Fiction
and Windus. 9s. 6d.) The %ray to Santiago. By Arthur Calder Marshall. (Cape.
7s. 6d.) Our Lady of the Earthquakes. By Peter Brooke. (Cresset
Press. 75. 6d.)
The Witch in the Wood is a sequel to The Sword in the Stone, which had an unusual success in this country and in America about eighteen months ago, and it would appear as if these two volumes are only the beginning of a large plan to re-write the Arthurian legend in what is certainly an unusual and individual manner. When the first of these books appeared one heard high praise of it from authoritative sources, and, although it went temporarily unread, the title lay at the back of memory as something to be investigated one day. Now, although I should have been glad to have had it at hand this week, for the better investigation of its sequel, I know that I shall most certainly never read it for pleasure's sake.
I know that the non-English critic must be wary of his own reactions to English fantasy, and that it is foolish arbi- trarily to dismiss that constant of " successful " English writing—facetiousness. For although I believe it to be a phenomenon .which, at its most expert, leaves the average non-English reader cold and -embarrassed, it has undoubtedly made the names and fortunes of a number of eminent English writers—and here it is in this new book, at its most shame- less. And dressed up, front and rear, in the enchanted plaudits heaped upon its predecessor by English criticism. The unfortunate reviewer, therefore, who found this book dis- likeable from beginning to end is naturally abashed.
But there is really no get-away in pleading one's " foreign- ness " to this kind of thing. Admirers of Mr. White's versi30 of the boyhood of King Arthur compare his work with Tile Wind in the Willows and with Alice in Wonderland, clai:n- ing its equality with these latter. The Wind in the Willo-t.s is not everybody's book, but children do as a rule both love and remember it, and it has the quality of innocence. Alice in Wonderland, incomparably greater, has assuredly never embarrassed any reader, English or non-English, and its character of genius depends finally on this : that the whole fabric arises from and reposes throughout upon the rocklike sobriety of good childhood.
The really deplorable thing, it seems to me, about The Witch in the Wood is that, although superficially its humour is mere public schoolboy, no one in his senses could wish "the darling young" to read it, for it is full of innuendo and bad Freudian nudges and pokes. And that being so, who is to read it? Surely not the grown-ups? There is no reason for this book. If the children will not read Malory, then let the little horrors forgo the Arthurian legend, or have a try at Tennyson ; but they certainly cannot enter Lyonesse with Mr. White. And it is inconceivable to me that their elders should desire to. For if they want ancient heroes debunked, there is Troilus and Cressida, for instance ; if they want them merely smiled at, we have M. Giraudoux ; and if they only want to giggle at English history, there were some real jokes in ro66 and All That. And as to the farcical aspects of marriage, and of female viciousness and male vacuity, the Aldwych farce tradition has been attending to all those things for many years, to say nothing of adult literature, from Chaucer to Evelyn Waugh. No, there seems no place for this curious work which is so unlucky as to be neither innocent nor sceptical ; which is only pseudo-picturesque and winkingly informative ; and the sole morality of which appears to be the stuttering one of "good form." If The Witch in the Wood is anything, it is an affable tract in praise of arrested development—which seems the wrong frame into which to fit the legendary events that led to the birth of Mordred.
It is a relief to turn from such confusing laboriousness to the good sense, the mature naturalism and adult observation of Mr. Compton Mackenzie. I am not, as it happens, a zealot for these Winds of Love which he has raised of late, and I always wish that he would make more use of his rich power of character-drawing, and leave discursiveness to writers who, more critically stimulating than he, lack his ability to make ordinary life move and breathe before our eyes. But although John Ogilvie and his Athene, particularly his Athene, have their dull moments as they pursue their controlled and talka- tive way from forbidden to sanctified love, there is a consistent life to be felt in this hero, who is perhaps a shade too wise and good, &c. But he is so likeable that we have to forgive him a curious 1918 omniscience about the future of Europe, excusing this in him more readily than we do the bland accord with his every notion of his really too bland Athene. It is odd, however, to read of two people, who had just attended a very amusingly described po:yglot party of a period- sophisticated kind, having to be brought to declaration of their love by the dear old device of the stumble as they walk, the snatch to save each other, and the consequent fatal face- to-face. However, that is by the way, and almost refreshing. And this novel, honest, steady and sympathetic in its expan- sive relation of personal life to the problems confronting the world at the close of the last war with Germany, is better and livelier than that in its asides—such character sketches as that of Nurse Widehose, for instance, and the caretakers of the flats in Charing Cross Road ; and almost any taxi-driver that crops up, or any Cockney girl. In all these warm and vivid details Mr. Mackenzie works in a great tradition and cannot put a foot wrong ; they introduce the beauty of art into a novel which without them could only be moderately interesting.
Mr. Calder Marshall gives us, in The Way to Santiago, 3 very well written Mexican thriller, up-to-date, competen', intelligent and entertaining. An American journalist is mys- teriously shot on the night of a public fiesta in Mexico City. An English journalist, in love with the murdered man's wife and liable to be incriminated in the affair, takes it upon him- self to clear it up—chiefly in order to prove something to himself about his own courage and ability to undergo rea! adventure. His decision lands him well into the thick of a dangerous ideological plot, with Nazis for villains, peones and red Compaileros for victim-heroes, and a strange Russian- German-Britisher, disguised as a journalist, for temporary god of a machine that is to grind him up. The Mexican scene makes a good setting, and Mr. Calder Marshall writes it in well ; his sympathy with Mexican character is controlled and attractive, and if the English hero's ruminations about himself seem irrelevant, at least his author succeeds in presenting him as both manly and intelligent, and On the whole the intricate story holds our attention right through to its violent end.
Our Lady of the Earthquakes is also about Mexico, or, rather, about a strange young Mexican woman in Europe, the narration of whose odd grown-up adventures is constantly interwoven with pieces from her equally odd childhood at home. I could not make head or tail of the fantastic business, which struck me as foolish and bogus. But I do commend the war-time format of the book, slim and neat, and pleasantly
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