Fiction
The Frontiers. By John Strachey. (Gollancz. 10s. 6d.) IN these days of restricted space the choice often lies between giving a novel an inadequate notice or none at all. On the principle that a crumb is better than no bread, I will say as much as I can about a larger batch than usual. Mr. Strachey's short and vividly told story was written in 1941. A pilot is obliged to bale out after a raid on occupied France. He meets a girl who enables him to escape, and remains with him until she can follow fit) further. In the meantime he has seen an important intellectual reject the lure held out by Laval, and overheard a dialogue which crystallises the temptation to collaborate and the resolve to resist. ' A Communist and an Austrian refugee round off the dialec- tical conflict into which the hitherto unthinking James has been precipitated. We have had to wilt all this time for The Frontiers because the censor feared that an imagined mode of escape might in fact be used. Mr. Strachey writes sensitively and with restraint, catching the flavour of the French countryside in a way that made me long at once to cross the Channel. The form of his story commits him to his one improbability that Laval (Nordenac in the story) should hold so confidential and compromising a conversation out of doors, as he must if James and the others are to overhear him. I think, too, that many readers will share my anxiety to know what happened to Madeleine.
Mrs. Charques in a novel of great length traces the course of the Third Crusade, best known to most of us because of Richard Coeur-de-Lion 's share in it. The story is told by an esquire, one of a small party that sets out from Stratford to join the massed forces at Vezelay. The delays, the adventures, the quarrels between French and English, the fighting, the treachery, the final disillusionment are unfolded with skill and care and a high degree of imagination. Two touches near the start reveal the quality of Mrs. Charques' mind : " I went on one knee to them and kissed hands, and the heat from the fire, I remember, struck at my face."
and on the next page : " I answered her simply out of what I momentarily felt to be knowledge : I think I am one of those who always come back.' " This combination of imaginative realism with an intuitive awareness of mystery saves Mrs. Charques from being burdened by her researches, and keeps the long tale alive. In her best moments she gives me the feeling of having been there at the time with a sharpness I have not enjoyed since I read Miss Helen Waddell.
Miss Abercrombie's best moments are so good that there is, even in a first novel, little excuse for her worst half-hours. The Rescuers is like a play I saw recently on a faulty television set. At one moment the figures were stereoscopically clear ; then they were blurred in quivering mist. Passages of really excellent dialogue, wise, perceptive and revealing, are followed by passages of the &Reg and dullest narrative. The fable, no great matter, tells us— in erect—that certain young women have a certain effect on certain young men. When Miss Abercrombie lets her characters talk and act, she_ is grand. When she tells us about them, explaining what they do and why they do it, she is an outsize bore. I read the book with an irritated persistence, unable to discard it, and often brilliantly rewarded.
Miss Ann Faber makes her debut with a sound and sensitive and well-made novel. I stress well-made. Even though here and there the joinery shows, it is a joy to find a young novelist who sees the need for shape and structure. Fanny, a junior typist, is picked by her employer to do special work for a reason the employer hardly realises. It is because she resembles a dead girl who might be alive if Miss Kempe had once been kinder. Presently Fanny sees the dead girl's ghost. Complications arise, in the office and outside, but the good steady young man who loves Fanny is not to be put off. This summary is unjust to a full and sincerely imaginerl story, lit by intuition and good sense, which has the extra quality of making one feel that one would like to meet its author.
Miss Cicellis's novel is remarkable, but shows her to less advantage than her short stories. It has the sort of light one gets at intervals on a wet day in the mountains, cold and a little unreal. The characters, mostly young people, all talk alike, and very oddly. " Gone, my curiosity," says one when he has lost interest in something. A girl says to a man : " I looked hard, I watched all your movements closely, I un- • earthed all your motives with a sharpness I don't usually have, quickly and nimbly, like a rat. I saw you sit ... with all your extra- ordinary cunning lying forgotten and bare on your face."
A queer, dream-like book from an original, odd talent.
Mrs. Thirkell is in triumphant form in her latest return to Barset- shire and its rituals. She is one of the subtlest of social historians, in that the reader can seldom be quite sure which of the county values she endorses and which she is laughing at. Sharp-eyed, agreeably malicious, and, underneath it all,.still youthfully romantic, she holds almost every kind of reader, some all the more strongly because against their will.
The one great service an editor can do to Thomas Wolfe Mr. Geismar has done, which is to select from him. Volcanic in his emotions, Wolfe poured forth everything he felt and heard and saw and smelt and wanted. Like Whitman, he longed to include the whole world. The general reader will appreciate his energy and his frequent flashes of genius more easily here than in the vast continent
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