Fiction
MR. F. L. GREEN is one of the. most exciting of contemporary novelists, and one of the least predictable. Everything he writes is lit up, given a disturbing significance, by the unusual quality of his imagination, and this although he is frequently a clumsy writer and has yet to prod uqc a novel entirely satisfying. A Flask for the Tourney is certainlrhis most ambitious book. His theme is freedom: " You wish to be free ? ' I asked. . . . The only way to discover absolute freedom is to become a prisoner. Yield the whole of your- self to something which will circumscribe your life. Then you'll discover freedom.'" The " I " is Mr. Green's narrator, Jack Kaspan, a returned prisoner -4 war. Despite the documentary accounts of prisoner-of-war life that have appeared in the past year, Mr. Green's description of Kaspan's experiences as a prisoner in Germany is entirely convincing as one reads. His theme is Dostoyevskyan, and his expression of it gives off a strange radiance.
But this is not the whole of the book, only the first two-thirds. The girl to whom Kas tells his story, Jane Gleeson, also wants to be free: " ' I want tdilraltee,' she said ... I don't want to love anybody, and I don't want anbtorly to love me. I want to be quite free . . .'" ; and having heard Kaspan on the meaning of freedom, we must then hear Jane's story; from the lips of a detective who has come to make enquiries of her. It is as though the comment were twice as long . as the story proper, and preceding it. And, unfortunately, Jane's story is much less interesting than Kaspan's and, because for me at any rate Jane has little reality, not much more than a sentimental story of infatuation.
There is, too, another, more fundamental, difficulty. Strictly, Mr. Green's is a philosophic novel and to set it in the present, to arrange his scene, as it were, he has had to strain probability and therefore our credence. To suggest the necessary isolation for his story, the necessary quality of timelessness, he maroons his characters in an anonymous city by means of a general strike • and he describes the strike so well that one is anxious to know much more about it than is relevant to Mr. Green's purpose. His problem, of course, is that which faces all writers of philosophic novels, that which the late L. H. Myers triumphantly overcame in his books by setting the scene of the action in the India of Akbar. All the same, despite its partial failure, A Flask for the Journey is a remarkable novel of much beauty.
Mr. Beachcroft's Collected Storie.i, consisting as it does of the three volumes of stories he published between 1934 and 1940, is very good value for money. He is a short-story writer who obstinately refuses to be classified. His stories are stories ; they depend upon
character and plot and' on that quivering sensibility which is the curse of the modern short story ; and the backgrounds he chooses for them are varied—provincial factory scenes, London scenes, farm- ing scenes. His art, which is never flashy and sometimes even a little awkward, is, it seems to me, remarkably close to the grain of ordinary English life. Perhaps his most important single theme is something one can describe only as strength of character, whether it is that of the old woman who narrates " Five Marriages," or that of the young Potteries worker who is the hero-of "The Half-Mile," a story which will probably take its place among the best dozen written during thepagawenty years. One lipks forward now to a volume of *new itoriei-ffbnt Mr. Beachcroft. Anna Collet is a tragic love-story, the infatuation of a farmer's wife for an Italian prisoner working on her husband's land, a tricky subject. Miss Lucas has a cool, sardonic style and a flair for the rendering of the actual, die wartime scene, encounters in pubs, hitch- hiking. Her minor characters are very good indeed, observed with perception and expres o. 'th felicity. Only her heroine is wrong. Anna Collett is not an Bovary, but She is a mass of sensibility. Miss Lucas seems to think this admirable, and her excellent detach- ment, constant towards -the other characters, breaks down when Anna appears on the stage. The result is a novel which, for all its good qualities, is soft at the centre with a false romanticism..Anyone who has sailed up the St. Lawrence River must have wondered about life in those ugly French-Canadian villages of tiny wooden houses and aluminium-painted church steeples that occupy its banks at regular intervals for a thousand miles: One such village is the background of the first part—much the best part—of Mr. MacLennan's novel, Two Solitudes, which is of the " saga " type. When one gets to Montreal tediousness sets in. One knows that in the second generation love will bridge the gulf between the two
solitudes of Anglo-Saxon Canada and French Canada, and love does but one fears the worst when the young hero of the second part of the book decides to be a novelist—and rightly. Much good work has gone to the making of this novel, but it would have been a better
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