FICTION
By FORREST REID
As a Man's Hand. By D. H. Southgate. (Methuen. 7s. 6d.) MR. BRETT YouNG must write with amazing facility. Like most of his later novels, They Seek a Country is a very long book, yet it was written in five months, and betrays no sign of hasty composition. The style indeed is admirable—a perfectly natural style, combining lucidity with grace. It is the kind of prose that keeps its freshness, because it is devoid of manner- ism and preciosity. When one calls it easy, one only means that it is easy to read, not that it would be easy to imitate ; and it lends itself equally happily to narrative and to descriptive writing. It has its limitations. Even at their best Mr. Brett Young's descriptions lack the poetic and dramatic quality, the intensely personal note of Hardy's : as a painter of the rural scene he is more akin to W. H. Hudson. Yet that he can be poetic The Tragic Bride showed, and in the present book the scene of Lisbet's vigil by the sleeping John is on this higher plane, stamps upon the mind a deeply-moving impression of spiritual beauty. It is, I think, the outstanding scene in the novel, and I half hoped it was going to be a prelude to that kind of love story which it seems to me Mr. Brett Young does better than anybody else. I mean the story of first love with its mingled innocence and rapture. John Oakley is a boy of eighteen, " his mind full of vaguely romantic ideals and aspira- tions . . . His passion was of that rarefied kind which only the youngest and least experienced of lovers know : strangely innocent, and so sufficient in itself that the idea of possession hardly entered into it. He asked nothing of Lisbet beyond what her beauty gave." But I am afraid I am failing to describe the book, and to begin with I had better say that the romance of John and 'Lisbet is only a single bright and delicate strand in its pattern : I picked. it out because it is what pleased me most. The book as a whole is far different. Its setting is historical, the date a hundred years ago. The story opens in England, where John Oakley's boyhood is spent, but after this young idealist is sentenced at the Worcester Assizes to seven years transportation for poaching, we see England no more. The voyage on the convict ship is an interlude of horror, but when the ship touches on the South African coast to take in fresh water, John and an older prisoner make their escape, finding, after much hardship, refuge at a Boer farm. The rest of the tale is concerned with John's relations with this Boer filthily, with the hazards of trekking, and with fighting the Zulus. It is a vast and graphic picture ; and the adventure of the great trek is realistic enough to have been written by an eye- witness.
But though I enjoyed it, and in spite of its length only here and there felt it to be dragging a little, I should not place They Seek a Country among Mr. Brett Young's best novels. Whether The Golden House is among Mr. Vachell's I cannot say. It is well constructed, slick, lively, obviously the work of a writer who knows his trade ; but personally I found its modish style rather irritating, and the harping on class dis- tinctions still more so. Secretly, I dare say, my own attitude is just as snobbish as Mr. Vachell's, but then I try to conceal it and he does not. I have read only one other novel by him, a school story called The Hill, and even in that book the boys were perpetually chattering about their pedigrees. It struck me then as unfortunate, and the impression is now revived. Humphry Paganel, the hero of The Golden House, I admit is modest enough, but he, too, is a youth of exalted lineage, and we are constantly reminded of the fact. He has very little money, and therefore is obliged to take a job in the office of Mr. Pontifax, a wine merchant. There he gets on rapidly ; in fact he is so successful all round that we leave him, while still a young man, head of Pontifax's, and once more master of the Golden House, his ancestral home. It is a good-humoured tale : a romance of Bath, Mr. Vachell calls it, most justifiably, for it contains a great deal, about Bath and quite a fair proportion of romance.
These two novels are by writers who have achieved popular success : in each, whether we care for the result or not, the author does without fumbling what he has set out to do ; the remaining books on our list are more experimental. Mr. Lucas's indeed, being a volume of short stories, is a series of experiments, some successful and some only partially successful, but none commonplace. In time they range over two thousand years, beginning in the first century and ending in 1995. Mr. Lucas possesses scholarship, imagination, and irony, and I think his touch grows surer as the tales become more modern in date. "A Christmas in Padua " (A.D. 1585) is better than "The Hydra" (A.D. 53), and The Woman Clothed with the Sun—a delightful account of Elspeth Buchan and her followers—is better still. Of the ten stories in the book only four, however, are historical pastiches : the remaining six are either contemporary, or else peeps into the future. "The Dictator" is such a peep (not very remote as it happens, the date being 1943), and to my mind it is the best tale of all. It is in the form of -a diary kept by a man who has only six months to live ; or at least has been told so by the celebrated heart specialist he has consulted. What can he do in the time ? Not much for himself, perhaps, but for humanity at large there is a singularly useful task to be accom- plished—the elimination of Julius Wernigerode, Dictator of Mitropa. This may not in the end avert war, but it cannot hasten, and is likely to delay it. Of course the story is a comment on contemporary Europe, yet it is none the less an imaginative creation, ingenious; amusing, exciting. For Mr. Lucas can be amusing and at the same time very much in earnest. His method is ironic, but it is quite clear what his views are, and that they are coloured by no undue optimism. "The Dictator" is a warning : "Last Act" (A.D. 1995) is a picture of society beyond the reach of warnings, with nothing left to hope for but annihilation.
With Musical Chains we leave propaganda and return to story-telling for its own sake. The novel is about two musi- cians—Graf, a violinist of European fame, and Lutz, a young peasant he befriends, and whose training as a pianist he super- vises. Graf, though a genius, is good-natured, and reasonable enough, but the boy is all nerves, and their life together is a stormy one. It is a curious and original study, the conception better than the execution. A strong affection unites the two friends—on Lutz's side, indeed, there is something more, a kind of feverish devotion—but each is self-centred, and the boy, in addition, is exacting and jealous. There are quarrels and reconciliations, a half-hearted attempt at suicide and an attempted murder, both so childish as to be quite convincing. The merit of the book is that a subject which might have been treated sentimentally is not so treated : its weakness that Miss Wake cannot quite make up her mind whether to be realistic or romantic, and deliberately breaks the story off at a point intended to create the illusion of a happy ending.
Miss Tyrrell's novel is told by the heroine herself, and begins promisingly. The chapters in which Una Griffiths describes her brother and her three sisters, and the little house at Mortlake where they are all living with their Aunt Poppy on eighty pounds a year eked out by the reluctant charity of well-to-do relations, have both charm and individuality. Unfortu- nately they are wasted, for with the appearance of Miles Bradby, Una's wealthy young lover, the family chronicle is dropped, and the story degenerates into a thriller based on the theme of split personality. Put in a nutshell, Una marries Doctor Jekyll and gradually awakens to find herself bound to Mr. Hyde. The result is melodramatic in the extreme, such excitement as it provides being a poor substitute for the human interest, quaintness and humour of the earlier pages.
As a Man's Hand is a novel of modern Indian Life, covering three generations and giving a mass of information concerning native custom and belief.
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