New NoNiels

Christina. By Claude Houghton. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) Old Soldier. By Frederick Niven. (Collins. 7s. 6d.)

Hester and Her Family. By H. W. Freeman. (Chatto and

Windus. 8s. 6d.)

Jamaica Inn. By Daphne du Maurier. (Gollancz. 78. (3d.) Agents and Patients. By Antony Powell. (Duckworth. 7s. 6d.) Three of the Three Million. By Leonhard Frank. (Bodley

Head. 7s. 6d.)

SINCE hope springs eternal, every reviewer opens each new book as if it were a literary masterpiece. As he reads he finds, nine times out of ten, that it isn't. But it may be good enter-

tainment, so he rapidly adjusts his standards. I read Mr. Claude Houghton's Christina with a great deal of pleasure once I had managed to make this necessary adjustment. Brand's wife, Christina, is dead and Brand is overwhelmed with a sense of loss : he finds in her locked desk an address- book and a bundle of letters to an unnamed lover. Brand swears to find the lover and the address-book is -his clue. Guided by it, he begins to do the rounds of her friends. This is a highly ingenious and original device : for we now 'begin to see Christina's life unfolded : see how different she was from her 'husband : how miserable she must have been, who loved the .company of all these ne'er-do-wells and artists (good sketches here) while tied to a beefy, ambitious, wealthy business-man. At the same time 'Brand's soul is revealed, and we are kept on tenter-hooks by his jealous craving for revenge. The end of it and the significance of that end it would be unfair to reveal. Of its kind, Christina is able, novel and clever—a most entertaining fiction. Those who desire a novel midway between realism and sentiment will find Old Soldier very pleasant reading. By comparison with Christina it is uneventful, but by comparison with life it is a simple and natural record of the kind of things that do happen. The old soldier is a silver-polisher in an Edinburgh jeweller's shop : he loves his wife and his bairns, he loves a wee drop now and again, he loves his work, he

respects his employers, he is interested in his -colleagues,. and,

he rejoices in Edinburgh—which city is so tenderly evoked by Mr. Niven that his novel is as good as a hundred pounds of advertising to the Scottish touring industry. The old man goes about his business, he goes on holidays, he kisses the maid (a rare treat) when he helps wind the clocks in the Edinburgh houses, he goes on a tipple, and then he loses his little wife and emigrates to Nova Scotia. It is all very charming, and effortless, and the sentimental Scots will weep over it and feel better men.

The reviewer has to do some delicate adjustment of values as he reads through Mr.-Freeman's romantic-realistic novel of

the domestic life of a 'poor Suffolk girl between 1900 and the present day. Heredity is his strong suit, so we begin with Hester's father (with a glimpse of the paternal grandfather

thrown in for better measure—the measure is rather too`free in this book). She is a poorhouse orphan, illegitimate, and has a hard childhood. A parson's son is the father of her first

child ; a thatcher the father of the second : a gambling pedlar lives with her when the thatcher abandons her for religion, and with him she is romantically happy and has two more children. All this first part is satisfyingly picturesque ; we feel that the background is real in its rich colour, and that the life of these people, though not particularly crisp in outline—a little too easily typical and romantically rural—is genuine in a general kind of way. We then leap forward to the " family " of the title. Jenny, who is sent to Cambridge, has romantic (and other) adventures in Italy ; Fred becomes a jockey ; Phyllis runs away to join a circus. Again the measure is easy—no compression—little selection—small detachment. Hester sees them all gathered around her at the end and the whole rounds itself to a happy conclusion. From the point of view of literature—dare a reviewer have such a point of view very often ?—it is the kind of novel that Tchekov said smug people like to read. From the point of view of the general reader it will satisfy all the pleasant expectations evoked by one of the most simply alluring dust-jackets I have seen on a novel.

These three and the next book, Jamaica Inn, make one realise how high the standard of entertainment has become in the modern novel. I do not believe R. L. S. would have

been ashamed to have written Jamaica Inn, with its smugglers, wreckers, wild moors, storms, its sinister inn, misplaced confidences, pretty and gallant heroine, and romantic love- story. Joss Merlyn, the inn-keeper, is in the good:old tradition

of Simon Legree cum Long John Silver, and his brow-beaten wife has had many prototypes in similar fiction ; she says to Mary, the heroine who has come to the mysterious inn :

" Sometimes they come by night and from the window above the porch you will hear footsteps, and voices and knocking at the door. . . . You must lie in bed and put your fingers in your ears . . . for if you came to guess half of what I know, your hair would go grey, Mary, as mine has gone, and you would tremble in your speech and weep by night, and all that lovely careless youth of yours would die."

After that there is no need to say more. There is here all the melodrama that one can desire—and let nobody say " It is an old fashion." The old fashion was good.

The remaining two books are for more sophisticated readers. Mr. Powell is wittily facetious in his satire on modern journal- ists, picture-dealers, and cinema folk. His " story " whirls around a young man with more money than brains whom the sharks fleece while they can. He wanted to see life, and they show it to him, at a price. But I read Agents and Patients about ten days ago : I know I chuckled a good deal over it : and not another thing do I remember, except that as I read it I came on this 'quotation in Maurois' Etudes Anglaises and applied it mentally to Mr. Powell—" A humorist who does not see that his ridiculous characters live very seriously is the dupe of his own egoism."

The remainder of the quotation might, annotate Herr Leonhard Frank's book, Three of the Three Million—" The idealist who does not see the ridiculous in everything is the dupe of his sympathies and abstractions." For this picture of the adventures of three German unemployed, in Germany and South America, is in every way real and impressive as long as Herr Frank will let himself grin at them, and it becomes

depressingly lacking in what one might call the general suavity of life when he gives all his sympathies to their sorrows. I should call this book a document rather than a novel. (What would one not give for such a document out of, say, the period after 1815 ?) But as for a novel, in love as in literature it is good advice—" Never give all the heart, for love will hardly seem worth thinking of . . . if it seem certain." Herr Frank is too sympathetic. Mr. Powell is too wild.

Sratw O'FAoLin4