Fiction

Call Me Early. By Angela Wyndham Lewis. (Peter Davies. 10s. 6d.) Dumb Spirit. By Doris Hedges. (Arthur Barker. 9s. 6d.) Love Bade Me Welcome. By John Lodwick. (Heinemann. 13s. 6d.) NUMBERS one, two and three are first novels,. each of such quality as to demand a respectful salute. Two deal freshly With familiar themes ; the third has a startling idea, and, though failing to develop it in depth, adds novelty to a spry and readable story.

Miss Wyndham Lewis's heroine is a shy, sensitive, awkward girl who has come to study in Paris. An amiable but stupid American makes a pass at her, and she takes it in earnest. Presently she wonders why he has said nothing about marriage, and wants to believe his explanation so much that, superficially, she does believe it. Even when she hears, in detail, about a previous recipient of his attentions she still tries to believe in him ; but the effort is too much for her.

Happily, however, Bill did no more than shake her deepest nature, and we leave her several steps nearer womanhood, and none the worse. As will be seen, there is nothing original in the theme • but a great deal of original talent has gone into the telling. Call ltie Early is a very honest, sensible, and sympathetic study of a character which

less sure hands could have been tiresome. Here, the vacillations, the contradictions, the impulses and Withdrawals of a yolurg girl at the mercy of feelings which she cannot understand make Rosemary all the more likeable. The picture of Bill is more sketchy than those of the girls, but there are no false touches. This is the sort of feminine book which a man can enter into and enjoy.

Mr. Hilton-Young's Anna too could easily have been tiresome, but is far from it. In case that seem the faintest of praise; I should

explain that she suffers from that most tiresome of delusions, the belief that she brings disaster to everyone with whom she becomes involved. Starting by being sick on a carpet, she is emotionally shattered when her pianist step:father, with whom her mother had lived for some years before they were married, tells her that the manifestly regrettable marriage was made on her account, and there- fore—in terms of her obsession—was all her fault. So fiercely does

she cherish this belief that, when her airman fiancé is killed in performing a feat which she urged him not to try, she refuses to

remember her efforts to dissuade him. The end, to my mind the one unsatisfactory part of a mature and most perceptive story, brings Anna back full circle to her stepfather and the carpet. I do not think it is sentimental to ask of Mr. Hilton-Young some indica- tion that the youthful Anna could break out of this vicious circle. She could—and the positive turn which such a promise could give would make the story a constructive instead of a purely diagnostic piece of work. Anna has further to go than Miss Wyndham Lewis's Rosemary, but the journey is possible, and I wish Mr. Hilton-Young had bought her a ticket,

Three people to whom, at random, I told the central situation of Dumb Spirit exclaimed, " What a horrible idea !" That the story

should not be horrible is the measure of Mrs. Hedges' success—and failure. A young man, removed by death from a situation which he feels to be incomplete, is restored to it in the form of a spaniel puppy.

Galled rather than agonised by his impotence, he is able at last, rather

melodramatically, to adjust matters. I count ten before commenting on this story, remembering the worst bloomer I ever made as a reviewer, about a book on a somewhat similar theme ; but I cannot help feeling that Mrs. Hedges, has not allowed her idea to make enough difference to the story.

" Benny's arms went slowly up round Paul's neck in the end, and Waldo" (the puppy) "breathed a sigh of relief. Well, that was that, anyhow. They had sex on their side, the old seducer, the reliable painter of pink glasses. With sex between them the rest would take care of itself."

Too much of this lively tale of timber concessions and high finance is told in this backslapping, roadhouse style. I pay full tribute to Mrs. Hedges' central idea, but, in my judgement, she has merely told an ordinary story from an odd point of view.

I have a great admiration for Mr. Lodwick's armoury of gifts, though I have not always been able to admire his use of them. This time my admiration is all but unqualified. Love Bade Me Welcome is a great advance upon the last book of his that I read. It is more mature, more economical, surer in movement and purpose, and, from

the technical point of view, quite da77Iing. Its theme is love. Mr.

Lodwick uses the mechanics of a detective story in order to reveal and analyse the motives and actions of a small group of people.

He gives us, it is true, the excitement of wondering who it was that killed the beautiful and unhappy Tania, but the real interest, the focus of our deeper attention, is all the time on character, and what love does to it.

In writing, in organisation, in timing, and in vigour of imagination this book reaches a very high level. Mr. Lodwick explores his subject with intelligence, wit, and an essential reverence which his occasional

facetiousness may obscure. The energy and brio of the opening chapters several times made me want to shout with pleasure. Mr.

Lodwick now wants one thing only—the compulsion of a major occasion. His theme here is big enough, but the setting has called for skill and intelligence rather than for that simplicity of response which could unify his great gifts and make him the great writer he has it in him to be.

No space is left to do justice to Mr. Compton Mackenzie's latest outburst of laughter—but then,, no space could. If the Loch Ness Monster were killed by a Flying Saucer, and an island were to claim a rival monster, the economic consequences to the tourist trade might be such as to provoke. . . . You can go on from there, in company with several old friends. Mr. Mackenzie's appetite for the absurd is as inexhaustible as the ingenuity with which he satisfies