Fiction
HAVE the market researchers ever attempted a breakdown of the circulation—the library-borrowing readership, that is—of our popular or critically esteemed novelists ? Somebody at the fiction counter of a subscription library in Tunbridge Wells, some public librarian in Manchester, some enquiring spirit with Women's Institutes in Somerset, the National Council of Women, the Mothers' Union, the Women's Co-operative Guilds, the Girls' Friendly Society, the secretary of the Brompton Road or New Southgate Literary Society might all help. it would be instructive, perhaps even useful in this season of drought of the novel, to know the distribution by age, sex, occupation, income-level, other interests, etc., of the readers of so accomplished and successful a novelist as Miss Elizabeth Taylor, for instance.
The Sleeping Beauty is light, intelligent, witty, engagingly but not too exactingly readable. It is about a grave, courteous, romantic, middle-aged underwriter named Vinny who consoled the foolish Isabella when her M.P. husband died, fell in love with the ghostly and enchanted Emily, who had scarcely come back to life after a bad car-crash, fought for her with his mother, with Isabella, with Emily's fearsome sister, with his own satin-frocked wife, and biga- mously married her. The scene, once more, is a small seaside town, and Miss Taylor fills it with clever and charming small pictures. Their gay precision of detail, the witty edge of her dialogue, the quick feminine allusiveness of her style generally are all to be admired. Yet this is style without a great deal of substance. Miss Taylor is, in fact, a little too easy to read ; one takes a closer look at her performance as a whole and its imaginative inconsequence, and something of shallowness that goes with it, become evident. Talented and prac- tised, she improvises too freely, flinging together scenes and fancies that have barely been considered at all. Too often her dialogue is out of character; the chatterbox Isabella would never have followed, for instance, some of the august things Vinny says to her, nor would so exquisitely grave a creature have tried to say -them. There are improbable comic passages, too, which Miss Taylor appears to have been unwilling to deny herself. Altogether a cool, entertaining and decorative piece of work, but not, perhaps, to be described as serious.
The market researchers would be able an time to tell us whether there were, as there should be, more male readers than female of A Stranger Here. Mr. Henriques at his individual best is a writer of genuine strength and experimental poetic impulse ; I have never, lost admiration for the impassioned threnody of his strange war novel, Captain Smith and Company. The idealised earthiness of his lavish novels of Cotswold farming life is another matter. A Stranger Here seems to me a better piece of work than its predecessor, Through the Valley, more coherent in design and closer to the English rural commonplaces today. It does indeed communicate a lively sense of possession by the satisfactions and ambitions of farming. But Mr. Henriques has allowed himself too tender, perhaps too subjective a sympathy for his obsessed farmer-hero, the strong, sagacious, authoritative Will Bowar, whose protracted mental pursuit—on the near side of sixty—of the virginal Miss Jones lands him in disaster. The brilliantly just sketch of the stockman George, a not uncommon type of country unreason, slyness and obstinacy, is worth a great deal of Bowar, Sirrier, Barry and the others, shrewdly observed though they often are. Still, the novel has variety and great vigour as well as moments of candid and unmistakably masculine eloquence.
In the Castle of My Skin, by a writer of, we are told, mixed African and English parentage, a native of Barbados, is not so much a novel as a series of autobiographical sketches of boyhood and youth. It is a striking piece of work, a rich and memorable feat of imaginative interpretation for all its fragruentariness. Mr. Lamming is visibly intoxicated by words, but he has commanding gifts of poetic thought and language and a sharply observant sense of comedy besides. A work of fiction from him that made something like a created whole might be well worth waiting for. R. D. CHARQUES.
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