FICTION

By SATE O'BRIEN

78. 6d.)

Antonina, a story of contemporary life in Leningrad, is two distinct things. It is a flowing, adult novel in the good Russian tradition but also, underneath its alluring skirts, which are cunningly made to trail with life's reassuring carelessness,,

it is a moral tale as steady of intention as any of Miss Edge- worth's. This is, I suppose, the same'thing as saying that it is a very clever piece of propaganda—because the intelligent- novel reader, whatever his prejudices, will surely read it through- out, his sense of refreshment in good work making him forgetful or tolerant of the " message," which is neither more nor less than that in U.S.S.R. the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

As a novel it is satisfactory and memorable, and if for one leader at least it fails in the great essential of making its heroine seem as real or as well worth writing about as her background, friends and lovers, it does convey the inner and outer life of human beings and the changeful reality of streets and weather. It presents the adventures of Antonina from 1925, in which year,. aged sixteen, she is left orphaned and poor in Leningrad, until 1935, when, twice widowed, she is about to marry an Ogpu man Called Altus. She begins by being the sort of girl to whom things happen without her willing them—for instance, two lOveless marriages, a birth of a son, and the striking up of friendship with a group of serious citizens who take so much pains with her that they remake her in terms of Soviet Idealism ..and she ends up a shining example of citizenship, and an

impassioned, happy woman. (In the. concluding chapters the moral tale and the straightforward novel-make no secret at all of their two-in-oneness.) Many excellent and vivid passages

stand out in memory : young Antonina and her little girl friend

ai supper with the great actor on whom the former has a ",crush "; Antonina receiving her new-born son into her aims ; a vodka-lighted conversation between her and Zhenia, the young woman doctor, the first night they meet ; Antonina's

journey to Batoum to visit Altus whom she loves ; and all the passages which expose their immense and hardly uttered love. The life of Leningrad, the Russian sky, the as-yet-unharnessed Russian ability to drink tea all night, to quarrel and kiss, to smash things up, to give parties, confuse issues, sob and dream—: all are consolingly to be found in full traditional strength in this earnest Mandan book. Therefore, when we come on Speeches proving that it is right that sculptors should be made into power-house builders and scholars into social workers,- when we read of " freeing women from slavish labour in the home," when we find that characters who in the early pages of 4e book were pretty, silly flappers or strongly sexed, unhappy Wives turn up in the middle disguised as complacent motor-

engineers and " technicians," when we are asked to accept .Antonina's absurd temperamental volte-face over the Welfare Centre, and even when we read this comic statement : " If we haven't got power stations we haven't got freedom "—we are not really baffled. In fact we are cheered, for art has been showing us under the very nose of political theory that even in

Leningrad life is still intractable ; we have looked on while a good novelist unwillingly, perhaps unconsciously, blew an ideologist sky high. • It is a comforting sight and we go on our way smiling, grateful to Yuri Herman and his skilful translator, Stephen Garry.

- The English are also busy at present with moral tales. Mr.

C. Day Lewis is a poet of true distinction and a divot of the Mandan persuasion. In Starting Point he offers us his second novel. I have not read his first, The Friendly Tree, which has been much praised, but I am regrettably unable to find fictional significance in Starting Point. Were it the first work of an unknown young man, one could class it among the respectable and quite publishable " also-rans " which it is unnecessary to

read. But from Mr. Day Lewis ! It is the story of four young men who were in their last term at Oxford in the summer of

i926, the period of the General Strike. It traces their destinies- down to 1936—one to an insane accidental matricide and

saitide, one to a monastery, one to marriage, children .atacl success as a chemist, and one to the International Brigade in Spain and comradeship with the " workers " who " woad guide a new world struggling out of the womb." This is Anthony, chief of the four, and most beloved by the other three, His advance from rugby-playing and casual love- making to the spiritual starting point he has always desired is adthirable in moral intention, and here and there, where the poet/ flashes out for a strong phrase, quite moving, but as fiction the book fails—perhaps through some unmastered emhar- rassment in the author at standing too near to his theme. In any case, though the reader feels genuine goodwill towards Anthony and John in their tussles with life and conscience, their soliloquies are trite, and such as we have read too often before, their conversations are sometimes very embarrass, and their characters and emotions are straight out of stc;eIt, English stock. It is disappointing ; but off-hand, with 'the exception of Thomas Hardy, I can think of no major English poet who was also a good novelist, and obviously the poetic gift bears no necessary relevance to the obligations of fictional proSe which are not seriously attempted in this generotisfy intended moral tale. " The poet's inward pride, the certainty of power " are not here, as they most certainly are in Mr. Day Lewis's noble verse.

Mr. John Gloag moralises, too. Sacred Edifice tells of a visit to England by Jacob Drune, an American millionaire who falls in love with the cathedral of Brell in the West Country. This Norman structure, with Saxon and neolithic prehistories, badly injured in a zeppelin raid, is practically finished off -by a gale while Jacob is around, and his beneficence makes it possible to have it rebuilt in terms which harmoniously carry on its tradition, while boldly expressive of twentieth-century art and ideology. (I should very much like to see this felicitous new cathedral of Brell.) Jacob is a sympathetic, kindly charac- ter. His good sense shines agrdeahly throUglithe book - 6rtain minor characters take one's interest also, but I did not believe for a moment in the heroics of Margaret and her lover, the architect Tompion. These were neither .necessary. in fact nor true in expression. There was also too much vague talk abou,t, specimens of architecture " saying something to you." Jacot, was deplorably prone to -this:get-away.- If something is said one wand to hear what it is. r for one have' no patience with the portentously inarticulate.. But on the whole the story of this nice American's love for a cathedral town, laced with moralis- ings about Christianity, war and the future, makes a well- informed and very readable book. There is no need to be put off by the unnecessary neolithic-dream beginning. The novels: as a whole is not in the least like that.

Remembering Laughter tells of a disastrously unwise adulter3t. on an Iowa farm, between the farmer and his young Scottisk: sister-in-law, and shows how it destroys all happiness for evet for the three affected by it. The author, whom I take to be 0: beginner, has the grace of brevity,, and suggests farm an& woodland life with an easy touch. He has much to leat'n of tlf creation of character, and his Margaret, Elspeth and Alec are somewhat difficult to believe in. But the book shows talent.

. There was a time—was it round about 1913 ?—when a lapftil of apples and the shilling edition of Spanish Gold was all that we 'asked of a summer afternoon. So now in nostalgic gratitude we read Daphne's Fishing with peculiar attention, ,and, if ruthless battle of the mullets waged on the West Coast of. Ireland does not give us back a vanished Eden, the fault is not in George, A:, Birmingham; but in merciless time. He is

the same, competent and mischievous as ever. It is we who have changed. I will not give away his lively plot. Thousands of readers -Will-pursue it contentedly, quite unoffended, in his

bright world of non-reality, by his amazing attitude to the "lower classes " and the Irish Free State. Daphne is that constant—the hoyden goddess of all our misguided childhoods,

and to read about her now is salutary. And if I cherished a lurking hope that in the end her little friend Mousie • would be revealed as the true heroine—the more fool I. Mr. Birming.4 ham, being neither Jane Austen nor Charlotte Brontd, finds nothing to pause over in .common sense or timidity. HiP tale is of self-coofidence!7-and he tells: it -with all his usual gaiety and good temper.