A TRIANGLE.t
MR. BARING must be rather handicapped by his reputation for versatility : since the Industrial Revolution life has become so specialized that the man of many pies is inevitably suspected of having incompetent fingers. Poetry, drama, memoirs, the novel, painting, diplomacy, travel, languages : Mr. Baring has distributed his distinctive talent between the most valuable occupations of culture and the most intriguing activities of sophistication. A Triangle is so original in form and technical idea that one is tempted to call it an essay in the novel, rather than a novel. To load it with such a label, however, would certainly be doing it less than justice. When, in the collected works of a poet we come across a section entitled " Experiments in
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• Geoffery Castleton, Passenger. ByRichard Blakcr. Lo4don: Cape. Od.] T A Triangle. By Maurice Baring. 'Loudon; lielnemailb. 10s4 Iambic Measures," or some such, our defensible impulse is to skip it. The formal implications of Mr. Baring's novel are extremely interesting, but we have only to read it to be sure that it was not set in motion by any theory, technical, philo- sophic or attitudinarian. The plot is usual enough ; it is the manner in which its incidents, and the varying aspects of the participants, are released to our view that is important. The narrative is carried on by three witnesses, a solicitor, a doctor and a Jesuit Father, and each of these witnesses, though he unfolds only so much of the story as his position in it enables him to know, casts a particular light on one of the triangular characters—David Aston, and Dennis and Eileen Poynet. Thus the realism of a shared narrative (the most usual and satisfactory means, in everyday life, of " getting into possession of the facts " of an event) is con- veniently reinforced by the artistic device of giving each of the three narrators an especial interest in one of the three principal participants. Again, since the style of the narrative, consisting as it does of notes barely amplified from diaries, is so formal and straightforward, such an effect of logic must, in turn, be enlivened by some twist of technique which shall stimulate the imagination. Mr. Baring has met this diffi- culty with admirable skill by introducing into his tale an unmelodramatic, a convincingly casual element of suspense. The solicitor's narrative, in which Eileen Poynet is the pre- dominant personality, closes quite naturally on the query : " Dennis Poynet's death being apparently without complica- tions, why did Eileen break off her engagement with Aston ? " In Dr. Langthorne's notes the emphasis is on Poynet himself, and we are left with the doubt : " Was his death a natural one ? If not, what motive for. suicide can be discovered ? " Father Rushby's version, which informs us that Mrs. Aston, anxious for a reconciliation with her husband, visited Poynet when he was in a weak state of health, and persuaded him that Eileen was in love with Aston, explains Poynet's death if it does not settle the question of suicide. This uncertainty at the close of A Triangle will be distasteful to those who, continuously bewildered by the actual life around them, demand the solace of a cut-and-dried climax from everything they read : others will welcome it as the last touch of truth in Mr. Baring's ordered and sensitive presentment of his story.
BERTRAM HIGGINS.
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