Fiction

By L. A. G. STaorm.

7s. 6d.)

THE first third, perhaps even the first half, of The Twilight Age is first-rate, or as near as makes no matter. Then Mr. Prophett goes wrong in a way not uncommon to inexperi- enced novelists who have the real thing in them. A novelist needs a philosophy as much as does a poet, but he has to

be more careful of it. He can easily get too much of it into his work. The first part of Mr. Prophett's story, where the philosophy is implicit in the situation and the characters,

is, as I have said, admirable ; but I should not be surprised if he himself preferred the later part, in which the characters talk and talk, and talk, making laboriously plain all that was -plain before. Ernest Croft, a schoolmaster, who has inherited

a sum of money, is sitting in a café on one of the South Sea Islands. He has gone there to meet once more his friend Hammon, an American who had married Croft's sister Grace. As he sits at the table, he thinks over all that has brought him where he is. He and Grace loved one another very deeply. This love, plus his own sensitiveness, had come between him and Hilda, who married the safe and dependable Bob. When Grace met Hammon and fell in love with him, Ernest forced the romance by obviously resigning himself to do without her. The marriage was not a success. Grace loved Ernest and England too well. After a couple of years she came over with her husband, and both begged Ernest to come to America and live with them. He, however, was tired of living vicariously. He wanted to find his inner self. - A- trip to Germany and the innocent love of Anna did not help, and when he came back to England it was too late. Grace had died. Ernest, sentimental and self-centred as ever, still pursued shadows, coming at last to meet Hammon in the hope that he might draw comfort from the robust nature of his friend. The Hammon he found, however, was not the man he knew, but a middle-aged materialist :

"I have been married. I am old, much older than you, Ernest. You've been living at one age for years. I've moved on. Your life has been like the scenes of a Shakespeare play, each called Another Part of the Wood, each- on the same stage, always the same place. Your life is still a dream, mine is a material existence with all the fresh-painted dream-stuff chipped off. I've lived it all suddenly. I am old now. I want to settle. I don't want any more of it, any more battling as I fought with you and Grace. I want to settle, to recover myself."

The Twilight Age is an uncommonly interesting first novel, raising high hopes for its author. He has made only one vital mistake, the mistake of over-labouring his point, and allowing theory to take charge of narrative. He has ideas, he can think, and his writing, especially in descriptive passages, is subtle and distinguished.

Three the Drive is a book to take in small doses, not at a

gulp. It is the noisiest, heartiest story I have come across for many a long day. The` Otways, offspring of a London University professor whose chief recreation is swearing at them, come to live between the Boomers (one daughter, Tessy) and the Tenants (one son, John). They throw things at one another, dance on the roof, act Shakespeare, and all talk at once, more than making up for their father's lack of pedantry. They stage a grand performance of The Bing, to gramophone records, and compel the neighbourhood to assist. Then they move away, to Oxford, leaving the Boomers and Tarrants (and the reader) completely out of breath : and -Tessy and John, .relieved, fall into one another's arms and live more decorously ever after. The book is inventive, madly high-spirited, and often amusing. Here is a sample of the young Otways' conversation :

'"All the names in the Otway family are preposterous,' the boy Toby announced to Mrs. Boomer, glowing up at her with large bright eyes and a face like a freckled dog-rose. '1 don't so much mean those given to us by our parents in baptism, though no doubt those are sufficiently open to criticism, but those adopted in common, and I might say, vulgar parlance. My eldest sister's name is really, for instance, Penelope, but we always call her Penny or Twopence or any other old small change. My second sister is properly called Saskia, after a girl in a Russian novel any mother was reading just before her confinement—my mother's, -I mean, not my sister's—but we always call her Sackie or just more simply, Bags. I myself was christened by the thoroughly respectable name of Thomas, but am invariably known as Toby after a disreputable chap in a play you might have heard of, °allot( Twelfth Night. Antoinette—that's Antoinette there, that ugly little girl opposite, with the big mouth and eyes and hair all round her ears, though you wouldn't think it, would you ?—she's called Tongs or Pincers or Handsaw or any other tool you think of at -the moment. As for that dear. sweet -little sister of mine sitting next to Tongo, she's Miriam, but she's commonly called Jenny or Brandy or Whisky, or any other alcoholic beverage, for reasons quite beyond =any explanation. That's Snuggers, between Penny and Sackie, garming her face round with a jemmy spoon. There's another one upstairs in the nursery. He's Horrors, he is I Regular Chamber of Horrors, the whole of it—isn't it—this family ? ' "

• If you like this, you will find plenty more of it in Three She Drive.

• Venetian Blinds is by far the best of-Miss Mannin's books -that I have read. There are thousands and thousands of people living lives just like the Pendricks', in long rows of houses with venetian blinds and ferns in the front room window. Stephen, frustrated- in his ambitions by. the need to earn a living, marries Alice, who is in service as his mother was. Stephen's father, a van driver, comes from a hearty family that does not trouble about being "common." His mother, on the other hand, is house-proud and heavily burdened with views upon gentility. Stephen and his young sister Elsie go to the council school and indulge in forbidden - pastimes with their friends. In due time they both go to work in the city, where Stephen begins as a clerk on twenty-five shillings a week. In reaction from a sordid affair with Dorothy, he attaches himself to Mabel, who is even primmer than his mother. This does not suit him, and he falls for the more spontaneous Alice, housemaid to the advertising agent in whose firm both he and Elsie are now working. It all comes to the same thing in the end— fretful domesticity in a semi-detached villa. Elsie, a good- time girl, gets herself into trouble, and, realizing bitterly that she cannot have everything, thinks herself fortunate that the man is rich and wants to marry her. Such are the bare outlines of a long story in which every detail receives careful attention. It is, however, more than a careful accumulation of detail. Rent problems, scullery sink, fortnight's holiday at a seaside boarding house in the summer, Stephen's longing to be a landscape gardener, Alice's unreason• ed jealousies, Elsie's slowly maturing philosophy, are conveyed with equal realism and equal skill. '

God's Little Acre is interesting, lively, and off the beaten track. Its best-drawn character is Ty Ty, head of the family, a Georgia' farmer, who keeps himself and his sons busy crazily digging for gold instead of attending to more profitable work. He does not have altogether an easy time. "This here now squabbling over women has got to stop on my land," is one of his mottoes, but it is exceedingly difficult to enforce, for Rosamond, Jill Darling, and the rest are, to say the least, irregular in their relations with the opposite sex. The final scene, where poor *Ty Ty labours Ineffectually to prevent the shooting, is pathetic and moving. I had better add, I am afraid, that Mr. Caldwell's vigorous story is unsuited for family reading.

The Amite and Eve is the third of Mrs: Jo van Anuners Kuller's books to be translated into English :

"' Why not?' she (Kitty, the mannequin) snapped in her old defiant manner. - As long as nu young and pretty and keep down my weight ? It's uncommonly nice to be always well dressed. Quite an interesting job if you can keep out of the jealousy and spite ; every day something important happens. Sober Dutch people like you and Han have no notion of the sort of life that goes on at Panatelles. You get mad about expensive pretty frocks and can't live without them, it's like drink, or drugs. II you live in such a great dress concern you begin to think fashion is the most important thing in the world. All the rich fanciful clients live for it, their whole life is taken up by frocks, coats, and hats, silk underclothes, furs and jewels."

The story is primarily concerned with a young and intelligent married woman's difficulties in -attending both to her children and to her job, but to many readers the most interesting parts of it will be the glimpses it gives into the world suggested in the foregoing quotation.