FICTION
By E. B. C. JONES The Crown-Ups. By Catherine Whitcomb. (Chatto and Windus. 73. 6d.) Brother Petroc's Return. By S. M. C. (Chatto and Windus. 6s.) Pennybridge. By Franklin Lushington. (Faber. 75. 6d.) The Master Comes Home. By Eveline Amstutz. (Methuen.
73. 6d.) Moss Is the Stuff. By Adrian Alington. (Chatto and Windus. 7s. 6d.) Son of Han. By Richard La Piere. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.)
MOST introspective and reflective people, even those without an overdose of egotism, like to talk about their childhood, particularly if they belong to that psychological type whose sensations are highly developed. These, whom seasonal odours or a certain light on trees and house-fronts transport many years back, must sometimes envy those writers who choose childhood as their subject. They, too, remember with acute vividness an age in some respects golden, an Earlham, a House of Stare, or the expressions on the palings of a back yard in Brixton. The less reflective may underrate the talent or the genius for selection entailed by embarking on such re- miniscences ; for how to thread the maze and what to choose is even more a problem for the writer whose subject-matter is largely autobiographical than for him whose scheme and theme set definite limits to the wandering, past-enchanted mind.
In thus introducing Miss Whitcomb's second book, I am not suggesting that her Camilla is to be entirely identified with herself ; it is a novel—and given its type, a quite shapely novel—that she has written in. The Grown-Ups ; but obviously a good deal of her material must have come from her own experience, moulded- to fit het ieheme; and worked on by the imagination. The fact that there has been such work done is proved by the skilful way in which she conveys both how the grown-ups appeared to Camilla and, at the same time, what they were in themselves. For this mid-Western American child, whom we meet when she is four and leave when she is seventeen, does not belong to the type whose sensations dominate her nature. She is much more aware of the people surrounding and ruling her than she is of sensuous things. Her perceptions are rather vague and general : " Summer wore to a breathless end and the days became chill. The roses were past their prime and the petals strewed the flag- stones. Camilla ate some—so that they wouldn't be wasted." No ; it is her desire for contact with, for love from, and Inter for understanding of, her numerous—relations, which preoccupies her. Owing to the divorce of her parents she is early separated from her beautiful and selfish mother (a too conventional portrait) and passes successively to the care of a grandmother, of an idealised father with a neurotic second wife, of an unloved aunt, and of her father again. There is a quite superfluous passage concerning her paternal grand- mother, telling the reader nothing essential that he has not already gathered ; and why must grandmothers in books, when they are charming characters, so often have French blood in their veins ? I suppose it is an expression of that American nostalgia for the grace and tradition of the Old World which determined the subject-matter of Henry James.
Apart from the unnecessary passage alluded to, there is only one other serious flaw in The Grown-Ups. Camilla, settled at a summer resort with her father, her belief in his love for her at last destroyed, is painfully out of it with the slick damsels and lustful, condescending youths with whom she is thrown. She is, at sixteen, fat and devoid of sex appeal. This familiar situation is extremely well conveyed. Then we are suddenly informed that a certain youth has looked favourably on her, and we leave her _ dancing _in his .amas ; but the transition is not indicated. There should have been at least one scene to bridge the gap between two important stages. This lapse is particularly noticeable because the foregoing chapters, describing Camilla and her friends at a smart boarding-school, are so convincing.
I do not pretend that The Grown-Ups would have received so much notice from me had not the Coronation momentarily stemmed the tide of novels ; its writing is undistinguished, and Miss Whitcomb is not a new Virginia Woolf (incidentally she says that someone's age is " unpredictable " when she means that it could not -be guessed from his appearance) but she has produced a fresh, intelligent, readable book.
Brother Pares Return is a long short-story, the work, so the blurb informs us, of a Dominican nun. Brother Petro: is a young unordained member of a Cornish Benedictine houSc in the reign of Henry VIII. There is fighting in the district between King's men and Catholics, and the -story opens with Petroc ill to the death, just when the Abbot is preparing to remove the monks to an island for safety. They bury Petroc hurriedly and depart. Centuries pass ; it is our own day, and the same order has "acquired the ruined monastery ; so that when, in rebuilding, they expose Petroc's undecayed body and find him alive, he is among friends. An interesting situation is thus created : a sensitive and cultured man (an unconscious mystic, in his new Abbot's view) finds himself in a strange, bewildering world. It is not the noise and scientific advances which depress him so much as the impact of modem psychology,' and developments in the practice of religion which puzzle and depress him. A tactless Brother undermines the care and consideration with which the Abbdt and sub-Prior surround Petroc by taking him to visit a Domini- can Convent, whose Superior reels off a list of Meditationt and spiritual exercises unheard of in his day ; and this is but one of a series of incidents calculated to unseat his reason. Actually he ages abruptly and dies.
This hopeful subject-matter is, unfortunately, treated in the flattest-possible manner ; and our confidence in the writer's acumen is not strengthened by the inadequate exposition of psycho-analysis on P. 99. She has bitten off far more than she can chew. The theme required subtle handling if Petroc's quality was to be felt, and though flatness is better than high- falutin it is no substitute for subtlety. The secondary plot, too, is amateurish in design. An errant Catholic girl is deeply influenced by Petroc, unknown to him, at a crisis of her life ; and she, stone-deaf because the plot entails it, is not _only a successful school-teacher but also talks to people without their even suspecting her defect. This improbability strains the reader's credulity far more than does the initial miracle of Petroc's return to life.
Pennybridge is a slight, charming book about leisured people living in Kent. It is a collection of brief essays rather than a novel, strung on the thread of the " I " and his wife Fenella. Two chapters in it show that Mr. Lushington could be a story-teller if he wished : " Walland Bank " and " The Bradleys." These are beautifully done ; in the latter particularly the tone and approach are fitted to the matter with the perfect apparent ease of the born writer.
The Master Comes Home belongs to the large class of com- petent, low- to middle-brow novels, but its subject-matter is more inherently interesting than some. Anna, Fnglish widow of a Swiss doctor, continues to live in the Spa which he helped to make famous, now sunk in slump. She hates the inhabitants, and when a movement gets afoot to turn the place into a winter sports resort, she not only refuses to sell her land, which is where the funicular would have to run, but buys hotels in an adjacent village and starts a rival resort. Meanwhile, she has fallen in love with a fascinating Slav gigolo, who turns out to be proud, clever, brave, reliable and even, finally, a devoted husband. When misfortune overtakes her enterprise, he comes to the rescue. There is something intensely smug in the atmosphere of this book, but Anna, a bard, disagreeable, sex-obsessed woman—though this is not how she is meant to strike us—is at least a probable and lively character.
Moss is the Stuff is a humorous picaresque novel, with fantastic and simplified persons. Anyone for whom satire means Evelyn Waugh had better avoid it, but there must be many who will enjoy the fat boy Godolphin, who runs away to London, believing it to be a gilded Babylon, and every pub a flaring haunt of vice. • - Son of Han is set in ancient China, date_ unspecified. It concerns the conflict between the feminine Chinese view that what matters most is the production of descendants— a view exemplified by young Han's grandmother—and the masculine desire for scholarship. Han's father and grand- father have attained only a lesser degree of learning; through becoming husbands and fathers too young, and Han in turn succumbs to matriarchal determination. It is a long, slow, quiet narrative, and the author is more a loving craftsman than an artist.
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