New Novels
FOR a book of 542 pages, 26 of which have fortunately been left blank, I Shall Not Want is a slim volume ; but as a novel it is too long. The slimness and the pre-war price of the production are explained, urgently and at length, on an orange band, and also on the back of the wrapper ; perhaps they account for the astonishing readability of the book—a posi- tive innovation ; one can read both sides of the page at once. To ensure such economy the public, we are told, " must play the game " and not choose its literature by bulk.
Its weight, however, is about the chief merit of Mr. Norman Collins's novel. It is accurate, strict and large, like a bank. It is as proper and old-fashioned as a family business. It carries you along with a momentum like a landslide. Until nearly half-way through you cannot complain, you do not struggle. The morality of the thing—that money corrupts— is impressive, enticing ; one wants to believe it, vicariously to enjoy the hero's horrid theft, to wonder at his daring, to draw back and watch him take the consequences. He is a shop assistant, member of the dissenting sect of Amosite Baptists (no kind of reference is intended to any existing shop, firm, or religious body—yet the setting rings true as steel). The robbery he commits is discovered by the daughter of his victim ; she blackmails him into marriage and, worse still, desertion of the girl he loves. But two wrongs don't make a Mr. Right, and the prosperity which they achieve together is doomed—from about page 400 ; or earlier if, as we advise, you read between the lines to make out the writing on the wall.
The publisher predicts for this novel a vast success, which in a large way, at least, it deserves. It has, to a valuable
degree, the story-telling gift, the Midas touch of melodram combined with excellent realism, the moral certitude. The; is much to be said, at all times, for the inevitability of gradualness.
B. Traven, too, that most mysterious of authors, and one of the most straightforward of writers, is a story-teller born— and apparently little developed. The Death Ship and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre ate rattling good books. He can spin a tale, as the saying is, like nobody's business—like the business of nobody, that is, who is at all likely to read and revel in the elemental adventures he sets down so harshly on paper. We may be dead wrong ; perhaps the able- seamen, the lone prospectors, the trappers and the lumber- jacks read him. After all, his best yarn, The Death Ship, his publishers tell us, has been " published in 17 foreign editions "—among which, curiously enough, they include their own. And it is true that there is something faintly foreign about these re-issued and collected works of Traven, transla- tions or no. It doesn't in the least matter ; but it's there, slightly more noticeable than before. He is the cosmopolitan of the stokehold, the blinding canyon, and the wopden shack—so we may infer that the occasional strangene of his language is all right. The plain man has - the bulge on us in that direction ; it's his right to be exotic in his speech.
The Bridge in the jungle comes as a surprise ; it is essienti- ally different from his other novels ; while retaining their good qualities—colour, action, simplicity—it has added depth, less flamboyance and more sympathy. The story is direct to the point of terseness ; the telling of it is neither elaborate nor laconic, but built up to a pitch of wholehearted emotion by a rapid, relentless application of pure and subordinate strokes, like an impressionist painting. After two inexplicable false starts—as meaningless as a performer's perfunctory clearance of the throat—we plunge straight into a squalid, sun-scorched Central American village on the eve of a poor fiesta, during which a little Indian boy disappears. He has fallen off the dangerous bridge in the dark and is drowned. His body is located by black magic with a consecrated candle floating in the stream on a plank. The rest is lamentation, the decay of the small corpse, and funeral ceremony. The effect is horrible and pathetic ; we have been forced to witness a fatal accident—not a tragedy, just primitive anguish. Partly against his will, the reader has to experience something beyond dis- tress ; he is made to mourn. One may resent such com- pulsion, but cannot deny the novelist's power, which even where the writing becomes clumsy isn't obvious, but hidden and humane.
Comparison with The Bridge is clearly unfair to the second novel by the author of On the Night of the Fire ; but a re- viewer, reading books cheek by jowl, cannot avoid being influ- enced against an average novel by a better one. If he $oes, if he manages to regard each work quite separately orb its merits, he tends to come out in superlatives, the ailme of his trade. But as I am likely not to give Mr. Green's its due, I must say so, and myself wear the picket's pr est- ing sign, " This Column is Unfair to Authors." Though !The Sound of Winter contains a spectacular set-piece (a raging blizzard in the city) to focus the attention in the same way as the description of the fire in his first novel, I do not feel that Mr. Green has fulfilled the promise which on that occasion was generally accepted. His new story is steeped in violence and drama ; it is painstakingly observed, care has been devoted to the drawing of character and detail—but his people are bustling dummies and, as -a result, their relation- ship means little. The hero is a discharged clerk who saves himself from the fate of the underdog by the shrewdness and luck of his passion for gambling. His friend, an oafish revolu- tionary, he fails to save when their ambition leads to bank robbery ; they part, embittered first by jealousy over a woman, enemies now that a prison wall comes between them. On his way to success, the gambler narrowly escapes with his life from the blizzard, to find death waiting for him a little farther down the road on the day of the other's release from gaol, a day long expected. The Sound of Winter has certain distinct affinities with both I Shall Not Want and The Bridge in the jungle ; it stands above their- lowest common factor of narrative ability. But personally I plump for the jungle.
JOHN MARKS.
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