Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER NoTILING in fiction is more essential than the creation of character, but it is rarely perfected. A novel may be badly constructed, sentimental, sketchy, or over-elaborated, but if it contains well-drawn characters it will contain some life ; better a lively dancer with one wooden leg than a dull one with no such disability. The plot, the narrative, the idea, the atmosphere, the scenery—all these things are important, but they will not do instead of characterization. In the detective story we are apt to find a plot of much ingenuity, and the characters mere puppets ; in the popular novel, sometimes a more or less good story or idea, and little else ; in one type of novel a wilful exuberam”, and in another a studied pretentiousness, and sometimes both qualities in a single cover. When a writer has powers of characterization, the great difficulty of exercising them to the best advantage is likely to tempt him into certain evasions. Either he will be in danger of trying to make its accept more or less genuine types as individuals, or he will colour his characters too much with the sentiments he himself finds or believes his readers to find acceptable. In his new novel Mr. J. D. Beresford shows signs of inclining to take both these lines of least resistance, and that is a pity, because he is a thoughtful and experienced writer, and in Peckover has chosen to deal with an exceptionally interesting idea—the causes and effects of a man losing his memory.

The victim, as a child, of one of those wicked punishments that insensitive parents used to inflict on their children, Mr. Peckover suffered, without knowing it, from a repressed claustrophobia. A successful quantity surveyor, living at Dulwich and coming up to an office in town every day, he was not happy at home. As he was afterwards told :

" Your wife bullied you, your son, apparently, despised you, and you were in a perpetual state of resentment against the limitations of your freedom, and of your natural desire to express your personality."

The spirit, or the unconscious self, rebelled, and Mr. Peckover lost his memory. Mr. Beresford rightly emphasizes that

" a man is not necessarily either a lunatic or an invalid because he is suffering from a temporary loss of memory."

Certainly Mr. Peckover did not behave like a lunatic or an invalid. His appetite for life was unimpaired, and he did not forget how to do his job. In matters of money, employment and love his new self was almost overwhelmed with good fortune. In fact, Mr. Beresford at this point throws plausibility to the winds, and the case history turns for a time not into a well-conducted novel but into some- thing like a fairy tale, a result largely due to a happy-go-lucky neglect of characterization. When Mr. Peckover recovers his memory and forgets his intervening behaviour, he has two lives to put in order—a remarkably piquant situation, which, being resolved, leaves the hero a wiser and a happier man, because truer to himself. His adventures are an excellent medium for the expression of that kindly wisdom we have learned to respect in Mr. Beresford, and which we detect in the words of an analyst to Mr. Peckover

" Well, what I have to say to you now is that you must make friends with yourself. You've got to stop all this lecturing and preaching at the side of you that wants to express itself and have a good time. . . . What you have to do is to understand that side of yourself, be gentle with it, reason with it affectionately if you like, but never set yourself up as its master. If you can treat it in the right spirit you will presently be able to join forces."

The theme of Earthquake in the Triangle is not entirely dis- similar from Mr. Beresford's. Here again the protagonist is a respectable professional man in the suburbs, but in this case he loses not his memory but his head, and loses it over a young woman. His wife being away from home, the doctor, who is forty-six, discovers his love for Nom West, who is twenty-three, and is completely bowled over when he finds it returned. The season is spring, the year is 1926, and the General Strike is on, bringing tension into the

air and to the streets an unwonted silence, broken by ocea. sional disturbances. As the doctor gets ready to abscond with his charmer, the conflict between love (" This springing freshness was, in the faded and decaying Triangle, like a

crocus on a grave ") and duty (heavily reinforced by habit) grows more and more intense. His conscience becomes personified as a devil and speaks to him with disconcerting directness : " In your heart of hearts you wish you were well out of it " However, he takes the final steps preparatory to the beginning of a new life. Unfortunately the dislocation of transport consequent on the Strike does not exactly smooth the path to bliss, but Mr. Lewis Gibbs is not content with such a simple intrusion of destiny on the side of home and beauty. A third person has an ingeniously contrived part to play. And here Mr. Gibbs's characterization is too slight: he gives us not an interesting and unusual character, but only a tantalizing note for one. Nevertheless, the central conflict in the book is of a kind that is nearly always worth presenting, and it is presented in a good-tempered and quite unassuming way. Mr. Gibbs uses a pleasant light irony, of which an example may be given :

" You could tell he was a gentleman by his tastes, which were expensive ; by his habits, which were inclined to be luxurious ; by his manners, which were irreproachable ; by his morals, which forbade him to steal money but permitted him to owe it, and would not countenance the seduction of a girl of his own class. He lived easily and he died easily, a fate so often refused to more earnest souls. History does not record that he ever did any work."

Mr. Ronald Fraser has written another novel about South America, not a long book, but one that seems longer than it is,

because this author's extremely careful prose has a stiff, brocaded texture that requires a certain effort of the reader. On some writers South America seems to have a curiously bewitching effect, causing them to see the most romantic visions, and Mr. Fraser's characters are so rich and beautiful and glamorous, so suave and accomplished and well-dressed- they ride and swim and in general live so well, and display

such an unfailing savoir-m'ivre—that his account of them has the slightly spellbinding effect that might be produced on a mere wallflower in a magnificent ballroom full of people waltzing with the utmost perfection, none of them less than six feet high, and all dressed, jewelled and scented with a maximum of elegance and regardless of expense. Mr. Fraser's hero is an Englishman who is a man of the world, a man of affairs, and at the same time a painter of international

repute. A very long novel indeed might be required to make such a person credible : Mr. Fraser only succeeds in making him improbable. Sent to the Argentine on a com- mercial mission, this individual becomes closely involved with the family of a Scotch millionaire, or perhaps multi- millionaire, native to those parts. Among its possessions this family numbers a palace in Buenos Aires, a splendid estancia swarming with cattle, a fruit farm with seas of blossom, a French-Chinese-Moorish seaside pavilion, and several highly marriageable young women. To one of these, named Karen (on whose " inhuman " nature much stress is laid), the hero pays his court, with eventual success, in spite of the theatrical activities of a parlour snake (half Spanish and half Russian) whose " unreality " is as definitely impressed upon the reader as upon his fellow-characters. Mr. Fraser has genuine powers of craftsmanship, an unusual sense of form and colour, and an eye for landscape, but he seems to see human nature through the lenses of Hollywood.

The first instalment of a tetralogy, .1 See No Sin (which derives its title from a poem by George Meredith), is an account, presumably autobiographical, of the childhood and adolescence of an American. Whether Mr. Vardis Fisher sees any sin or not, he certainly sees the crudity and ferocity of the kind of world he describes, mainly to the exclusion of such other aspects as it may possess. He has produced a forcible reminder that the impact of the roughest kind of rural life in a new " country on a boy of some sensibility can be a formidable thing, for there exist, whether in Idaho or Africa or elsewhere, communities of transplanted Europeans who are little better than howling barbarians.