Fiction

By SEAN O'FAOLAIN

FOR the reviewer it is not better to travel than to arrive— the end, for him, can so often justify the means : readers

may so enjoy the climb that they need never struggle to the top, but the reviewer, must—he needs the long view back. That being so, I fear most reviewers are going to be a trifle acerb with Mr. E. H. W. Meyerstein, whose book is the equivalent of about five ordinary novels ; for as one steps a little wearily from the train the terminus isn't the one marked on the ticket. In plain English, the end of this long novel does not quite come off.

It is a novel about modern rogues, blackinailers, cads, burglars, murderers, petty thieves, Wantons, gulls, trulls, coney-catchers, cozeners, crossbiters, and what-not besides, with all sorts of incidents appertaining thereto—such as seductions, a shooting, a murder and suicide,. the framing of a Scotland Yard detective by crooks; seances, ballets, third-

degree l'Anglaise, night-club life, Diabolism, Spiritualism, all in a most fecund invention of plausible detail. The framework is the life of Terence Duke, told by himself, from the day he drowned and buried the neighbour's eat to the day he went out with a coal-.axe to kill his wife, Seraphine

the danseuse, made it up with her instead, and became restored to sanity, self-possession, love, and human-kindness. There is no stint of action and surprise, so that if one is not put off by the subject one will not fail to be entertained unceasingly.

It is only fair, however, to warn the reader that there is

here little of the gusto of The Unfortunate Traveller or Moll Flanders. Terence recounts his villainies, mean as they often were, with a chill unemotionalisra that often repels ; yet this is as it should be, since Mr. Meyerstein has chosen to deal with people who obey no law but the law of their own natures, and a selfish, vain cunning is the outstanding quality of this young man who deliberately sets out to exploit everybody for his own ends. Moreover, the classic rogues of English fiction know and, confess their villainy, while this one knows and confesses nothing—which is a hard note that hampers his creator immensely in his efforts to adapt the picaresque novel to a modern subjective delinea-

tion of the salvation of a soul.

That, indeed, is the trouble about this book. It begins as sheer Defoe, and for two-thirds of the way is entirely enjoy- able, in the following style :

"I leaped out and turned on the light : Alice—I recognised the hair, was trying to hide under the bedclothes. I made for the door, paused to unlock it, found it was unlocked, and ran, clad as I was, along the moonlit passage to Seraphine's bedroom, the wretched creature after me. But I was there first : and, roused by my call, my one and only love opened the door, and divined the truth well. nigh on seeing me. The baggage was discredited before she opened her mouth and was dismissed next morning on our combined representations to the host and hostess. I have neither seen nor heard of her since."

. Style, content, language (baggage, one and only love) are pure eighteenth century. In that manner the tale spins on. When the author is not ending one incident with such harbingers of the future as" But fate was busy contriving a terrible awaken- ing for the pair of us," or "This was the beginning of all the mischief," he is boldly inventing chance meetings, sudden

reunions, unexpected visits, accidents, not to speak of" brain- waves" and " inspirations " that fall unpredictably on the hero ; as well as irrelevant incident flung in for better measure. For Iwo books he evades the matter of reformation by leaving us to understand.that each one was completed at different ages. Then comes the third book, and it is as if Wallace Beery suddenly became Ronald Colman in the middle of a gangster film, or as if Defoe were metamorphosed into Dostoievsky.

The hero-villain talks (p. 518). about his "abasement of soul.!'

The psychology, which has been in the main simple and extro- vert—however misguided the motive of these blackguards—

become hysterical and introvert and is complicated by the introduction of a kind of symbolic Diabolism.

It is the psychology that will trouble most people. The beef-steaky characterisation of the naturalist novel is. dull but credible : the characterisation here. is exciting but not always plausible : all that about the stolen £200, for example, which :nobody makes a serious effort to recover, suggests the behaviour of KUM of Dostoievsky's congenital idiots, and when Terence talks calmly to Cuxton, the seducer of his "one and only love," we are simply at a dead loss. However, thieves' psychology is unpredictable, and that miglit pass : it does not necessarily convince : it is the last book which bothers me—it breaks the laws of the hero's character as only too ably defined in the first two books. In sum, this is an Unusual book : it is a mixture of genres and not always a happy one : it is entertaining : and if the last book could be rewritten it would be an even more efficient book than it undoubtedly is as it stands.

Far less ambitious is Ladies in Love ; also of the underworld —one part of it, only, ladies who love—it is Situated in Buda- pest and concerns the affairs of three girls who begin by sharing a flat with little or no furniture but much hope. Yoli finds in Karlovvitz a generous friend : being hard and calculating she refuses to let him see that she is in love with him—she believes such men do not like such attachments to become serious. Mitzi, generous and foolish, finds herself a real Count and falls head over heels in love with him : but he is engaged and his behaviour to Mitzi proves that Yoli is right about these affairs. The last girl, Agatha, earns her living as a housekeeper to an irritable actor, and after she has, in despair (when he dismisses her--for she too has fallen in love) tried to kill herself, marries happily a poor doctor in the flat above them. If this is mem resume, all one can say is that the book is meant to entertain one by its loose plot : that it has nothing in common with Vie de Rohame, is, in truth, much more honest about things : and that life in Budapest seems to be exactly the same as life in Brighton. You will be amused lightly by these light ladies.

Mr. Shamus Frazer's skit on British Fascism is much more hilarious and dishonest. The hero, Rupert, goes to Russia, grows a beard, gets the sack at school, is turned down by his girl, becomes a Whiteshirt, edits the paper, stands for Parlia- ment, is concerned with Whiteshirt interference in the matter of Tithes, "flirts " with Vivien, a typist in the offices, and has a good time generally. Why he should go to Russia is not ex- plained, nor why he needs to grow a beard, nor why all these incidents above shouldn't have been jumbled up in any other old way. But it hardly matters. If uncritically one simply wants a book full of a breezy and occasionally vulgar laughter this is a good 'tin. That in the end Fascism comes into power and Rupert is assassinated seems to me to be the final sign that Mr. Frazer wrote off this novel in a very reckless mood indeed.

There is no humour in Mr. James Steele's American novel. In fact it isn't human. The jacket shows a fiendish American cop bludgeoning a worker who carries a flag marked Strike. Workers Unite, while underneath a row of workers like galley- slaves or robots toil at a conveyor-belt. It is all there. Brutalism, coarse physiological. details, much profanity : the usual mixture, and enough to tell one, for the hundredth time, that literature and' propaganda do not mix.

Of Deep Dark River, a novel of the Mississippi delta, one must say that it is a novel to be respected, and that Mr. Rylee is a novelist of sincerity and integrity. Its merit is its heavy, almost oppressive atmosphere, its sense of fate in human existence, its gallant attitude to life. Mose, a negro, not without faults, a poor creature of the misfortunates. of his race and his circumstances, is charged with the murder of another negro, and a white woman lawyer defends him : but the whites outmanoeuvre her and the man is sentenced for life to a penitentiary. In the end we are given hope that he will be pardoned, It is a novel which, in common with most novels of this region, especially where they deal with the life of the negroes, is so thick with a sense of decay that the human figures dwindle almost to nothing : Faulkner alone, perhaps Caldwell, too, seem to be able to resist this feeling of the overpowering earth and consuming, time. But there is more compassion here than in Faulkner. For a first novel it is a fine achievement,