_ Fiction
FOR his new book Mr. Charles Morgan has taken the most serious theme it is possible for a novelist to handle; that of the integrity of the self and the tension of the opposition between good and evil. The itedge's Story is written with an admirable clarity, economy and restraint, a skilled performance from which the reader gets the same sort of mild pleasure as from being borne rapidly and smoothly along in a well-appointed and perfectly controlled limousine. What is it, then, about Mr. Morgan's writing which reminds one irresistibly and persistently of an Academy painting? Is it that the seriousness of the idea is not matched by the intensity of the execution, that it is all done with too well-bred and easy an assurance which, con- taining a formal assertion of the theme's importance, betrays an inability to feel intensely that its importance is desperate?
Something of this sort is suggested to me by the book. Mr. Morgan's " good " character, the latter-Victorian retired judge, Gaskony, and his " bad " character, the collectivist-minded capitalist, Severidge, are presented stiffly, without psychological insight, as
static embodiments respectively of virtue and of. controlled vicious- ness, thus leaving the conflict between them to be worked out dynamically in the personality of Gaskony's ward, Vivien, who has been drawn into Severidge's orbit through her husband's partial economic indebtedness to him. Yet the struggle within Vivien is indicated sketchily and, as it were, theoretically. There is, on the whole, too much discussion about the theme, and not enough con- crete embodiment of it in the action. And the characters, drawn with strokes too vague and general in outline, lack definition (except in the case of the judge), appearing not so much individuals as representatives of their class and kind. The general impression left upon me by The Judge's Story is one of a certain remoteness from living actuality. Mr. Morgan does not seem to be quite close enough to existence to know, for example, that in 1934 good wives like Vivien did not passionately exhort their husbands on no account to stay away from the next war, or that existence for a single elderly man on three pounds a week is not literally destitution.
Like Mr. Morgan, Miss Renault has set her novel of personal relationships in the pre-war world, where they will not be com- plicated by the later invasion of the personal life by apparently impersonal issues. Her theme is love: the love between a woman doctor of thirty-four, bruised by an unhappy affair with a hospital colleague, and a much younger man whose will has been destroyed and his ambition crushed by the gentle domination of his mother. The story is well, though somewhat lengthily, told, and Miss Renault succeeds in engaging one's sympathy for her characters. The novel's construction shows, however, several faults of method. First, attention is concentrated upon the two principal characters throughout, when in so leisurely a novel one requires either a greater expansiveness—some longer treatment, say, of the unusual relation- ship between Hilary's friend, Lisa, and her foreign-correspondent husband—or, alternatively, a much more emphatic, intense and economical concentration upon the central issue. Secondly, there is a certain distortion through the employment of the third person method of narration, when in fact everything is presented from Hilary's—the doctor's—viewpoint. As a result of this one is able to see only the boy, Julian, as a " case," whereas it should be made much clearer to the reader that the woman's love for him has founda- tions as equivocal as his own for her. In the third place, the employ- ment of symbol—particularly that of the cave—is uncertain, and perhaps unconscious; and symbol and actuality here do not happily comb:ne. Lastly, and in general, the relationship and its significance are not adequately pondered over and thought out, and the book ends, as a consequence, with unsatisfactory inconclusiveness. It is a story with undertones of unhappiness which Miss Renault doesn't seem to know what to do with. Shy of ending the book, as would have been appropriate, with the decisive gesture of tragedy, she
i lets it draw :o a close on an uncertain, unsatisfactory suspended note.
Forgive Us Our Trespasses holds the attention almost entirely through the interest of its subject-matter, the lives of the com- munity in the East Coast fishing village of Senwich, circa 1844. Mr. Bell knows his subject, and presents it with sympathy, humour and a skilful management of Suffolk dialogue. D. S. SAVAGE.
Previous page
