Fiction

By GRAHAM GREENE Entertaining the Islanders. By Struthers Burt. (Lovat Dickson. 8s. 6d.)

Miss STORM JAMESON'S and Herr Brehm's novels are both successful in a not very common genre,. the novel of con- temporary history, which subordinates fiction to the inter- pretation of this period. Herr Brehm's subject is the last two years of the War, and the ground he covers is very wide,

Russia, France, Germany, England. It forces him to work more in dramatic scenes (the murder of the Romanofs, the break through at Chemin des Dames, the Armistice, the signing of the Treaty) than Miss Jameson, who has limited her scene to London. • Miss Jameson's story is of the immediate post-War years, December, 1918, to June, 1923, and it is only the first of a series of five or six novels. The excellently chosen title gives the purpose of this opening volume, the introduction of the main characters who have been chosen to represent the contemporary scene : it would be quite beside the point therefore to complain that no pattern has yet emerged or that the characters are superficially presented. One is content to wait.

For how admirably Miss Jameson writes, with fastidiousness of phrase and tight emotional control. The dialogue is spare, curt, as necessary to the theme as the dialogue in a good play. There is no hazy writing, no padding, and she has the ability to describe her characters quickly and clearly.

This is an essential quality for a novelist who finds it necessary to desert a character for chapters at a time : she needs to impress an immediate vision which will last in the reader's mind until she is able to return and elaborate it. How well, for example, she " places " Delia Hunt : " the very boldness and grossness of Delia's face, the air she had of being sunk in life like an old boat in mud." ; the rapacious, ageing, rather precious woman writer, Evelyn Lamb : " The war is over, she thought. It seemed to her that already some brightness, some Mystify., had departed from the world " ; the elderly man at the pavement edge with a tray of toys : " He was not trying to sell his toys. He merely stood there as though giving himself every chance to be the object of a miracle " ; and more elaborately and indirectly William Ridley, the brazen, the potentially popular novelist, who plans his success like an election campaign. He describes to Evelyn Lamb the big book he has at last begun : 'You know the book I mean, don't you ? about a London restaurant, full of action and humour and characters, hundreds of

characters, a real human book. . . - " Evelyn saw this enormous book rolling towards her, with descriptions of faces and family parties and love scenes, with inventories of pantries and kitchens, with comic events, with speeches in character, corpulent, leg-slapping, something for all tastes and nothing for thought."

This big parade of characters, who are so far (perhaps the balance will be righted in the next novel) too preponderantly intellectuals to give a quite satisfactory sense of the con- temporary scene, is lent some unity by the mood of the author, which is also the mood of her principal character, Nervy Russell. It is a mood shadowed by war, the War which is just over and the worse war which is already being prepared. The weight of this impending war, and the weight of the internal war between. the classes, grows heavier as the book proceeds; one of the last scenes presents the war-mongers themselves at work, a directors' meeting of Garton's Ship- building Company held (here Miss Jameson's tactful avoidance of sentimentality temporarily deserts her) on Armistice Day. Technically this growing sense of doom worries inc ; I cannot see how Miss Jameson is going to conclude the larger work of which this is a part. Her theme cannot remain in- definitely the threat of war. This would be to call " Bogy " once too often, and yet her book demands a climax. Macbeth,

after the witches' invocations, after the foul fair day, couldn't not have murdered Duncan. The witches squeak and gibber with admirable effect in Company Parade, but I fear that unles'S another European war breaks out before Miss Jameson's novel reaches its conclusion, she will find it difficult to_present a climax adequate to her beginning.

Herr Brehm, though he allows himself rather ampler ges- tures than Miss Jameson and does not quite so successfully avoid sentimentality, has the same talent for the hard en- lightening phrase which makes itself heard inside the Eliza- bethan panoply of his tragic rhetoric, rattling like a nut in its shell. There is a delightfully impartial irony in his opening description of the dinner given to the Russian peace delegates at Brest Litovsk, the curious juxtaposition of Russian work- men and Prussian general, of woman assassin and Austrian prince : " There, with tanned expressionless faces, sat German, Austrian, Turkish, Bulgarian and Russian officers and, among them, rows of pallid, spectacled Jews, like little windows let into a wall, on the other side of which was another world. There were also diplomats, leaning politely forward, with faces which seemed less to belong to them individually, than to their families."

Herr Brehm has this advantage, not of his own making, over Miss Jameson. His subject offets him a pattern. His novel, which opens with Brest Litovsk and Germany at the height of her success, closes with the tragedy of Versailles ; the harsh- ness and injustice of Germany to Russia is rounded off by the harshness and injustice of the Allies to Germany. He has, too, I think, one advantage over Miss Jameson of his .own making. The point of view is a constant one ; the observer is always the author. But Miss Jameson quite frankly has no fixed point of view, not even a fixed point of view in each short section, and her novel suffers from the dispersion, is inclined to flicker like an early movie.

It is to the stage that one would compare Herr Brehm's novel, but not to the modern staccato stage with its missing fourth wall and its three acts and its rather middle-class gentility. Even his cast of characters is Elizabethan : the Emperors, William and Nicholas, the Generals, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, Haig, Foch, the Politicians, Ertzberger, Balfour, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Wilson, House, Winston Churchill ; and occasionally the author himself breaks through the cast to soliloquize upon the apron stage with (the adjective' is not meant in this context disrespectfully) gorgeous effect.

An international east like this requires immense courage and confidence. Herr Brehm has only one failure, and it is a failure which reveals his conscientiousness. When Mr. Winston Churchill stares out into a Zeppelin-haunted night and has " a sudden vision of Shakespeare's England ; Thiri little isle set in a- silver sea '," one feels certain that Herr Brehm has studied Mr. Churchill's own flamboyant remini- scences a little too closely. Mr. Churchill, the writer, might well be responsible for " Marlborough, my ancestor, fought Louis—may God grant me the same grace of victory !" but one is not convinced that Mr. Churchill would actually have said it aloud, and to Mr. Lloyd George of all people."

This is one of the few blemishes on a book which is even more successfully rhetorical th-an Miss Jameson's is success- fully laconic. James, with a certain personal and feline malice, complained, that Flaubert should at least have listened at the chamber of the soul. This would have floated• him on a deeper tide ; above all it would have calmed his nerves," and one does feel that the bright superficial clarity of Miss Jameson's portraits is the product of nerves too tightly strung. Herr Brehm perhaps is inclined to take the soul by rape in a manner Which James would hardly have approved, but there is a calmness behind his indignant rhetoric. He risks a good deal more than Miss Jameson and comes off safely.

' But I do not really wish to compare invidiously two novels of quite outstanding merit. How dry as dust after these is the self-conscious entertainment offered by Mr. Struthers

Burt. Mr. Burt hai set out to write an-urbane book in the manner of South Teind,'a discursive comedy set in an imaginary

West Indian island. Perhaps Mr. Douglas's particular type of cultured humour demands a European palate. Mr. Burt continually trips up. His amused detachment is apt to vanish at the most astonishing moments, and one cannot help suspecting the cultural veneer of a writer who classes together as " physically unpassionate, early feminists and socialists

. arid thinkers," _Eugene-O'Neill, Lady Gregory, Bernard Sliaw, Rebecca West, Lady Astor and Keyserlin (sic).