New Novels
Sergeant Lamb should be put into- every school library and. read by every boy or girl learning about the American War 01 Independence: and to say this is not in the least to disparage its value or attraction for the older reader. This excellent novel is based on the rare Memoirs of R. Lamb, published in Dublin in 1809 and au ; Mr. Graves has supplemented it with detail. s and events from other contemporary records, and can promise his readers that he has "nowhere wilfully falsified gengral' chronology or character, and that the information contained in it is accurate enough to add without discount to their golleral stock of history." Sergeant Lamb joined the Ninth Foot in Ireland, and after some years of service in Waterford, Belfast and Dublin, he embarked with his regiment for Canada in 5776 to defend Oje-bec, against the American colonists, who had already taken Mon:1'041- It arrived to find that the Americans had been repulsed from Quebec: and the rest of the book describes the British Arrn-v success in driving the invaders out of Canada, their failure, °nee the pursuit was carried on to American territory, to join with the British troops operating from New York, and their nnt" capitulation at Saratoga. In the course of the story--whin diversified by Lamb's strange and romantic personal adventures— we learn a great deal about the administration of Canada, condi- tions of service of mercenary troops, the life of private soldiers and the wives who marched with them, the causes of the revolt. But, as in Hardy's Napoleonic War novels, the historical back- ground is vivid and memorable because it is presented not as information, but as one man's experience. Sergeant Lamb describes himself as "of an inquiring turn of mind " ; he likes to get at the root of the matter, whether it be the grievances of the colonists, the laws of Canada or the rules of lacrosse. We are not just flatly told that General Carleton's administration was humane and sensible: instead we see, with Sergeant Lamb, how reverently and respectfully Protestant British soldiers salute a Catholic process:on in the streets of Quebec.
Lamb had considerable sympathy with the grievances and aims of the colonists, but this feeling did not at all conflict with his loyalty to his King and regiment. He was tricked by a recruiting-sergeant into joining the Army in Dublin, but once in, he made it his profession, and took every chance to improve himself in it—spending, for instance, two months as a member of an Indian tribe in order to learn something of forest warfare. He makes interesting observations on the discipline of the American Army. Like all revolutionary armies, they had great suspicions of the gentry who fought on their side, even of Washington: "If he had his will he would put only gentlemen in command of us," an American prisoner told Lamb. But "our captains and lieutenants are voted for by a show of hands.. They are pretty respectable tradesmen—such as hatters, butchers, tanners, shoemakers . . . if they do not please. us we do not obey, but we bid them hook it off in nation quick time." Lamb didn't think this made for efficiency, and he was often critical of the amateurishness of the American Army ; but he didn't, like some British soldiers, despise them for not fighting the war on sound European principles, and recognised the superiority of their guerilla tactics in the wild wooded country round Lake George and Lake Champlain.
Mr. Faulkner has an unusual gift for presenting an idiot's view of the world, though it is puzzling why, after doing it so exhaustively in The Sound and the Fury he still goes on. In The Hamlet he almost succeeds in parodying himself, by describ- ing an idiot's devotion to a cow. This is one of a number of loosely connected scenes and incidents of life in a Kentucky village at the end of last century. A number of Faulkner figures reappear, especially members of the Snopes family, and the book as a whole is the familiar Faulkner mixture of country quarrels and intrigues, sexual peculiarities and scenes of physical brutality. He describes the village with all his usual ability—the men lounging about on the gallery of the store, the itinerant sewing- machine salesman persuading a suspicious farmer to take one and pay for it out of the next cotton harvest. But it is a drab and gloomy scene on which Mr. Faulkner deploys his talents. The only pleasure that the Snopeses and other inhabitants of Frenchman's Bend ever seem to get is out of doing someone down, over a rent contract, or an I.O.U, or the sale of a horse. They show no family affection and no charity—the idiot's feeling for his cow may be intended as a contrast to the inhumanity of the rest, but it is a beastly world if people have to be quartet. witted to be kind. Their terrifying Puritan individualism is summed up in "Man must sweat or have not." Yet the picture is boring rather than moving or shocking, because there is rio contrast, no other standard to judge it by, as there is, for instance, in the novels of Jean Giono, who has described a similarly brutish life among the peasants of France.
In Mr. Lucton's Freedom, Mr. Brett Young provides a cosy novel on a familiar theme, the successful but bored business- man who breaks away at sixty and at last "begins to live." A lucky car accident gives Mr. Lucton his chance to cut loose from his tiresome family in North Bromwich and live the simple life on the borders of Wales. Mr. Brett Young does it all very easily and agreeably, with plenty of lavender sheets, magnificent rounds of beef, draughts of newly-tapped perry, ice-cold butter and other country pleasures in which Mr. Lucton finds more delight than in the black and rose bathroom and other luxuries of his North Bromwich home. And he gets a satisfaction he never knew in his business out of jobs like haymaking, tinkering up an old car and painting the house of two maiden ladies who have been kind to him. It is all very soothing except when Mr. Brett Young raises larger issues. As soon as Mr. Lucton begins to question the value of his material success or "think things out for himself," we begin to see him not as the harmless hero of a picaresque novel, but as a soft-headed silly, who has never really faced the problems of his own life or the society he works in, and who has himself largely to blame if his existence seems pointless, his wife behaves like half her age, and his children are callous, snobbish, greedy and rude.
JANET ADAM SMITH.
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