Fiction
The People Immortal. By Vassili Grossman. (Hutchinson. 7s. 6d.) The Barricades. By Philip Toynbee. (Putnam. 8s. 6d.) THESE two titles suggest battle, and the " jtist cause " which haunts the complicated heroes of Arthur Koestler's books; but whereas the battle is present indeed in Mr. Grossman's book, and the ideal, expressed and attested in blood and simple bravery, no question, no debate, but only the certainty and the generous, necessary courage in Mr. Toynbee's we look in vain not only for those values which were historic certainties even before Russia and the R.A.F. so magnificently endorsed them, but also—without much enjoyment— for those peculiar, personal values which superficially the author presumes upon, and which—if they did in fact emerge in the text— would perfectly justify its gloze of impudence and dreary knowingness.
But let us take the Russian uplift first. The People Immortal is a forthright tale of the Red Army in the field, in South Russia in the autumn of 1941, and although it is a very manly story, full of movement and dealing professionally and clearly with military events, there is—I suppose inevitably—a ring of righteousness about it
which a little mars its quality as narrative, the rhetoric, hot and honest in praise of personal integrity and valour, running over sometimes into preachings and generalised apostrophies which are out of place. But the book is true at its heart, and it celebrates Russia and Russian soldiers with vitality, and out of knowledge of war conditions; characters, situations and landscape are really alive in its pages, and the whole thing is done efficiently and movingly. If Mr. Vassili Grossman, who is a Russian writer and war correspondent, wrote this novel directly into English himself, it is a very remarkable performance in a language not his own; but if it is a translation, that also has been better done than is customary, and the name of the translator might surely be allowed to appear on wrapper or title-page.
Mr. Toynbee's novel belongs to the kind that must either be first-rate or else thrown in the waste-paper basket. The Barricades is not first-rate; and in so far as it is " smart," which is always a fairly awkward thing to be in letters, it sports, alas, the smartness of yesterday, or the day before even—the surest way of all of being dowdy. It is, or seems, a very long book about a schoolboy who in 1937 runs away from school to try to get to Spain with the International Brigade, and about a schoolmaster who gets chucked from his job, for drink and impudence, and hangs about London, Paris and the South of France, acting as some kind of washed-away Mephistopheles both to his own hardly perceptible alter ego and to the schoolboy. The latter gets to Spain in the end, and the schoolmaster takes a job in Paris—but first of all we are asked to sit in at an exposition of the conflict between two generations, that which was young in the bad, loose twenties and that which came up in the moralising, anxious, angry thirties. We are asked, through the experiences and reactions of Rawlins and young Markham, to examine the barricades of spirit, purpose and desire, which hold these two generations apart and render them useless to each other. This is a good theme, but—like any other—it stands or falls in presentation by the significance or not of its exponents, and it seems to me that Mr. Toynbee has failed to give any authority, comic, tragic or symbolic, to either of his .leading characters. And if that is so, it is too much to ask us to follow them so very closely, from drink to drink and from pretentious party to still more pretentious private argument, learning only as we go that they are dull, vain exhibitionists, forever repeating themselves and never being really
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