Fiction

Br L. A.

. STRONG.

3enny Wren. By E. H. Young. (Cape. 7s. 6d.) No Epitaph. By Ramond W. Postgate. (Hamish Hamilton.

7s. 6d.)

Josephus. By Lion Feuchtwanger. (Seeker. 7s. 6d.)

Great Dust. By Peter Traill. (Grayson. 7s. 6d.)

)our Fantastic Tales. By Hugh Walpole. (Macmillan. 7s. 6d.)

Recapture. By Clemence Dane. (Heinemann. 8s. 6d.)

The Triumph of Time. By Storm Jameson. (Heinemann.

88. 6d.)

My Funniest Story. An Anthology. (Faber and Faber. 7s. 6d.) Miss E. H. YOUNG is one of our strongest and most delicate writers. She can let her attention fine down to the last point of subtlety, without loss of narrative time or space, for the broad sanity of her approach to her story keeps her up and carries her as steadily through it as the river Jenny could see from the window at Beulah Mount.

" Jenny lay on her right side to see the sky. The sun cannot be .faced, the moon floats by, indifferent and aloof, but the stars have messages for mortals, and the brightest star she saw, through the small square of window, seemed to blink at her, now and then, in disapproval. It liked her, it was friendly, and when it blinked, it was remembering, with pain, that she was not honest. The price of that bureau, whatever it might be, was owed to Thomas Grimshaw, and Jenny did not mean to let him have it. When she looked at the star, boldly defying its regrets, she had to look beyond Dahlia's bed, and Dahlia, too, would say the bureau belonged, morally, to Grimshaw. Then, thought Jenny, I must be careful not to let her know its value, and she saw another little complication added to her life. A new lodger, the vicar, or Mr. Sproat, entering that room, would be a danger, and as she lay there she.felt angry with the world and all the people in it, except herself and Mr. Cummings. He had done what she wanted, but everybody else seemed to have been born to worry her."

! I, Jenny is the heroine, Dahlia her sister. Their father married " beneath him," and the sisters, helping their mother take in lodgers after his death, feel all the dis- comforts incidental to the conflict in their blood and altered circumstances. Mr. Grimshaw is their mother's plebeian wooer, to whom she owes money ; Mr. Cummings is the lodger, expert in furniture, who has proclaimed the value of the bureau. Jenny Wren traces the story of these

leople. Miss Young makes two demands upon her reader, eisure and care. She is well entitled to both, and she repays them. No one at present writing more subtly [understands the mind of the immature, and is so sympathetic and so unsentimental towards growing pains. Jenny Wren moves slowly, but is otherwise delightful.

Another writer on our list who reveals a remarkable under- Standing of young minds is Mr. Phil Stong. State Fair is a first-rate performance. I do not know who Mr. Stong is, but he knows his job backwards, and has produced a book which, in its kind, could hardly be bettered. Abel Frake, a country farmer, is the proud possessor of a hog named Blue Boy. It is his ambition to win the State prize for the best hog ; and his ambition is fulfilled. The family visit the annual State Fair at Des Moines, and the book tells what happened to them. Father, mother, son, daughter—and hog ; Mr. Stong tells us all about them. His understanding /s remarkable. The boy and girl are marvellously drawn, the old people no less well, the book is full of humour, and the journey back, the long drive through the night and through the dawn, has a touch of real beauty. I recommend State Fair without reserve, and shall keep a sharp look-out for the next book by its author.

Mr. Postgate, who has made his mark in biography, proves that he can deal as happily with an imaginary as with a historical character. The faults of his exceedingly attractive first novel are the usual beginner's faults of architecture. The incident of the strike, which in itself is the best thing in the book, has little to do with the problems of Felix Queagh, and, in any case, disproportionate space is given to it. The end of Felix, too, is on the arbitrary side ; but once this is said, there is nothing left but praise. Felix Queagh, arriving in the office of a Liberal-Labour daily with no assets but a letter of introduction and a diffident charm of manner, soon kams his job ; but his domestic affairs are not so easily managed. Still, nothing is seriously amiss till Felix asks his chief Sheringham to bring his wife to dinner. Both Felix and Anne have modern ideas on the subject of freedom in marriage. Accordingly, Anne lets Sheringham kiss her, and Felix dutifully kisses Mary. Anne goes no further, but Felix does, whereupon both Anne and Sheringham turn out to lie furiously jealous. Felix throws up his job and takes to free. dancing. Anne does her best to be modern, but finds she has no real talent for unfaithfulness. Felix degenerates.

Thus baldly summarized, No Epitaph does not sound an attractive story. Actually, it is very attractive. Mr. Postgate, who writes with economy and distinction, knows bow to draw characters, and to communicate his sympathy with them to his readers. His hero. is a weakling, and his heroine a fool, but he makes the reader follow their story, and, best of all, his writing has the indefinable quality of charm.

Dr. Feuchtwanger gives us in Josephus another of his coldly observed pageants of history. His hero is Josephus the historian, whom he follows from Rome to Galilee, to Caesarea, to Alexandria, and to Jerusalem, through the maze of Jewish activity in the period which ended with the destruction of the Temple. When he first appears Josephus is only twenty-six years of age, a newcomer to Rome, with two resolves : to learn the lessons of Rome for the benefit of his own people, and to liberate three innocent Jews imprisoned in a Roman brickyard. Various men and women play parts in the development of his character, Demetrius Libanus the actor, Justus, the Empress Poppaea, and the Egyptian girl, Dorton; whom he married. Josephus succeeds by his writings in making Jewish culture known to the Roman- world, but he wants political power also, and the part he plays in the intricate drama of the Jewish downfall is, against all his intentions, less fortunate. The book abounds in brilliant scenes, in which the storming of the Temple is conspicuous. Worthy of the author of Jew Siiss, it is observed in the same hard light, and written with the same detachment.

Great Dust starts from an admirable idea. A man playing poker with five friends discovers, after the lights have fused, that he has lost chips to the value of twenty-five pounds. He is rich, and his friends are rich. He determines to find out who took the chips, and why. He suspects each friend in turn, and, in following up his suspicions, learns much about their private affairs and a few home truths about himself. Here the story suffers from the conventions of its type. To provide a detective interest it is necessary that Lapwood suspect each of his friends in turn, without definite evidence against any of them. We should accept this the more readily if Mr. Traill had not developed a psychological interest with sufficient skill to bring our minds to another plane and make us realize that Lapwood's actions, particularly the public accusation upon which he at last determines, are improbable. All the same, Great Dust is an excellent yarn, excitingly told, !with a climax which I am not going to give away.

A number of omnibus volumes make a timely appearance as possible Christmas presents, with a maximum of reading at a minimum price. Mr. Walpole's omnibus, Four Fantastic Tales, contains Maradick at Forty, Prelude to Adventure, A Man with Red Hair and Above the Dark Circus—four full-length novels for seven and sixpence. The book is neither ungainly nor heavy, and the type is not too small. Miss Clemence Dane's Recapture is a miscellany chosen from her works. It contains Regiment of Women, Legend, plays Including A Bill of Divorcement and Will Shakespeare, and tales and shorter pieces. This volume, too, is easily handled, and only the purist will object that it is not in uniform type. In The Triumph of Time, the life story of Mary Hansyke can now be read in the form in which Miss Jameson conceived it. Her trilogy contains A Lovely Ship, The Voyage Nome and A Richer Dust—a real and enviable con- tribution to the literature of our time. Last comes My Funniest Story, in which no fewer than twenty-six authors have made their own selection. It is always interesting to see what a writer thinks of his own work, and the book will provoke argument as well as laughter,