FICTION

By KATE O'BRIEN The Village. By Mulk Raj Anand. (Cape. 75. 6d.) A Good Home With Nice People. By Josephine Lawrence.

(Cape: 75. 6d.) Harlequin House. By Margery Sharp. (Collins. 75. 6d.) The Rise of Ann Parnet. By Michael Foster. (Constable.

7s. 6d.) Spider's Silk. By Mary Lutyens. (Michael Joseph. 7s. 6d.)

The Village is a slow and informative narrative of peasant life in a remote community of the Punjab in the years just

before the War of 1914-1918. Accumulatively and without sensationalism, it gives a vivid picture of a life that is poor and terrible, but in many aspects extremely dignified, and which is made complicated and alarming by ritualistic fears, regulations and traditions which, though novel, can of course be paralleled by similar evolutions and excesses in any old and self-conscious race. The interesting thing, indeed, about this story is that, closely localised as it is, its theme is universal, not to say commonplace. For it tells of the growth of a sensitive boy in uneasy revolt against the inflexible way of life of his family and of his caste in general. A subject which must have produced thousands of novels in all languages and which will continue to produce them.

Lal Singh is the youngest son of an ageing, impoverished fanner in the village of Nandpur. He likes his farm-work and is good at it ; he has moods of great feeling for his harassed, sensitive and rather moody father, as also for his affectionate, fussy mother. These characters are well done, as they persuade us of their truth to themselves, yet are also clear-cut presentations of the eternal parent, male and female. Lain desires to please them, but he has done well at school, speaks English and has glimpses in his soul of a free and reasonable life, stripped of the excessive superstitions of the Sikh faith, and of taboos of dress and custom which make for discomfort and disease. He does not wish to be betrothed against his will when he is fifteen ; he gets his hair cut short at a village fair ; he speaks his mind to the pompous village money-lender of whom his father and everyone else goes in terror. Altogether, though affectionate and willing to please, he is compelled repeatedly to shock his people, and he gives trouble in the village until at last he has to run away from home and enlist in a Sikh regiment. In the last chapter he is sailing from Karachi, homesick and uncertain, in September,

1914- .te is an attractive boy, and his mild, adolescent problems are sufficiently interesting in themselves, because of the good sense and restraint with which they are stated, and also because they bring us into easy contact with the day-to-day life of an Indian village, still practically untouched, in its routine at least, by the remotely suggested, almost mystical civilisation of the angrezi, the English. There is no bitterness in the book ;

indeed its tone is tender and gentle, and there is plenty of humour in the character-drawing. There is much to be learnt from it of the patience, dignity and gaiety of certain hard and desolate ways of life, and it is a novel which promotes under- standing between peoples.

A Good Home With Nice People has for its purpose the castigation of American female employers of "helps," and it

certainly hammers those ladies with an industry and repetitive- ness which they can well be believed to deserve, but which tend to become boring when unalleviated by any plot worth talking about, or any development of character or emotion. This book is no more than a show-down of things as they are in the kitchens of certain mean and pretentious Americans.

It is a static, depressing presentation of laziness, greed and bullying, and of the grind which they enforce upon the poor.

The Hazens live in a seven-roomed house in a certain amount of closely calculated comfort, wrung hard out of the labours of poor, mild Mr. Hazen ; but, so far as it goes, most savagely and relentlessly insisted upon, hail, rain or snow, by Mrs. Hazen, an appalling woman, an out-and-out monster. The household consists of these two, Grandpa Hazen, and Pettie, their only child, a great, dull, self-pitying lump, over thirty, discontented, unseductive, and unable or unwilling to do a hand's turn in this life, for herself or for anyone else. Another monster, but made of a more jelly-like substance than her mother. The fifth member of this household is the help" who, except Opal, never stays with the Hazens more than a month. Opal had to, because she was saving to ge. her young man to California to cure his tuberculosis, and she had had hard luck about other jobs.

The book consists for the most part of screaming matche, between Mrs. Hazen's bedroom, Pettie's bedroom and the kitchen. These women, heavy eaters, are always having trays sent up, and staying in bed for the day for no reason what- ever. They are passionately interested in their own menus. They yell up and downstairs all day about almost nothing else. " Pettie ! Would you rather have my relish, or just tomato catsup? Pettie, do you hear me?' Catsup ! ' Pettie shrieked."

The helps have a frightful life, and so has Mr. Hazen, who is really too good to be true. There are other characters, too, mostly horrible. Mrs. National, for instance, where Opal worked before she came to Mrs. Hazen. It is really, in its un- mitigated, uneventful ugliness, a somewhat exhausting book— and nothing happens in it, except that Opal, driven past reason by Mrs. Hazen's unceasing talkativeness, has a rather comic crisis one evening as a result of which she naturally has to leave, and the Hazens have to eat their Thanksgiving Dinner in a hotel. But Miss Lawrence must certainly have enjoyed her own savagery as she lashed in this portrait of Mrs. Hazen. And though one wishes the book as a whole were better, and that something more, for better or worse, had been made of the lumpish Pettie, one applauds every second of the mercilessness poured upon her mother.

Harlequin House is by Miss Margery Sharp, and is sure to make a wide appeal to people who need something cheerful to take their minds off our present life, and who are not put off by those edgings of facetiousness and whimsy which, for this reviewer at least, disfigure much English humour that, free of them, would be pleasant and welcome. In this book, for instance, the three chief characters—a sweet young English girl, her knock-kneed brother, and a dotty old man—have a series of ramshackle, surprising adventures, which, it seems to me, could perfectly well have been set down, and could be much more easily accepted, if readers were not being dug in the ribs so often, or reminded by this, that and the ether airy turn of phrase that we are now in the Never-Never Land. What I mean is that the matter of Miss Sharp's random tale is quite legitimate, but that one is a bit exasperated by her manner, and feels inclined to turn on her sometimes with a snarl of "Who's reading this book—you or I? " We really might be allowed to take her story or leave it. However, here it is, quite amusing in places, even if a little too hung with bells.

• The Rise of Ann Parnet is a nicely sugared success-story. about an American actress. She is the child of a fourth-rate touring baritone of the old school, and she gets her first job in some ramshackle travelling show with him. But he washes up into failure and a night-watchman's job on a lumber island off the coast of Oregon, where she meets an eccentric old rich man who once loved the stage and an actress, and who sends her to New York to be trained as one also. There she has the usual luck of the movie-waif who doesn't want to be a morning glory, and she meets again the bogus-genius, Jake. who had first shown her, in their travelling show, how to be a genius. He is a very tedious character, and she can never really love him. They both become immensely successful and she marries the son of her old lumber-patron. We leave her, forty, rich and rather inexplicably introspective, waiting for the birth of her first child. It's a film story, but I hope Hepburn won't play the lead—she would be too good at th introspection.

Spider's Silk is the sort of novel that I thought had gone out for ever. It is about one of those wild Irish heroine, from an old stone house in Kerry, who has no manners no brains, and an entirely incredible quota of charm, or some- thing. She marries an English young man who is going to be an earl. She is miserably shocked at his wanting to sleep with her, and they have an awful life—but they are both absurd people. In the end, after a lot of bother, she smashes herself up in a road accident, but not fatally. Com- plications are eliminated for them by a helpful Major who loves Gina hopelessly, and they undertake to begin again.