FiCtiOft Mixed Adventures
Rif : an Unvarnished History. By Gordon Daviot. (Bean. is. 6c1.) , . .
IT is almost a shock to find sleuths of the soul and its sins, like Miss Clemence Dane and Miss Helen Simpson, con- templating mere bodily murder and presenting a new super- detective, with Enter Sir John. The magnificent actor- manager, Sir John Saumarez, who determines to show Major Traill of Scotland Yard and others that his flair is as acute in real life as on the stage, is an agreeable and gently humorous personage. The crime is a good enough crime from a pro- fessional point of view ; and 'Marcella's impasse looks suffi- ciently. hopeless. - (One feels dubiously that even the_ police might have evinced enough interest in her dazed head to discover an unexplained contusion on it.) Sir John, howeirer, is very ingenious, and-turns the flashlight on the real criminal in a characteristically dramatic way. The chase, with the two taxis, is breathless enough_ for the cinema. But the passages that stay in the memory art those in which the authors pause to probe the weaknesses of humanity. That jury-scene,-for example How appallingly familiar are those processes of reasoning, or unreasoning, rather ; and how it makes us dread that great British institution, trial by jury ! The flame of pure excitement which burns so high in such recent achievements as The Prisoner in the Opal, or The Cluny Problem, or even The White Crow, is scarcely kindled in this experiment in sleuthdom. Yet it is a skilful story, neatly concluded, and thronged with sharply observed figures. _ .
A more intense excitement we might also expect from Mr. Compton Mackenzie's account of The Three Couriers. Mr. Mackenzie of the many moods and manners has returned to the Greekish city where Captain Roger Waterlow grappled with_ the comic and sinister interludes of British espionage in a neutral but suspect country during the. War. At the end of Extremes Meet, that much-enduring. hero was left tearful with joy because the Q-ship of his heart's desire had been offered at last. Now he reappears, bitterly detained because nobody can be got to replace him ; so, while, his lost calque sails silken seas to tempt. emergent funnels, he tries desperately _to extract from. German mails evidence of the complicity of an ambiguous court. Two couriers he tracks, only to lose them through the supercilious languors of a diplomacy beyond his ken. The third, ludicrously .seized, only reveals how important was the second. The impression of the scene is vividly rendered—rose-violet light and divine moonset over unspeakable squalor, strange Levantine types like the Wizard, and Missoukian, and the loathly Phix, astonishing intervening women like Lysane, and Colombina, and Euphrosyne, absurd sensational spies nicknamed Dryden and Milton and Tennyion, diplomats and representatives of every degree. Waterlow, cynically considering the delirious little pother of these creatures at the conclusion, remains a sympathetic character ; and the reader acquires some queer experience of extremely mixed races.
In Sleeveless Errand, Miss Norah C. James proves that she can write, for she does- record sensations, if not ideas, with an intensity which is wasted on her theme. She describes the last hours of kneunitie-woman,_bent on suicide because her worthless loiter has Thresiii her- Mief7 Paula meets a young architect who is also tired. of existence, having just realized that his wife is faithless. The two drink and talk at various haunts of Paula's " crowd " ; and drive to Hove. Finally, having persuaded her companion that promiscuity is only " a point of view," and that he should return to his wife, she drives a motor over a cliff. Evidently she believes
that all women belonging to her '" wartime-worker" generation should do likewise. Certainly her companions, as seen and heard at various cafés, drink, talk, and mechanically caress, with a monotonous, meaningless profanity which is too stupid to shock, but which inflicts ape rt neuralgia of boredom.
Paula may murmur plaintive about her " complexes," and her rotten war-generation." She and her companion, one thinks,dre obiriouslyso drunk that their words are irresponsible. Without imagination, without wit, without emotion, without decorative effect, without even desire, these figures have no tragic value, and are quite as useless for a novel as they are for reality. The beginning and end of this book are incisively stated ; and it 'is a pity that Miss James considers creatures so futile to be representative of any generation.
Mr. Eden Phillpotts is not really at his best in Tryphena ; and the somewhat stubborn heroine who begins as a foundling and is claimed at sixteen by her father, the local landowner, hardly seems to us so marvellous, a, creature , as to Leonard, the farmer's son, who regards her with a mystic adoration. But it is always pleasant to wander in Mr. Phillpotts' familiar country, with its apple-scents, amber streams, mists of blue- bells in the woods; and long lines of ploughed land ; and to watch Tryphena's hands dance _over the bobbins that weave the butterflies in Honiton lace. The conversations and descriptions are very leisurely :. the racy and juicy qualities of Devonshire speech are as welcome as ever.
to a very different world belongs the " unvarnished
Iliittiry. -7' of Tiff, which arrests, and disturbs. The core of this book is a throbbing human pity ; but Mr. Gordon Daviot has also the story-teller's art, and " unvarnished does not mean " dreary." " Kif," the farmhouse boy who enlists at fifteen because he has the stirred heart of the great adventurers, who 'endures the war- uncrushed because its moments of fear and ecstasy answer his need, becnmes extraordinarily actual and lovable. Dropped by his friends, swindled, astounded, the inexperienced, life-loving Kif finds hiniself unwanted after the War and is succoured only by an did comrade who turha'niit to be an agineable 'crook. Life is dramatic ; life, in its way, seems innocent, when Kif seems merely to miss a step, and so comes to the gallows-tree. Ingenuous, pleased, with a genius for happiness and a fidelity to any brave captain,. Kif, whom society used as a_ child in its wars, and then deliberately threw away, swings out in the dark. For high qualities as well as base may betray you to a shameful end. This is a most moving and remarkable novel.
RACHEL ANNAND TAYLOR.
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