FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN Late Harvest. By George Blake. (Collins. 8s. 6d.) Love Within Limits. By Paul Frischauer. (Cassell. 7s. 6d.) The Gentle Phoenix. By Dorothy Wright. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.)
I See a Wondrous Land, got up in a very funny and off-putting wrapper suggestive of the works of G. A. Henty, turns out to be a scholarly novel about Icelandic adventurers and explorers of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Believe it or not, these four hundred and sixteen pages about Vikings and Valkyries, godars and thralls, are for the most part downright interesting ! Granted that you have leisure to spend on them, can be patient with honest pedestrianism, and are of a humour to welcome irrelevant information provided it appears to be sound of its kind.
If anyone had told me when I first examined this book that I would read the whole of it with sustained curiosity, I should have ventured to disagree with him. It deals with the Icelandic colonisation of Greenland, the conflict between paganism and Christianity in Iceland and the voyagings of those saga heroes who discovered Newfoundland, Maine and Virginia. And I may as well confess that I was first persuaded into the story by my own ignorant surprise at learning that these tenth- century navigations in the western ocean had in fact taken place. The more-than-nine-hundred-years-old events which it reco:ds were hot news to me.
It is the work of a historian who is obviously well steeped in the records and sagas of his people but whose love for a remote, fantastic and brave past is governed by a strong desire to reconstruct it as realistically and probably as may be. There is an inescapable air of legend around the careers of Erik the Red, Leif Erikson, Bjorn Ashandson and all the other larger- than-life figures which fill the story, but Professor Kamban is clearly sticking to the facts of their adventures, and it is only legitimate that he should build his personalities to the scale of their known achievements. These bright-haired giants lived, and drove their ships into amazing and perilous courses ; they !wed women and bloodshed and their own extreme conception of personal courage ; at their best they were mad individualists, and as sophisticated and erratically curious about life as also they were barbarous ; they were great navigators and frequently very good poets. In what appears to have been their studied and purposeful exaggeration of their own attributes one is reminded of the heroes of the Irish pagan sagas, Cuchullain and Fiona and the Red Branch knights— and this is not surprising, for by the tenth century there was much Irish blood in the Viking races, and Dublin and Limerick were Danish cities. So the historical sagas of Iceland and Greenland derived much of their manner and ideal from mythical Celtic sources, though more austere themselves, less ribald and rich than the latter.
The shape of the novel is somewhat confused. The idea appears to have been to compress into fictional form the adventures, loves and marriages of a great saga group—but it is too much. Outline is sacrificed, emotions, triumphs and
disasters jostle for position, and no one destiny is dominant. There are too many Hercules and too many labours. To view and map this enormous new landscape we should be given a centre, a headquarters, a fixed base in one character or one emotion. When heroes are of Viking-size, a few go a very long way. And Valkyries should be severely rationed ! Nevertheless, Professor Kamban's striding characters are real, vivid and persuasive ; his love-passages, however epic, have a convincing human truth and a poetic ring,-and his voyages, battles and surprises on the ocean and on the American coast are thrilling and effective. He has been very well served by his translater, E. C. Ramsden.
From Iceland to the Firth of Clyde was an easy pleasure- trip, no doubt, for Erik The Red, but from tenth-century heroics to the small passions and anxieties of a Scottish town in the nineteen-twenties is a quite remarkable jump. Mr. George Blake, whose Shipbuilders will be remembered with pleasure by many readers, knows Scotland and the inner places of the Scottish household and Scottish character, and in Late Harvest he exposes a clear cross-section of provincial town life, middle- and lower-middle-class life. He does this very efficiently, and on the whole economically. For the most part his characterisation is justly blended of firmness and benevolence ; he has a not too harsh eye for folly ; he can be tender and he is only sometimes sentimental. For non-Scottish readers at least there is a certain novelty in the goings-on of the people of Garvel, and in the fortunes of the Martyrs United Free Church, its minister, Session Clerk and fluctuating congregation. The minister is, indeed, a touching and carefully drawn character, and Livvy Queen, the heroine, is an attractive creature, running true to established Scottish form for her kind, and actually none the worse for that. But Roddy Malvin, the upper-class hero, boy and man through the book, and picturesque in red kilt and blue tweed jacket, is more than I could stomach. The author was obviously set on creating, without hesitation or apology, an entirely sympathetic and lively boy. In this dreary day of " no panache by request " one applauds the courageous impulse. But sympathetic young colts do not spring into life, alas, by an author's determinedly commanding them so to do. That rare, sweet bird in life or art, the entirely lovable character, cannot be graphed out in advance of its own demonstration, as a plot may be. An author must only hope for the sympathetic character—never insist. The delightful must not be guaranteed. But the Scottish good, sense and good grammar of this book, its unaffectedness, efficiency and plain truth, will appeal to a great number of readers who, admiring its author's honest general talent for narrative and character, will forgive him Roddy Melvin's charm, and even that hero's conversational mannerisms.
Love Within Limits is a novel of modern life in Vienna and has been praised by eminent judges. " We feel," say the publishers, -" that a book which has caught the eye of Mann, Lenormand and Geraldy will interest you." A legitimate feeling—but, alas for my perversity, I found this novel a muddle and a bore. It is badly trans- lated—but its shapelessness is its own defect. It rests on a good idea. Its central figure is a Viennese lawyer who, loving and hating his gentle, infatuated school-teacher wife, and becoming infatuated with an odd young married woman whom he meets in a Kurhaus in the mountains—a Bergner character—comes to see his only hope of peace in his wife's death. She also sees his hope and desire, and commits suicide on the night when he was resolved, or half-resolved, to kill her. He is accused of her murder, and the situation is examined, untidily and non-consecutively, in retrospect, and largely through the surmises and experiments in criminal investigation of an alert police inspector. Balthbser, the lawyer, is a neurotic and the son of a déclassé doctor who makes his living as an abortionist. His morbid and resentful emotional reaction to his father and the circumstantial complications created for him by a wastrel brother who forges his name in order to obtain a loan from a quick-witted brothel-keeper- these are potentially valuable under-themes of a crime- psychology fugue—but the book lacks order and authority. Executive power of a high standard is needed for the manipula- tion of the tricky idea. It is not detectable in this English version. I defy the most patient reader not to be worried by the combination of pomposity and untidiness with which the author and translator of this work defeat its conception. Maria, the wife, is a touching and well-managed character. The Bergner girl is clear also. But the pseudo-profound psychological working-out of the neurotic lawyer's dilemma is wearisome, and the brothel-comedy is curiously lifeless in translation.
The Gentle Phoenix must be handled gently. It is—it can only be—the work of a very young girl. Miss Wright has some talent—but, oh heaven, who has not nowadays ? What she has not got is the defensive wit to see that when you re-hash The Constant Nymph, &c., you must not have that word " Phoenix " in your title. Talk of rising from the ashes ! The family at Much Cumber was a blaze of talent. The mother was Russian, the father was an Irish poet—" with mist and madness in his blood." There were seven children—one with her head screwed on in approxi- mately the right place. It is a very young book, but there are, for better or worse, many symptoms of talent in it.
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