Fiction
The Weeping Wood. By Vicki Baum. (Michael Joseph. 12s. 6d.) 1, Said the Fly. By Elisabeth Ferrars. (Hodder and Stoughton. 8s. 6d.) An Inch of Time. By James Norman. (Michael Joseph. 8s. 6d.)
AMONG the commodities offered us this week are rice, rubber, pearls, jade and heroin. The most enjoyable of all the batch is Miss Elisa- beth Ferrars' novel of murder in Bloomsbury, and the most interest- ing is Out Daily Bread. This novel was a runner-up in the Latin- -American fiction contest held two or three years ago, when Ciro Alegria won first prize for Broad and Alien is the World. Enrique Gil Gilbert is a much less sentimental writer. His style is harsh and he is over fond of the short staccato sentence, which becomes tedious to eye and ear after a few pages. "Opposite Jaramillo lay Moreira of the scarred face. He knew well enough that an ulcer was eating Moreira's life away. Nevertheless, he will never let the truth pass his lips. Why should he? Everyman's life is like a tree, like the course of a river. Now Moreira whispered with the son of Juan de la Cruz Vega. The two of them were stretched out on the ground, between them a guitar." The novel tells of pioneers open- ing up land in the coastal regions of -Ecuador. They plant rice and for a time succeed against great odds. The author gives vivid pictures of the South American background. His range of characters is lively and various, -these include rice-planters, ranchers guerilla soldiers and peasants, for whom he provides plenty of dramatic incident.
Much the same can be said of Miss Baum's industrious rubber research. Her novel is longer, covers a greater span of time, space, contains more people than places. Indeed, The Weeping Wood is a kind of super-saga of elastic that has been stretched too hard and too long : as a result it is more than a little flabby. Miss Baum is coy, lush and coarse. "It is possible that he fell into the water when he was drunk' or possibly someone pushed him in. The piranhas did the rest. There was very little of his face left when he was found ; and his right hand and his testicles were gone entirely. Piranhas like to eat a drowned man's testicles, you know. 'I did not know,' Leocadia said. She went over and took Ambrosio's head in her arms and pressed it against her heavy body. Can you feel your little girl move? ' she whispered. Ambrosio listened respectfully to the lively movements of his unborn child. He loved Leocadia best when she was pregnant, just as he had loved his cows in Murca best just before they gave him a calf." After five hundred such pages of Miss Baum's India-rubber-necks it was blessed relief to open I, Said the Fly, and so find oneself in a shabby London street, with Miss Elisabeth Ferrars' matter-of-fact and slightly hard-boiled methods of handling the outer fringes of Bohemia. Here, living at the top of a lodging house, is Kay Briant,
a not very successful artist who has recently left her husband. So on a cold March day Kay returns from a tiresome business engage- ment to find workmen in the house fitting a gas-fire for a new tenant : "Two men in shirtsleeves were kneeling on the floor. They had removed some of the floorboards to lay the new piping, and in the hole that gaped between them some of the it issive, ancient joists were visible. One of the men looked up at Kay as she stood hesitating, told her laconically : We ain't saying our prayers, Miss, we're just two little mice.' Edging back so that she could step across the, hole, they waited until she had gone into her room, then resumed their hammering." Kay can't light her fire and she has to enter- tain the new lodger who can't get into her room until the workmen leave. And before they go they find a pistol hidden under the floor, from which a bullet has been fairly recently fired. The discovery of the pistol leads to the identification of a body, that ox a young woman. She had been the previous tenant of the room where the pistol was discovered. Kay had known her slightly. Who killed her? The amateur 'tecs all have a go, but another victim is slain, and Kay herself discovers, to her own peril, the identity of the murderer. Miss ' Ferrars writes with clarity and vigour, her characters and her situations are all excellent. She will go down well with Raymond Chandler fans.
An Inch of Time takes one back to the exotic lands. Instead of Miss Ferrars' pearl-robbers we have Mr. Norman's heroin-smugglers. Paul Courtland, American jade expert and importer, sets outsto meet a puppet-general in occupied China. He meets various other people, too, including Marta Reed, a young American girl who seems far too friendly with the Japanese, a sube.e Mexican, a celebrated Eurasian beauty and a young and clever Chinese patriot. There are numerous complications. Courtland's partner is murdered, nor does the attack on Pearl Harbour make things less difficult for him. Eventually he reaches the car of the puppet-general, but since both Marta and he know too much their lives are menaced. However, the various other members of this international brigade arrive at pre- cisely the right moment, and the secret of the smuggling route is
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