Fiction
Fenella. By Margery Nugent. (Faber. 7s. 6d.) The Sampler. By Richard Church. (Dent. 75. 6d.) Aunt Auda's Choir. By Humphrey Pakington. (Chatto and
Win
9s-)
The Tapestry Men. By Alice Buchan. (Hodder and Stoughton. 81.
IN her recently published essay English Novelists, Elizabeth Bo suggests the contemporary novel "takes a poetic trend." She a "Is this because we live in an age of ideas and passions, in individual destinies count for less, in which people take less co from their surroundings because those surroundings chan e f day to day?" The suggestion is exciting and the question p rti But how are such novels to be judged and what are the stand by which we can measure their achievements? Can pattern • take the place of character? Or rhythm supersede narrative? poetic novel must have more qualities than these if it is eve produce the "lasting essentials" of human experience. Pa gives the novel a certain formal quality which gives pleasure to reader, and rhythm can induce exquisite effects. But both have ' dangers, for the pattern may impose a too rigid conception rhythm may fatigue, or even worse, bore the reader. Miss Nu: in her first novel, Fenella, has braved these problems with siderable skill and taste. Her pattern is quickly and sharply cated: "She sat up in bed and hugged her knees ecstaticall.y as realised the scenes to come. They would not have a holiday, would be the usual lessons and walk, but there would be parkin
tea, and after tea there would be a glorious bonfire and yet glorious fireworks. Yes, the day had really come! Everything '
ready. Frances had made a great batch of parkin, the ho crowned by a lolling Guy, was piled up at the end of the g and Daddy had come home rather late last night, bringing 3 parcel which could be nothing but fireworks. Fireworks! of a large, but motherless family, the child progresses trough eventful day; which contains far more for her (and for us) the pattern at first suggests. We are given a touching andsat' tory evocation of a bygone age in this unsentimental account small girl's hopes, fears and experiences, though less than iv' four hours of time elapse. Miss Nugent makes use of life's un dictability which is, perhaps, the secret of her success. Her charming, and is warmly commended to those interested children, family life, or the lavish period before the world war
Mr. Church, too, has similar problems of pattern and rhythm. The conception of The Sampler is far less simple than the title suggests. Its framework is too rigid; we are told too much, too early, in the brief time scheme. The de&gn has for its centre The Woman of Samaria, for corners The Blue Sky, The Young Tree,
The Grassy Foreground, and The The Water. The period is November, 1940. Two sisters, spinsters, are living in a remote country cottage in Hertfordshire. Martha Woodman makes a meagre and uncertain livelihood for her sister and herself out of a poultry farm. Mary, almost crippled with arthritis, is an exquisite needle-woman, who has been commissioned to make the sampler. On her forty-fifth birthday comes the news of a legacy to them both, which means freedom from penury and anxiety. Martha goes to London to see the family solicitor. She arranges to stay in a small Bloomsbury hotel. Among the otl.er guests are three people, a woman and two men, whose lives and problems are symbolised each in a corner of the sampler. That evening there is a terrible
• air-raid on London and the hotel is hit. The two women are in the underground shelter. Next morning a band of rescue workers arrive and help the two men complete the job on which they have been at work all night. The women are saved and the problems of all resolved. Mr. Church uses coincidence rather wildly : even in these days of intensive publicity it teems far from likely that in the space of forty-eight hours, people in York, Tunbridge Wells, Cambridge and London should become aware of Mary Woodman's skill with the needle. This makes a too clumsy rhythm, knocking like a harsh familiar fist, demanding recognition instead of can- vassing sensibility. Characters must be convincing; in this lies their sole reality. If they are cut to fit a precise set of circumstances, they often become types; a fatal flaw, their proper function is lost, they no longer live, but merely exist to demonstrate the author's interest in technique. Mr. Pakington's novel suffers from similar defects, though he is much less ambitious than Mr. Church. Aunt Auda's Choir lets time and custom :mpose a gentle pattern, presenting few problems to the reader. Aunt Auda herself is that familiar tyrant of English fiction, the rich spinster; with numerous and subservient relations, in whos.z lives and affairs she delights to meddle. The book opens on the turn of this century and ends in 1940, some time after her demise. The first two-thirds of the book are the most interesting, for the author does recover many echoes of the lively past. Its progress becomes more serious and less ironic, more formal and less convincing. Aunt Auda outlives her period, becoming a harm- less ghost of her former self. The moderns are all too much of a type. They don't compel either animosity or admiration. One longs for the bad old days when Kensington was Kensington, large families and mahogany furniture-a matter of course. But the mood has passed and only melancholy remains.
The Tapestry Men takes pattern from history; the vivid and turbulent years between 1385 and 1425, which were but prelimin- aries to the Wars of the Roses. Miss Buchan's novel begins with Richard of Bordeaux and ends shortly after the death of Henry V. The story has the merit of following history fairly closely, though the characters are burdened by the confusion of their period. Anne of Bohemia, the most attractive of the many historical figures, died of the plague in 1394. And neither Edmund Mortimer, nor his servant Adam, can restore the balance of tenderness to a chronicle
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