Fiction
Underdogs
THERE is no common denominator that will reconcile these four books. A gulf separates the spark of genius in M. Istrati from the absence of it in the other three books on this list,
as if they were documents merely, though they are, in fact, much more than that. Yet, by comparison, they seem meritricious and to lack some vital breath.
The first book is the shortest, the least ambitious, and perhaps because of it the most reussi. For some time it has been evident that Istrati is in the direct line of succession to Maxim Gorki, not only as a writer but in his politics, and that he is identifying himself in the same way with the oppressed and outcast. But whereas Mr. Hanley's sympathies, profound as they are, seem in the end, because moulded to violence and conflict, detached and laboured, those of Istrati are fresh, upwelling and a strong call to action. Nobody can have read Vers L'Autre Flamme and felt anything but admiration for an honesty which so wholeheartedly attacked
everything the author had thought he stood for.
The Bitter Orange Tree is the story of two boys and a girl
in a town on the shore of the Danube. Against a background of river, sky and mean streets torn up for pipelines, the rivalry and friendship of the boys, their love for the girl, pursues a tortured path to a tragic end that, extravagant as it may be, has a sense of inevitability which forces the reader
to accept it as he might not so well accept many a less startling denouement. There is no weakness or hesitation in the telling of this tale. It has a morning freshness as of a younger, friendlier race, like every previous book by this author. How different in comparison is Mr. Hanley's book. The characters are all underdogs and inarticulate because of it and they move in the narrow circle of their ships and obsession, under the powerful searchlight of Mr. Hanley's talent. For talent it is, though the result comes to us as something frus-
trated, stopped short. There is too much power in the worst sense in Mr. Hanley's work, too wilful a use of strong situations, the strong words of inarticulate men, set against a background of war, jealousy and destruction, told with admirable art. In a sort of way these men live, but as it were to illustrate a theme. It may be that in their lives, that is all the life such men have, and that Mr. Hanley's stories are the exact transcription of that death in life, but such a solution must always be inacceptable to the civilized reader, conscious of his own responses which are not such responses. Inevitably these stories must as a result seem unreal to us. So far, all Mr. Hanley's work has suffered from this defect. Not that it is overstatement, for Mr. Hanley restrains himself with exquisite tact, and the backgrounds teveal clearly that we have here a writer of no mean talent, but the situations are too strong, the emotions too strong, and the reader ends at last by feeling nothing.
The Trap, on the other hand, seems to have gone to another extreme. We know the sort of character it deals with very well indeed, but his doubts and hesitations, described too photographically, seem because of that fact amateurish and not of a nature to move us deeply. There is a vague prolixity in the hero and his entourage which, to say the least, is—in long passages of this very long book—tedious. Only occasionally does the book come alive, and, as in all war books, it is the actual war episodes that are the most living. The book is carefully docu- mented and its object " to give an impression of war as a whole in its cumulative effect and progress towards a human dibdck . . ." and " to bring out the peculiar difficulty with which thoughtful Englishmen, alone among the com- batants at the beginning of the War, were faced through having to decide for themselves upon the question of voluntary enlistment and the conflict which this problem of will and conscience might arouse in the minds of their womenfolk also " ; but all this does not justify its longueurs. Other books with less ambitious programmes have succeeded more economically in conveying all this. That the problem was a real one must be conceded, but stated as it is in this present instance it has neither the force of a treatise nor the true life of a novel.
The Golovlyov Family is a moving and realistic novel of life on a Russian estate before and after the liberation of the serfs. In it we are shown the last generation of a family of landowners, the men grown effete and flaccid, grouped about the tyrannical old lady who was their mother. Her life has been spent with no aim but to increase the family possessions from a few hundred to several thousand serfs, but in the process she sacrifices all those round her, sapping their wills and rendering them unfit to enter into their inheritance when it falls to them. It is a tragic story, deeply moving, and by means of the figures that pass through it, relentlessly depicts the Russia that so inevitably prepared the Revolution. The book is a classic in its own
country, and it is obvious why. J. RODEER.
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