Fiction
The Ministry of Fear. By Graham Greene. (Heinemann. Ss. 6d.) The Ship. By C. S. Forester. (Michael Joseph. 8s. 6d.) Escape Into the Past. By George Slocombe. (Harrap. 9s. 6d.)
1EADING the earlier pages of The Ministry of Fear, before I knew where we were going, its desolate, " blitzed," dusty mood associated itself persistently in my mind with a certain kind of moorland, where nettles, blasted pine-trees, dead bodies of crows and a sense of lost and somehow stuffy emptiness are made at once less strange and more sinister by encounter with a rusty kettle, empty sardine- tin or wrapping from a piece of chocolate. For the relation of human life's stretches of barrenness, failure and unalterable regret to its manifold and foolish shabbiness; the balance, or lack of balance, between a disappointed and truly self-conscious and anxious human soul, and the dance he has to keep up throgb streets, boarding-houses and Tube stations, is an inversion of the blasted, forgotten heath where, inexplicably, someone has picnicked or dumped rubbish. This bitter dilemma, of personal desolation. choked and pushed forward by necessary, routine sordidness, is a preoccupation of Mr. Graham Greene, so I thought at first that I knew where I was; I thought we were to travel inward, to find grief and a spiritual conflict, from the outer aggravations of an obviously. wretchcd life. So, though it was clear that the mood was thin and scratchy this time and that uneasiness was to take more the sensation of a foreign body in the eye than any fiercer pang; though it seemed that z-o greater understanding was to be forced upon us than follows tai a somewhat cynical pity—yet I thought we were to pursue, and perhaps resolve, a personal grief. This did not happen. Arthur Rowe, a man in whom pity an fear of the sight of pain were so much over-developed that he ha• become a criminal and done a " mercy-killing," becomes involve not in the consequences of himself which are sd relentlessly pre sented to us in the early pages, but in a wild, improbable, gangster whirl, with enemy spies and an enemy girl, and detectives, and mad criminal doctor. We pursue, in fact, not the never-to-be-buried pain in Rowe's breast, but a tiny roll of films wanted by Scotland Yard; first we meet it, without seeing it, in a cake won at a raffle; it participates in a direct bomb-hit on a house in Guilford Street survives, and is pursued—more by good• luck than good manage- ment—hither and thither about England. The schoolboy business fits oddly with Mr. Greene's nervous, brilliant probing, off and on, at character and motive. But some- will like the romantic gangster- nonsense, and others will grudgingly enjoy many fine, hard passages of writing, and wonder why they had to be wasted on such Boy's Own Paper goings-on. They may wonder too that, at this time of day, we should still. be sentimentalising the lunatic and the killer.
. . Watching the sleeping man he could realise a little of the force and the grace and the attraction of nihilism—of not caring for anything, of having no rules and feeling no love . . a book lay on the bed and one hand still held the pages open: it was like the tomb of a young student. . . . It was as if he were the only violence in the world, and when he slept there was peace everywhere."
With the work of Mr. Forester the word that occurs first to th mind is competent. His is competence of a high and unusua order; dear, precise and close-knit. He writes of his subject, what ever it may be with that perfect assurance that carries with ii inevitable conviction. The Ship is the story of one day's nava warfare : a battle in the Mediterranean between H.M.S. Artemis and the Italian fleet. The job of ' Artemis ' is to defend a convo making for Malta. Mr. Forester has chosen the crods-section method, and he has made very good use of it. He can give a vivt. portrait of .a man in a very few strokes. But the chief charact of the book is ' Artemis,' the gallant ship, manned by her discipline and trained personnel. This is a book to commend to those wh' appreciate a detailed and beautifully simple account of an exp job, written by an expert.
Escape Into the Past is an earnestly written but confused effo to show the past merging-into the present. The Lotta of to-da is one with the Charlotte who married a Prince de Condg wide Henri IV, and the writer endeavours to convince us that she is living her two lives simultaneously. It is too much to expect read, acceptance of so involved and large a theme, and in fact this attemp
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