Fiction
A Fugue in Time. By Rumer Godden. (Michael Joseph. 8s. 6d.) Cliffs of Fall. By Dan Davin. (Nicholson and Watson. 8s. 6d.) Three Men in New Suits. By J. B. Priestley. (Heinemann. 8s. 6d.
Two years ago William Plomer, in an essay entitled Some Boo from New Zealand, drew the attention of the English reading publ: to some of the various work done by young writers of the colon during the last decade. The tendencies of Katherine Mansfield which have made such a deep, and often fatal, impression on the minds of many young English short-story writers, have had little influence on the most promising of her young countrymen. It is to England and America, rather than to Russia and Germany, that they have looked ; though they have retained a quality which one may define, a little clumsily, as, freshness of approach. Their work has weakness as well as subtlety. To Mr. Plomer's list, which included poets such as R. A. K. Mason and Allen Curnow, prose writers like Frank Sargeson and.D'Arcy Cresswell, many readers must have added the name of Dan-Davin—if they happened to come across a short story of his, dealing with an air-raid on Crete, called Under the Bridge—for here was work from another young New Zealand writer of decided promise and freshness. Mr. Davi*-comes from Irish stock, he has seen active service in Greece and the Middle East. His remarkable first novel, Cliffs of Fall, which takes its title from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, has a theme similar to that of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, though Mark Burke is a more sturdy, less vacillating character than Clyde Griffiths. Any summary of the book must appear as sordid and ungenerous, since the story tells of a young man whose vanity leads him to rescue a young woman from an unhappy career of sexual promiscuity, only to destroy her, when, as a result of their love, her very existence 1.
appears as a dangerous threat to all his aspirations. When the story opens, Mark, an intellectual, is staying with his family ; they are 1. Catholics, simple, rather petty and 'provincial. In order to shock their complacency he tells them he is going to marry Marta, the girl whom he has already planned to murder. Her name has been a byword among the student's, but he found her character warped b. an unfortunate experience of her girlhood, which their mutual loy 9 does much to eradicate. Once she becomes pregnant she is doomed, since Mark, who will not marry her, can see no other way out of the impasse. The crime is planned skilfully ; Mark spends a final evening with the girl, at whose _summons he has hurried to return. The next evening he goes to her home add gives the alarm of ha being missing himself. With her father and brothers he goes in search of Marta, and finally, after-her body has been found, he leads in a wild fatal pursuit of her slayer. In its final section this novel nearly reaches great heights of poetic imagination. 'The author has some of the matter-of-fact brilliance which makes the novels of Graham Greene so impressive, he too can depict the seedy and the violent in terms which do not depend on mere realism. Since execution is not equal to conception, Cliffs of Fall is a failure, but a brilliant one, for the author has passion, a quality which is mere rare and more valuable than competence.
It is said that writing for the theatre enables an author to keep 3 knowing finger on the public's pulse ; whatever the truth may be about this particular generalisation, here, slightly coarse, hot and neat as steaming meat pie, comes Mr. Priestley's Three Men in New Suits. Soldiers returning to Civvy Street, these three young men, all from the same unit, all from the same district, are having-a qui one in the small town pub before returning to their respective homes First there is Alan Strete, one of'the local gentry, who has preferr being sergeant to holding a commission ; then there is Herbe Kenford, a farmer's son, and Eddie Mold who has been a labourer Each goes home to find chaos and misery rampant. • Lady Strete wants life as it was ; county families must go down fighting. The Kenfords have -done pretty well for themselves, what they hay they'll hold. Mrs. Mold has lost her baby and gone astray with the Americans; of being at home to greet her spouse, there are empty bottes and tattling neighbours. Alan is offered a job by 3 great newspaper magnate and a giddy holiday by a glamour girl who is far worse than she ought to be. Herbert is disgusted by his family's horrid graspingness; has found himself a girl who interests him far more than he dumb but capable blonde already chosen for him. Poor Eddie, least articulate and hardest done by of the three, quickly gains unpopularity by getting himself drunk and disorderly. Just as Alan is off with the girl friend to her country cot, his mates arrive to confide their troubles ; while the female drives off in a great rage, the three friends go into a huddle. And Alan—since it is providentially a Sunday, everting—provides a neat postscript and a solution for every problem: "Instead of guessing
and grabbing, we plan. Instead of competing, we co-operate. We come out of the nursery—and begin to grow up."
Some twenty years ago Virginia Wolf published a story called A Haunted House : it is a charming exquisite gem. A Fugue in Time deals with the same theme, with a similar, but much less assured, technique. Instead of a gem we are offered an undercooked suet pudding, in which the plums are too sticky, too sweet, too ripe and too many. But those who can swallow a general, who at the age of ninety-nine or so, takes a violent fancy to one of the later poems of T. S. Eliot, will find the pudding very much to their liking.
JOHN HAMPSON.
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