Fiction
Meeting on the Shore. By Robin Estridge. (Peter Davies. 8s. 6d.)
COME, for once, behind the scenes with the reviewer. The parcel of books, solid, secure and, one cannot help feeling, sound, has arrived and sits waiting for you on the table in the hall. How many times in the past has one seen it sitting there ; how many times has one rushed excitedly towards it with the carving knife—some- how always the nearest to hand-wand slashed with enthusiasm at the string, forced back the stiff, carefully-folded, brown paper as a wrestler overpowers his opponent, and disclosed the succulent books, gleaming and new-smelling in their bright jackets, the thick white mass of their pages resting between the boards like the fillings of very rich cakes. Few moments in life are more perfect. Just as every drunkard forgets his last hang-over and every parent of a new-born child forgets that this is how human beings have always started, so the reviewer forgets miraculously each pre- vious disappointment and plunges eagerly, excitedly, into each newly- opened parcel of books. Let us not be niggardly. The books in our present parcel make as brave a show as any we have seen, and that, in these days, is not a small thing. Reverently, reluctantly we begin to turn them over. Not Necessarily for Publication by Stephen McKenna, with its yellow and blue lettering on a luscious creamy pink falls easily into the hand. The title has what advertisers might call a negative appeal, but as we open the book the most exciting smell in the world driftt off the pages. We note that Mr. McKenna has written more than forty other novels. A mad impulse makes us begin to read the first page: " Whether I live to complete these autobiographical notes will depend primarily on the hazard of a world-war that was fairly established in its fourth winter when I suspended work to deposit the lira instalment with my hankers.
" Whether any or all of than are ever published will depend primarily on . . ."
We note that Mr. McKenna's hero is called Sir Peter Rainham, Bart., and decide to give the book a fair chance later on.
The next book we pick up gives us a shock before we ever open it. For there on the cover of Mr. Ghisalberti's impressive 768-pager is Mr. Fredric March in all his Gainsborough trappings as Christopher Columbus himself. Remembering that Pride and Prejudice too has been a Book of the Film we decide to return to Mr. Ghisalberti when we have swallowed a few of our prejudices about this particular film. Mr. Tabori's book will certainly earn a place in our review, for he is a writer whom we have at times admired. With a whoop of delight we notice that nestling in the middle of our parcel all this time has been a new Raymond Chandler. We suspend our function as a reviewer and carry him off to a deck-chair to read him in three hours dead. Mr. Chandler has three hours off you with the speed and precision with which his hero Philip Marlow has a knife and a Luger off an ugly customer in a boarding-house. That is to say he has the three hours before you know yoU've started, just as he had the knife off the customer before you realised that he'd just had a Luger off him too. Remembering sadly that in a fiction review we are meant to be concerned with " important " literature, we decide to exclude Chandler. But it is difficult to suppress a subversive thought that any man who can so effectively compel one to read his book, even though it is only about an improb- able hard-boiled Hollywood where sleeping men sprout ice-picks from the backs of their necks, must have a real literary quality.
Georgette Heyer, of course, we know too. She is a sort of Ray- mond Chandler at the other end of the scale. Her Regency story of the beautiful country rector's daughter who goes to London and takes the town and Mr. Beaumaris by storm is also the mixture as before—phaetons, flounces, faro and a happy ending in nice Propor- tion. There seems little point in reviewing such a book. Those who have read Miss Heyet's other books will find Arabella 'delight- ful. Those who haven't won't dream of reading this one, for if it was the sort of thing they liked they would have discovered Miss Heyer long ago.
But misgiving sets in as we notice that we have only one book left unexamined in the parcel, with only Mr. Tabori definitely awarded a place in the review. Hurriedly we check on Mr;Tabori's Uneasy Giant. A conventionally framed story of a young French- American in Paris with literary ambitions at the end of the last century. Famous names dragged in and given a smattering of life— Zola, Dreyfus, Anatole France and the rest. The Weakest possible flavour of Maupassant's Bel-Anti. The inevitable Two Women In His Life. The years roll by, comes Success, an episode among African leopard-men, a Third Woman and the 1914 war. An undistinguished book but professional Yes, it will pass. But what of `Mr. McKenna ? He surely must be professional too, for has he not written forty other novels ? Alas, in his tedious account of the young baronet with the broken back steaming his sententious way through the flotsam of events of the last war at the helm of a weekly review there is no trace of polish, only the glibness of a no particularly old club bore. Sc one's instincts on reading that firer paragraph, like nearly all such instincts, were sound.
Those which tarred Mr. Ghisalberti however with the Gam- borough brush were less so. True,-there is a certain heaviness about this careful, thorough account of Christopher Columbus's life which could easily degenerate into the fatty waste of the film, but on the whole it is just a sober' history in the modem 'idiom 'for' those tvh(, hive to have their history_in some sort. of idiom or not at all.
And so we arrive at Mr. Estridge's Meeting on the Shore. A few pages arc enough to assurers that he is trying to write a good book that he is interested in human personalities because they are more than the thickness of a page deep, and that although he has only written two other books he uses the English language with greater craftsmanship than some who have written. forty. And for all thi, we are grateful even though there is about the book a slightly fetbl..: quality. He has arranged his two young people out of line with the world—the young man back from the war who is trying to escape from the post-war, and the young girl imprisoned by her love for her mother in a sleepy Cornish village—with some care and success, but it is as if the effort had been too much for him The resolution of their problems has a disappointing touch of trite- ness, and for one moment one has an uneasy feeling that Mr. Estridge has been trying something a little too ambitious for him, that he should stick to the level oT the magazine story. Second thoughts mainly about his heroine, .persuade one that one is wrong.
Oh, yes, ample material 'for a review even if one or two books may find their way into it that have no right to be there. But how different, how sadly different, is the slow melancholy movement with which one picks up one's pen from the dash with which one
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