Fiction
Was There Love Once ? By Ernest Raymond. (Cassell. los. 6d.) Housebound. By Winifred Peck. (Faber and Faber. 8s. 6d.) Darkness Falls from the Air. By Nigel Balchin. (Collins. 8s. 6d.) THREE novels about the war this week ; the present war as it has seemed on the home front and in domestic life. All three can be said to have been written, on the whole, with care and good feeling ; all are lively and have entertainment value, but each also contains
passages and qualities more satisfactory and more touching than are to be looked for in the ordinary readable novel. All will probably gratify a considerable number of readers.
But Mr. Raymond's book should make the 'most general appeal, for it has an easy largeness of spirit, and takes in a good wide span of the London scene ; moreover, he assaults objects of his derision with a gusto which, though almost boyish, is spirited, realistic and sometimes really funny—and he is not afraid to present simple goodness on the most dangerous ground possible, i.e., in the
person of a High Anglican monk at his work in the East End. For my part, I confess that when I .saw what we were to have
—a story balanced between the customary two extremes of the Church of England cleric—the absurd, lazy vicar in the suburbs and the saint in the slums—I felt depressed and unwilling to pro- ceed. But I read the whole with interest, and with frequent amuse- ment; and I dosed the book with the impression of having read something that was true and encouraging in its essentials. My only reservations were against certain slapdash mannerisms, and occa- sional failures, as I thought, with minor characters. I shall not recount the plot, which is a good one, and illustrates the develop- ment of a girl's character between the ages of nineteen and twenty- four. She begins as a typist in Whitehall in 1935, and we leave her working as a nursing auxiliary in the East End of London at the end of 1940. Her father is a tyrannical, conceited and brainless parson whom she resembles somewhat in her hor temper and in her desire to shine ; her mother is a poor, browbeaten worry who never stops talking ; she has a bright, modern-minded young lover whom she adores ; and she falls under the influence of Father Porteous, the saint of Shoretown. It might all be very ordinary
indeed—and actually one of its merits is that it is -nowhere pre-
tentious—but Mr. Raymond's great strengths are (a) the conviction he feels about his story, and (b) the vitality which he gets into his characters. Somehow, even in their lapses—and they have a good many, chiefly in moments of senciment—one feels that, em- barrassing though they may be, these people are still running true to their own form. But Mr. Raymond is at his best with the objectionable and the absurd, and he therefore makes a very credible and by no means too preposterous job of Judith's father, the Rev.
Basil Mottram Fear. The family rows in the Vicarage at Stenning Gate are very good ; the first " blitzes " on the East End are effec- tively reported, and—against heavy odds—Father Porteous, the Anglican Franciscan, persists in being a real as well as an edifying character. But why did he have to say "my dear" to all of the people all of the time?
Lady Peck writes with a disarming anxiety and modesty of—and I suppose mainly for—that nice, upper-class, middle-aged woman who has been so cruelly wronged by Mrs. Miniver. A book such as Housebound pleads effectively, with its gentle, bewildered cry of " Peccavi," against the stigma of complacency, vulgarity and insolence, which Mrs. Jan Struther so unconsciously laid across the forehead
of her kind. Ro-s'e Fairlaw, the Scottish heroine of Housebound, is no Mrs. Miniver, but she has to struggle, according to her modest
lights, against all the social and economic advantages, and disad- vantages, under which that famous lady also laboured. She does so with a rueful grace that takes the wind out of the cynic's sails.
Left servantless in an old-fashioned, correctly run house in "Castle- burgh," with a difficult, conservative husband, and with all the anxieties and griefs of three children involved in the war—she battles along humorously and touchingly ; and she makes one very remarkable and helpful friend, an American officer who is indeed a man of parts. Lady Peck's sense of humour is deft and endearing, and she has a nice accuracy with domestic detail ; but her charming Rose is indeed as the author indicates, excessively "anthology- minded," and is too apt to get her snippets of reference and of poetry into an amateur's muddle. However, the book is true to its own gentle range of pathos and of irony.
Mr. Balchin leads off badly by altering a famous line of English verse to give his book a title, and offering no apology for such behaviour. His novel is uneven—all that part which deals with wartime life in a Ministry in Whitehall is entertaining, tough and funny ; and the end, when the young man goes in look for his wife in an air-raid in the East End, and finds her dying, and gives her morphia, and then goes and tells her inept lover that she is dead, is very moving. But the domestic passages before this conclu- sion, wherein we debate ad nauseam with husband and wife this puny, -Shoddy love-affair, are by no means fresh or worth the time
The fact that goods made of raw materials in short supply owing to war conditions are advertised in this journal should not be taken as an indication that they are necessarily available for export.
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