• -! Fiction MACNE10E I'd Do It Again. By Frank

Tilsley. (Seeker. .1s. ed.) . . . The Queen's Doctor. By Robert Neumann: .Translated by Edwin and %Villa Muir. (Gollanez. 8s. 6d.) , Overture, beginners I By John Moore. (Dent. ' is. (id.) ; A Week by the Sea. By Bryan Guinness. (Putnam. .7s. 6d,) To the Mountain. By Bradford Smith. (Hamish Hamilton.

7s. 6d.) .

Please Don't Salad'. By :loltatill Rallener.'. Translated.- by 1:eoffrey Dunlop. (Boriswood., is. 64.) .

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BOOKS with lower-class heroes are often distorted by snobbery .(witness in their very different ways Mr. Vells and D. H. Lawrence). Mr. Frank Titsley's hero, wbo.speaks in the first person, does not suffer from this. In spite of his first person he is palpably, and all the time; a human being and not a faulty gramophone record which jams on a catchword. This hero is a clerk who earns three pounds a week and is in love with his wife. These two conditions being incompatible, his love for his wife wins. Ile asks his odious employer for a two-pound rise, does not get it, and calmly decides to make enough periodical thefts from the firm to bring his income up to the five pounds A week which he thinks he deserves. He steals Ingeniously, so that there is only a chance in a thousand of detection, but the odd chances tend to turn up ; this makes the book a good deal more exciting than the average detective novel. Apart from excitement, I would say that this book had sociological interest were it not that one thinks of sociology as a kind of foul sauce poured over a story in pints and killing all flaVoui.S.- Mr. Titsley has the knack of making co lllll ionplace detail interesting. This is because, as in Defoe, the detail is in the first place interesting to the characters of the book themselves and is not stuck on in an academic attempt- at -objectivity. Hence our pleasure in learning how the clerk has to move his kettle sideways to get it under the bathtap, how he lays out his suburban garden and builds a shed with four-inch posts, how he cheats on the Underground and economises over his lunch 'and the tutiourit his wife's clothes cost. His thoughts and reactions are throughout_ in chanuter, whether he is being sensual, hard-headed, con-. templat ive or lyrical. •Such a clerk successfully cheating such if

ti mould indeed be one of the few people in our world with- * right to be lyrical. This is about the best novel out of tlt Illst seventy which I have read.

I I do not like historical novels, bid The Queen's Doctor can: lie 'safely recommended to those who do. Half the battle in a historical novel is picking a good bit of history. (Claudius, uan emperors.) Mr. Robert. Neumann has picked a plum- 1-. example, was obviously the best material among the early

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the fantastic and moving history of the Danish doctor, Stniensee, mho, armed with masculine intelligence and: 4ntinine fascination, beeame first the saviour of the King of Denmark's sanity, then the lover of the Queen (the king's' simity being allowed thereafter to lapse) and finally, in MO,' cletator of the country. Having spent his obscurer days reading Rousseau he began a series of downright reforms, but , ulas also driven by the nemesis of dictators to such Measures! a§ the abolition of the freedom of the Press. Struensee is a - good hero and all the characters in this book are as solid as (411 be expected in a historical novel, while the book is coin.... pitratively free from the kind of cliche which disfigures this - Owe. It is a pity that it should begin with one—" From the ' frOzen North, the land of the midnight sun, where the crags '

aid skerries of Norway faced the ice-floes of the Arctic. . .

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ie scenes of action are exciting and tempered with irony, and there is one magnificent scene in the Danish Stock .• Eiwhange, where a disgruntled merchant sets out to smash - Sirticosee's State Lottery. The rise and fall of the low-horn - gelatins is a theme chronically subject to over-writing, so that _ Htrr Neumann has done well to carry it through with dignity.._'

;(herture, Beginners ! and A Week by the Sea are both.'

e !Filially amiable novels. Query : Can the essentially ,•

ai4iiable novel be a great novel ? I doubt it. Anyhow the ., 4. : stion does not arise here as it is evident that neither Mr, ' Moore nor Mr. Guinness wishes to write a great novel, and for • • that they deserve our congratulations. The world is cluttered with books st bling on tragic buskins or prophetic stilts. Mi. Moore and Mr. Guinness do not write with a message; • the) cultivate their,gardeas,W _Woke 's garden-t....small;;:

section of not very unusual English society, which he pictures conscientiously from one angle without moving round it. Mr. Guinness' is a little set of fancy comics whom he arranges in pretty patterns ; there is occasionally a suspicion of" criticism of life," which is a pity ; you cannot take a plough into a window-box.

