FICTION
Party Going. By Henry Green. (Hogarth Press. 7s. 6d.)
The Red Centaur. By Marjorie Mack. (Faber. 7s. 6d.)
WHAT a relief it is for once to open a novel and be immediately immersed in a compete other-person's-world ! Is there any
other reason for reading novels?
" Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.
" There it lay and Miss Fellowes looked up to where that pall of fog was twenty foot above and out of which it had fallen, turning over once. She bent down and took a wing then entered a tunnel in front of her, and this had DEPARTURES lit up over it, carrying her dead pigeon."
Those are the opening paragraphs of Mr. Green's novel : the whole book has got under way at one eccentric stride—the obscure setting of a London railway station in dense fog, the confused middle-aged figure of Miss Fellowes wandering among the buffets to say good-bye to someone, with her dead pigeon carefully washed in the " Ladies " and wrapped in brown paper, the dying poetry of a departure which never comes off because the trains are all held up, the Waugh-like group of rich young people going off—it looks sometimes as if they never will—to the South of France : the pansy Alex, Max the vague pursued host with too much sex-appeal (the women "were in league against him and watched his back like cats over offal or as if they thought his heart might fall out at their feet feebly smiling and stuck all over with darts or safety-pins "), Evelyn who has the tickets, Julia who loves Max, Angela Crevy who is out of it all and uses Christian names awkwardly, Amabel—a well-known lovely—whom Max mistakenly thought he had left behind ; and outside the hotel into which the stationmaster has shepherded them (Julia's uncle is a director of the line) the huge mob of season- ticket holders, impatient for their trains, barred off by steel shutters, menacing by their mere number and presence the little exclusive preoccupied party. Miss Fellowes lies un-
conscious on a hotel bed watched by two silent monolithic nannies belonging to someone, and an unpleasant small man in a bowler nobody knows wanders in and out, scooping drinks and officiously making suggestions. In ide the three suites Max has extravagantly ordered—one for Miss Fellowes, one for the party and one for himself to make love in—the characters talk themselves vividly alive. Nothing in Mr. Green's mind is taken for granted: even a station lavatory is described in his strange Steinish prose as interestingly as if it were an Eastern tomb he hadn't seen before. Even the oldest words taste new: the structure of his sentences is ever so slightly jostled, like the scraps of silver paper in a kaleido- scope, to form fresh patterns. Mr. Green has written only three novels in about fourteen years—he is one of the few novelists whose books, produced at such long intervals, are never likely to disappoint.
Lord Dunsany's Mona Sheehy was popularly regarded as the daughter of the Queen of the Shee—actually she was the illegitimate daughter of Lady Gurtrim, conceived one night when the Countess was on the way home from a dull ball at which Charlie Peever had failed to turn up : Lady Gurtrim danced on the moss, while her carriage waited, with a young farmer called Denis O'Flanagan. She told Charlie Peever the child would be his, so he persuaded Lord Gurtrim to go and study Heligoland with a view to becoming Governor there (according to Charlie Peever the Kaiser and Campbell- Bannerman were going to do a deal), and Mona was born in Italy and afterwards deposited at O'Flanagan's door by an Italian nurse. In spite of the priests' opinion that the child was mortal, the villagers and O'Flanagan believed otherwise and the child herself grew up with that idea. Later she was driven from the village by gossip that she was bringing the world to an end and travelled for awhile with some tinkers until Charlie Peever persuaded her to go to London and work in an advertising agency—just as later, when she had inherited the Gurtrim fortune, he persuaded her to give him Power of Attorney. The charm and humour of Lord Dunsany's story• comes from the sharp contrast between the traditional folk imagination and the world we are at home in: on the one side are the She; the priests, the tramp who answers Mona's questions about fairies, " They were here in the old days. . . . And then for awhile there was none of them. And now they're getting a bit plentiful again," the dark irrational tribe of tinkers, all called Joyce, who " get a bit wicked sometimes, if any of them is after a girl. But they mean no harm by it as a rule. Only, the other night one of them killed another lad ; and they're always real wicked after that, until anything happens to make them forget about it ": and on the other persuasive Charlie Peever (" He never sold medicine; and yet of all the men of his time he was the most perfectly fitted to do so "), the World Improvement Publicity Company, and the man who had invented an expensive substitute for mustard to be sprayed out of little bottles. This is a delightful book, belonging to the disputable territory between fancy and imag- ination, full of underground malice and quite free from whimsy —a difficult achievement.
Miss Mack's achievement is equally difficult—to tell a romantic story about Brittany (an aristocratic French family, a first love affair and an arranged marriage) through the eyes of an English child without laying a feminine claim to sensitivity. So often such books are like a continuous boast: Look what I notice ; look how tenderly I feel. This is an admirable novel which shows no sign of being a first : quiet and unurgent, written in a prose exactly adapted to the subject : no strain, no overtones. Sometimes one remembers Tchehov: the sadness of revisiting a loved place after a few years' absence—the new villa above the beach, the unbearable children in what had been one's private cove.
Three good novels in one week : it doesn't seem possible.
GRAHAM GREENE.
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