are part of the march of

progress. These two, however, round off the book with a pretty inversion of roles. The self-made young man, who first appeared as a kind of gypsy brat, is now holding forth intensely on the necessity for civilisation, while his wife, brought up among the elite, look3 at her streamlined husband and regrets the lost gypsy. A book to be recommended to those who like family trees and a heap of characters-.

Mr. Brinig's last novel took a copper-mining city in the Middle West and gave cross-sections of its life in the laborious

American manner. His new book, The Sisters, is more

successful though perhaps less interesting. It begins in the early years of this century, and shows us three sisters living with their parents till each goes off and marries. Then we have eighty pages of A, eighty of B, eighty of C, and then repeat. The three sisters are very different in character and have very different lives. I did not find any of the three a memorable character, but the eldest is at least given a life brimming with opportunities for reportage ; she lives with a ne'er-do-well newspaperman husband in San Francisco before and during the earthquake (good commercial material ; Jeanette MacDonald starred in a recent film on this subject).

Mr. Brinig wci.zs up his period effects with a conscientious attention to detail, and his accounts of baseball matches, boxing contests, horse races, &c., &c., are as exciting as those things always ought to be when handled by a competent reporter. Myself I prefer this sort of thing in short-story form, as done, say, by Ring W. Lardner. Those who like six hundred pages on end of exciting but everyday life in pre-War America should certainly try this book.

The Porch is the story of two young men in the Civil Service who work in the Food and Drugs Analysis Department of the

Custom House in Billingsgate. It gives us a vivid picture of that sort of job as well as of the spiritual adventures of the two young men. One of the young men wants passionately to be a doctor; the other is a consumptive poet, sprung from a driinlen slum-family and racked by rancour and ambition. - The poet inevitably dies. We know only too

well what a less sensitive and' skilful writer would have made out of this-but, though I cannot bear novels about poets, I read about this one with interest to the end. I am a little doubtful about Mr. Church's Minor characters. When the hero first enters the Custom House he meets a fellow clerk with long yellow hair who spends all his spare time and many of his office hours in either studying mosses under a microscope or " tranatribing back into their original parts the Vivaldi concertos which Bach -set -for the clavichord." We think how lucky it is for the hero to work with this amiable eccentric. But When the Custom -House introduces him also not only to the Timonnqne poet but to a dapper Irishman who quotes Villiers de l'Isle A d un at first meeting, and when the hero's lodger, a Dickensian little man called Mr. Finch, declares, also at first meeting, that he stakes his existence on two books —" Those books Are by the mighty cervantes and the unjustly treated Boswell "—we begin- to feel that a11this is a little too good to be true. It cannot be denied that all Mr. Church's characters are alive but the fact that so many of them are so unexpectedly cultured tends to make us feel that their life is not as ours; - The book as -a whole is, however, charming.

- Olive-E.-and Women also Dream are both concerned with modern woman- looking for a better life. Olive E. is the better, chiefly because it has humour, but its satire on the whole is -too -easy and so too is its human feeling. It is like one-of. those unsatisfactory plays which oscillate between farce and light-serious comedy. The heroine becomes secretary to a-qnixOtic Man of ideas who uses his wealth to propagand by various means against his pet Armageddon, the mechan- isation of life. This character palls in large quantities but he gives one some laughs.

Women Also Dream is about a young woman explorer who marries a young man about town, finds him (alas) inadequate and goes back to her adventuring ; we leave her planning to fly on an expedition over Afghanistan which is almost certain to be fatal. This book is unpleasantly written, has a lot about pagan drums in it and is full of tedious digressions where Miss Mannin takes the reader by the hand and asks him not to be hard on her characters because they are only human. The reader will be able to judge this book in the shop from the dozen astonishingly fiat quotations from it which the pub- lishers have obligingly put on the wrapper. The only reason I can see for reading this book is that other people will read it and it may therefore be expected to throw some light on other people's extraordinary mentality.

Spring Horizon is a first novel about a sensitive boy brought up in a small town in County Cork. Not very original ; the dialogue is feeble and some of the writing bad--e.g., "It was only to be expected that the nascent intelligence should reach out its tendrils to the drooping stem rather than to the upright bole." Mr. Murray's most interesting character is his Roman father—again nothing new but it is a type worth repeating if only because most people in England are ignorant of the still lingering Irish tradition of patria potestas. The description of the boy's school is much more interesting than the boy. Institutions give bony structure to a novel. Schools, jobs, prisons, country under enemy occupation, are far better material than the personalities of free lances who spend their lives looking for solutions to them. For, as can be seen from Miss Mannin's novel, the free lance's logical solution is extinction.