Overture, Beginners ! deals with a fortnight of dramatic festival in a town which seems to be Malvern. It begins with a girl of seventeen who "watched with compassion the antics of her father, the general, who was trying to catch the trou- which lived under the middle arch." From this opening sent tence on we know where we are and we know where Mr. Richard Aldington would be, too, and how he would be watch- ing the antics of the general and of everyone else with some- thing other than compassion. But I would rather go to Malvern with Mr. Moore than with Mr. Aldington,-though undoubtedly Mr. Moore is slightly sentimental. (But is sentimentality more false to life than venom is?) I do not object to Mr. Moore's kindly and sometimes idyllic • mood, but I do consider that he sometimes writes much too easily. He should avoid conventional similes and he should not say "sans butterfly net." There are many laughs in this book, mostly very genial, but I am glad that Mr. Moore was able to be a little less kind to the Oxford Group sisters who threw buns about in selfconscious joie de rim. And it is most refreshing to meet a theatrical company who not only believe in their work with enthusiasm, but who so evidently have their author in agreement with them.

Mr. Guinness also writes too easily, and moreover conceives his characters too easily. His hero is an eccentric middle-aged organist living in a seaside resort called Mudmouth (Mr. Guinness' names on the whole are a little obvious) who has a dull bridge-playing wife and an eccentric trombone-playing. brother and who falls in love with a young girl who thinks she is a Communist. The parish fun is all a little ingenuous, but Mr. Guinness has a gift of mild nonsense—" We walked,' they explained, because if you. run when It7s-_.raining•-you

Only collect twice as-many raindrops His most convincing'. elharacters are the two small children who play Bridge with hydrangea leaves. • Mr. Guinness should beWare, however, of title transition from comic to tragic. He should never have-: introduced a cloien blind boys into his pierrot scene, which is one of sheer fooling.

To the Mountain is a story of modern Japan at the time the war in Manchuria.. . As ft, story it is' slow-hur4, and lacks subtlety, but it is of great interest as a sincere and Unprejudiced picture of a very extraordinary country. The Young student-hero walks out from concerts of Beethoven :

and Wagner, whom he admires, into Western-style restaurant's where people cat with forks, which he deplores. The tradi- tional heroic virtues are balanced by the traditional repressions and imported beauties by imported vulgarities. The book opens with an impoverished family scavenging for food—' "'fallen grains of rice, the peelings from fruit, or the discarded head of a fish—a great delicacy "—and ends with two lovers - leaping into a volcano. Nearly every one of the characters is. lost among paradoxes from the muddle-headed Marxian student who is beaten up-by the police to the lecherous but kindly old merchant who gives an aeroplane to the army because he.has lost his favourite prostitute.

.Please Don't Smile is the rather heavy, sometimes gauche, - story of an intense young writer Who runs away with Martina, the wife of a ruined German banker. Martina does not appreciate his Art, su we have once more the hackneyed - conflict between artist and lover. Eventually the lover prostitutes the artist and writes a commercial success. This only leads to a further estrangement ; they become "as much ' strangers as man and wife." Martina, who has already " doserted her fifteen-year-old daughter. for this man- much younger than herself, finds that she is going to have another - child, and decides on abortion. She persuades a Jewish doctor, who has always been in love with her, to perform the opera- t kin ; he does it without an assistant and she dies of peritonitis. The writer and his mistress are much like other writers and m‘tresses ; the best thing in this book is the character of the . daughter,- -Edda-, • lll —