FICTION
The Boon Companions. By Hugh McGraw. (Heinemann.
8s. 3d.) War and Soldier is a Japanese version of the life of the twentieth-century infantryman, and it does, indeed, as an accompanying folder points out, "demonstrate the extra- ordinary sameness in the experiences of the common soldier." And that, in spite of many merits, is really the chief thing it does ; which, for a large work of art, is not enough. Perhaps, with its polite but definite nationalist complacency and its whiffs of sentimentality, it comes ill-timed to readers over here ; perhaps certain oddities in the English translation work against it ; whatever the cause, in spite of much " literary " skill, and many passages of vigour and of delicacy, the book is cumulatively disappointing.
It is the work of a distinguished Japanese author who is at present a conscript in the Japanese army. It is his first-hand record, in the form of letters and diaries, of campaigns of 1937 and 1938 in China. The author is still on active service, and his novel is enjoying a great success in Japan—although it was apparently a cause of surprise to him and his publishers that it got past the Japanese censor. No reader unacquainted with the methods of that official will be able to imagine why on earth he could have been expected to ban it. One can hardly imagine, from his point of view, better or more courteous propaganda. It is a gentle, sensitive and frequently sentimental record of the discomforts, dangers and alleviations of a modern soldier's life on active service ; it is filled with pleasing land- scape impressions and character-episodes, touching or amus- ing; it celebrates the eternal and heart-breaking will-to-endure of the simple soldier, as also his desperate, war-induced dependence on the comrades at hand ; and while always detachedly gentle about the enemy, it contains some con- descending observations about him, some oddly benevo- lent explanations. These last, combined with the author's mania for detail, and his too frequent inclination to a lump in the throat, detract from a book which nevertheless has distinction.
In Take Courage Miss Phyllis Bentley has turned away from our own time, and has elected to show us, perhaps as
a parable, some of the very real troubles and tragedies of another period of English history. Her new novel spans from the crowning of Charles I to the year of the Great Fire of London—a crowded, unhappy time, and not the less so, pro- portionately, it would seem, in Bradford than in the capital. Miss Bentley has taken all the characters for this novel from Yorkshire history, and has woven their personal stories into the events of the Civil War ; indeed, the Civil War is, for most of them, their personal story, and this novel's highest merit is the persuasiveness with which it shows how painfully the lives of the good and the simple were injured by that war ; how grossly loyalties were disillusioned ; and yet how faith and courage struggled through somehow.
The destinies of two respectable clothier families of Brad- ford are worked out in the story. These two families, the Clarksons and the Thorpes, are allied by marriage, by business
interests and by a common belief in the Roundhead cause and the non-conforming ministry. Under the inspiration of Thomas Fairfax, afterwards Lord Fairfax, 'Black Tom,' they take their very fair share of the sacrifices and blows of the war ; they take also its weary aftermath, and come to old age and the patchy comforts of compromise, &c. Their personal events, like their characters, are of a threadbare pattern, and cannot be said to enthral—though that may be the fault of the heroine narrator, Penninah Thorpe, nee Clarkson, who is a perfect fountain of bromides. In any case, the Yorkshire convention of character and dialogue, wedded as it is here to the Puritan convention in both, makes very heavy going. "Aye, 'tis a gradely spot. And the price of a virtuous woman is above rubies." A whole book of that kind of talk, with personalities to match, is not for all markets ; for my own part, I should have found it unreadable, were it not that Miss Bentley has a remarkable power of impressing life on lay figures, almost in their despite. And the history of the time is admirably imposed—with power and justice, and with a subtle but obstinate insistence on the reader's attention, so that we become concerned to remember events ahead of our author, and humiliated that we never can. Indeed, this novel's secondary title might well be Brush Up Your Civil War.
Mr. McGraw's new book is lively, unpretentious, and a very good entertainment. He attempts no novelty of plot, or even of character, but he does give his events a setting which, though prosaic and recognisable, has not been made weari- somely familiar to us by other novelists. This story, The Boon Companions, takes place with attractive unity in one of those industrial suburbs of London which are among the less glorious developments of our time. The author conveys the mess of these places with a slapdash noncensoriousness; he has a good, selective ear for slang, and an all-round talent for conveying the behaviour of typists, idlers, cads and in- effectuals, pleasant and unpleasant. His young man with the invention to sell is agreeable, but could have been more of an ass without losing face, I thought. His adventures in factory, bars and lodging-houses keep the indulgent reader worried and amused, and the happy ending gives pleasure. But I liked best the irrelevant sketches of the neatly married pair with the radio and the "toddler." Mr. McGrew 1) good and savage in his handling of them, and said a few things that need saying. A whole book about them would be fine.
Miss Joanna Cannan's new novel will disappoint admiren who remember earlier books, such as lthuriel's Hour and High Table. It is a light and fairly amusing fairy tale, On the well-worn theme of the old, proud poor and the naive new rich. The girl belongs to the latter class, the boy to the former. He is said to be a ne'er-do-well, but he makes good. and he gets the girl. Both are pleasant characters, and there is a fresh gaiety over certain passages which alleviates the general conventionality.
Citizen of Westminster struck me as a turgid affair. It IS about a great house in Westminster, a Wren masterpiece which in the fullness of time and with plenty of drama6e irony, is pulled down to make way for a block of flats, bearing its name, Borlase House. The theme is all right, one sup- poses, but the handling is unctuous, and it was difficult to be interested either in the millionaire owner of Borlase House ne in his Burne-Jonesy love, whose name is Carole Shelmcrdine-
KATE O'BIZ IEN.
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