FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN Bloody Murder. By S. C. Mason. (Bell. 7s. 6d.)
Father Coldstream is an interesting, stimulating book, and if one demurs somewhat from details of its execution and finds oneself unable to record conviction and final satisfaction, a certain ungraciousness in such withholding must be admitted. For the art of fiction, hopelessly over-exploited nowadays, is in a muddy mess of stale derivativeness, and therefore to come on a clear, strong, informative story of South America, the eighteenth century and the Jesuits, is a relief deserving of much thanks from the reviewer.
That Mr. Duguid knows his scene is beyond dispute. Even those who have not read his earlier work will find here in his economical evocations of the Paraguayan landscape and climate a certainty of touch which is all the more convincing because it is not over-laboured by a syllable, and every line which Mr: Duguid uses to depict forest, sky or weather is vivid with imaginative truth. The author tells his story well too, neither too fast nor too slowly—though the nature of the plot menaces him with repetition and monotony of effect—a danger which he cannot be said to have entirely mastered. It is a good- story. Father Coldstream is a Highland Scot who, when a boy, after the tragedy of Culloden and the overthrow of his family of Auchinvar, went to Spain with his younger brother to be trained for the Jesuit priesthood. Twenty years later, in 1767, a fully equipped and passionately loyal member of the Society of Jesus, he reaches Paraguay to take up his duties in the remote mission of Santa Magdalena, between AsunciOn and Santa Cruz. His labours there are to be brief, for in August, 1768, the Jesuits receive from Charles III of Spain an order of expulsion from his dominions, and with his broken-hearted old chief, Father Gaudrand, he has to depart from the labour for which he had prepared himself in long-drawn, passionate zeal. But his year is full of drama—drawn from the hatreds and conflicting interests of the Jesuits, the lay Spanish colonists and the outlaw Mamelukes. By a chance which heightens danger for Father Coldstream, his brother Simon, who is a renegade Jesuit and still wears the black robe, is leader of that band of Mamelukes which especially harries the neighbourhood of Santa Magdalena, and as both are stalwart men with red heads and grey eyes, mistakes of identity help to quicken an already lively plot, which works itself out in a series of brisk alarums and excursions, until the Jesuits have at last to take defeat from the royal parchment.
A good and picturesque story indeed—and my only quarrel is with its curious failures in characterisation. Perhaps in a drirna of its kind where everything turns on a few violent principles and hatreds it is unnecessary to seek analysis of individuals—and we can in fact overlook the entire non-reality of Ana, for instance, and accept her as a mere event in the plot. We can excuse too the " stock " quality of Simon and Iymerich, Ana's lover and father. But Mr. Duguid has attempted to present the Jesuit character, general and particular, and one who was brought up in a certain routine familiarity with various twentieth- century versions of that famous product, and who believes that, given the varying necessities of time and place, the Spiritual Exercises remain the same, ventures to assert that in this attempt he has failed. He approaches the character of the Society of Jesus from without, of course, but rather through fascination and some respect than through sympathy. Those even dimly familiar with the work of the South American Missions will find it difficult to accept Mr. Duguid's theatrical claim that it was carried through; for good or ill, by near-maniacs of the caste of Father Gaudrand and the Provincial of Asuncion, or by such pathetic and hide-bound heroes as Father Coldstream.
Imperial City is a disappointment. It is the first novel of Mr. Elmer Rice, whose dramatic work, while not always winning our complete surrender, has had the great merits of energy, individuality and provocativeness. And if energy be indicated by 672 large, close pages of heavy reportage, then that merit is certainly here. But I can find little else.
Mr. Rice had the idea to " report" contemporary New York —practically all of it—in cross-section manner, and mainly through the activities and repercussions among their fellowi of an immensely wealthy family called Coleman. There are three Coleman brothers and one sister in this third genera- tion of the Coleman greatness. They are much differentiated in their characters, pursuits and points of contact with life —so we get every conceivable human sin, grief, blunder and pleasure—but not much pleasure, really. There are far more characters in the book than are either necessary or memorablf, and they are all " reported " with a horrifying non-selective- ness. We get " big business," dipsomania, municipal politic, theatrical enterprise, blackmail, brothel raids, religion, idealism, university life, Labour Day processions, ,birth, marriage, death, to say nothing of murder, abortion, psycho-analysi, lust and love. An immense undertaking—heroic, but lifelesi. For there is no passion here, no wit and no discrimination The writing—except in the dialogue, which is sometimes really good—is startlingly cliché-ridden and threadbare. None of the characters, with the exception of Christopher Coleman and perhaps Maud, his mistress, achieves personality. In short, Imperial City is a heavy disappointment.
Mr. Mason's tale of the last few months of the Irish Rebellion, told from the point of view of an officer of the British army stationed in Cork, has among other commendable qualities the freshness for readers which that point of view bestows on it. One or two books which may eventually rank as literature have already been written from the Irish side of the smoke, and Bloody Murder is not literature, but it is a workmanlike, brisk record of the adventures of an Intelligence Officer, Lieutenant Charles Ingram, in his attempt to " get " Commandant Michael O'Connor, I.R.A., who has ," got two of Ingram's predecessors in the Intelligence Department of the Brigade. He must have been an exceptionally intelligeit I.O. We are not told how long he had been serving lit Ireland, but in his various disguises in moments whidh threatened discovery he broke into " a few sentences of Irish " which invariably saved the situation. "Many long-term native students of the Irish language would find it difficult to pull off, a trick like that on a peasant speaker. For all his daring and skill, he does not " get " O'Connor. The truce of July, 1921, intervenes.
The narrative is good in its simplicity and in the real tension it creates at the correct moments, but the writer would have done better to eschew comments which now ring somewhat naively. The war of 1916-21 was not engineered or pressed so bitterly through by "adenoidal morons " or.." dirty louts," and the foolish cry of those. times : " Why can't. Paddy fight fair ? " has been answered in a thousand places, not least effectively by " Fluther " Good in The Plough and the Stars. Moreover, it is disingenuous to describe the burning of Cork as the haphazard revenge of a few out-of-hand Tommies for an ambush perpetrated on the regiment during a sporting event. Cork was not burnt by the British army in a rage. The reports of the British Labour Commission, then in the city, as well as many other reliable records prove that it was a most carefully planned outrage, perpetrated with skill and pievision by the Auxiliaries and " Black and Tans," and it was initiated after Curfew, not before. Mr. Mason has tried to safeguard himself against accusations of inaccuracy by never mentioning Cork by name and by placing the burning in the early summer of 1921 instead of in December, 1920, but readers who know Ireland and remember the Anglo- Irish war will recognise the scene and situation as they are clearly meant to, so perhaps it is as well to refer them to the historical facts on which this novel is based.
A Stranger and a Sojourner is a dull,unexceptionable story, which one seems to have read once or twice before, of a child —girl—woman—old woman called Zillah—we pursue her; at a leisurely pace, right through her life. She is a foundling, brought up on a rough Derbyshire farm, but she has inklings of gentility in her which the unfolding of the story justifies. She marries the eldest son of the farm, fights a good, bitter battle against poverty and against the bad character of her husband's father. She has children, she discovers who she is, she inherits some property and she grows old in a certain measure of comfort and peace. She is a decent and self- Aghteous person, and _it is difficult to be interested in b6r.
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