Fiction
THERE is nothing in the world so rare as a popular novel for educated women. For men there are available • detection and adventure at the highest cultural levels ; but if we wish to relax with some romantic and unrealistic love, the level of intelligence of all fictional characters usually- available is- so degenerate that the result is not soporific but emetic.
So it is a great relief as well as a great pleasure to read and praise Margaret Kennedy's new novel, Lucy Carmichael. The writing is good, quietly witty, delicately perceptive, subtly observant of rare and various brands of snobbery. The setting is entirely original ; most of the action centres round the Ravensbridge Arts Institute, a - philanthropic organisation intended to raise the cultural level of a Midland manufacturing town. The incidental detail is always interesting, particularly that concerned with the produc- tion of the various plays there. But, most important of all, both characters and plot are absolutely first class. Lucy herself and her kind elegant friend Melissa have both been 'to the 'university, and, though this does not, alas, spare them the emotional agonies of less fortunate women, it does at least ensure that when they attack their problems intellectually they do so with decorum and good sense. (I am prepared to admit a charge of arrogance here.) More, though it is clear from the title that Lucy is the heroine of the book, one cannot be certain up to the very end who is going to be the hero, or, indeed, be at all sure how the plot is going to turn out in any way,- which is such a very refreshing pleasure. In fact, this nice long book can be most heartily recommended to any woman who doesn't think that 'higher education for girls is a waste of time. (A small point: • why does' no list of Miss Kennedy's previous books- appear in the prelims ?)- I am very much afraid that Mittee is a phony. So many novels have lately come out of South Africa, but far from being semper aliquid novi they seem very much to conform to the same 'pattern with the invariable ingredients of race hatred and sexual Misdemeanour stirred up with a hefty admixture of violence. The best of these writers-,-Alan Paton, Doris Lessing—have been very 'good indeed ; and there is, a real danger that we may be taken in by what more critical reading shows to be -no more than a simulacrum, a popular novel in a new setting.- Mittee, set -in the 1870s, has all the conventional ingredients, but neither the narrator herself, who is the coloured girl Mittee, nor her petulant white Mistress nor her violent white lover is more than an adequate Character part for a-minor South African Gone With The Wind.
Mrs. Langley Moore, on the other hand, in her popular novels makes no pretensions at all. She • uses her very specialised know- ledge of the arts to provide a most interesting background to a thriller based on a theme that strikes a chord in us all, the discovery of some possibly extremely valuable pictures in an old trunk. Story and characters are pitched and maintained at just the right 'level to make All Done By Kindness very rewarding light entertainment.
Not very long after the First World War there appeared in England a translation of a novel called Carl and Anna by Leonard Frank. The author- never wrote anything _comparable., to it, but this short book, written in a strong, highly impressionist prose, had a force and poetic pdwer that made it singularly memorable. I am reminded of it when reading The Forthright. Spirit, a transla- tion from the French. It is not so good' as the German book, attempting far too -much in the way of significant interpretation and achieving only confusion. There is too much plot, too much " stream of consciousness " writing, thotigh admittedly this may be less effective in translation where verbal associations must inevitably have been lost. But what the translatiOn does forcefully convey, and where the memory of Carl and Anna arises, is an unusual force of poetic passion that achieves an almost blinding reality in describin$ physical love. It is not a book to read for a story about a lost plane in Indo-China, or for mystical musings on comradeship and religion ; but a few people will be very much interested in it as a largely successful experiment in poetic imagery expressed in prose. The jacket is not very nice or appropriate.
MARGFIANITA LASKI.
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