FICTION

By RATE O'BRIEN Story of a Lake. By Negley Farson. (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.) Margareta. By Alec Brown. • (Boriswood. 8s. 6c1.) Last Port of Call. By Heinrich Hauser. (Arthur Barker. 8s. 6d.)

I CAN do no more than report impressionistically on Death on the Instalment Plan, which struck me as one of the most

vainly exhausting books I have ever read. It is very long and I think that many people will find they cannot read it consistently through. For. its effect is as if one were caught in a municipal refuse dump during a high Wind, of perhaps as if one were huddled in the, cloakroom of a_channel- steamer

during the most awful of overcrowded and stormy crossings. It is full of „retchings, smells, dirt,,rage, confusion, and aimless cynicism. Its only' pity is self-pity ; its whole strength is

driven into gustY, small; hatreds, its imagination goes into

a fantasia -of disease and ess ; its observation is almost

solely of vileness or of ph • embarrassments. But strength, imagination and "observation are there in plenty, the author using, and misusing, them With an astonishing energy to create at his will Suctession,of extravagantly, funny, horrible or wearisome scenes, most of which are approached with an intention of brutal naturalism,, but, nearly all of which swell up, under pressure of the writer's amazing narrow and, I must-insist, pointless -passion into phantasmagoria which, brilliant sometimes, taken as set pieces of nightmare or of grotesque, are impossible, because of their uniformity and misdirection, as a creative progression.

What is it all about, this whirl of garbage ? A middle-aged and sordid-seeming doctor, with a mean job at a clinic in a Paris slum, goes battening back in memory over his childhood and youth, and gives us a succession of pictures of misery, shuttling in and out of each other with a speed and violence which are very effective, because very infuriating. M. Celine

must be said to have succeeded in-his obvious intention to show life as both vile and idiotic—but such demonstration is not 'enough to justify his book, because he lacks the far perspective and the tragic - sense. He is so. fascinated by

Pimples, ulcers and drooling bile that he does not see those other things which, by admonition and contrast, make such indisputables significant. Indeed, enduring his circum- scribecf and exhausting gusto, one marvels at his din, for if this is life and all there is to it, why such a rumpus of dispute and whining ? Dirt, lechery and belching are dramatic and noteworthy only because other things are also known of humanity ; were this not so, they would be as little worth recording as the family laundry list or grocer's catalogues: And as M. Celine gives us no reason to assume in him an acquaintance with more than the offal parts of our nature, I find this book pointless. But it may well be that admirers

of Voyage Au Bout De ,Nuit will disagree, with me, and will desire to read this novel, which certainly has been superbly

translated by Mr. John Marks. -

Mr. Negley.Farson's Story of a Lake is only. very little_ about a lake,' and that little by a -More or less unnecessary device.

Actually, the beginning and . end of the _ book, which are set by Scaup Lake in British Columbia, provide its freshest chapters and its more interesting characters. Tony Lynd, the central figure, is an American journalist, and having met him in the lonely Canadian shack where he is trying to recover from his wife's' death, his own bad habits and the love of a vicious, husky, alluring young woman, we are taken back over' his adult career and relive in somewhat unnecessary details: the events which brought him to Scaup, arthritis and soul-. Searching. It is all lively and easy enough—there is Chris,' the English wife, very nice and friendly, very much adored and respected, but cold; there it Luba, a boring White Russian whom, after years of virtuous longing, he makes his mistress ; there is Felicity, " Flick," her of the huskiness, tremendously

brainy -and-.wicked, and who makes him drink himself into, dipsomania. There are hosts of minor characters, comic American senators, comic " Bloomsbury," hustling journalists,

&c. There is the pageant of world affairs as a pressman sees them, there is some informatory stuff on American labour and land troubles. There is a lot of love-making and a lot of

whiskey. There is an interesting description of a dipsomania cure, and -also a 'good- ptece"-atonr life- irr-a- 'mental -clinic-in

Hamburg. (Mr. FarsOn's unpretentious sketch of a nun working in this clinic is very good.) There is the death of Chris, which ante-dates and causes, perhaps somewhat incredibly, the visit to the clinic. There are Weasatit, descriptions of life on the lake, and some ironic character sketches of the types assembled on its shores. The book, though it goes on too long and ends awkwardly, will be found entertaining by man}. But the writing is slapdash, and on one occasion the hero " literally blew up." -- - - r -

The photograph on the wrapper of Mr. Alec Brown's new novel provides a clear guide for potential readers. If you like reading about simple,_ strongly sexed girls in Central Europe ; if you like a " folk " background off-embroidered shirts, kolo- dancing and plum-brandy-drinking, here you have a really good version of- that-genre, and with an American interlude in the middle of it, too, to break and thereby emphasise the design. Mr. Brown seems to, know Jugoslavia very well indeed ; all his local 'colour has an agreeable significance and .he manages to get the landscape over to us easily, bright, innocent and wide- rolling. -- His -story is of a handsome and eligible young man of prosperous farmer stock, who makes a runaway match, at the cost of a bitter quarrel with, his father, with the dowerless elder daughter of another peasant farmer, who is very proud and is drinking himself to ruin. Margareta loves the land with a broody passion that is frequently stated in rural novels but which I for one always have to take on faith in this type of heroine—I almost never feel it to be true, which is absurd of me, I suppose. Andreya, her young husband, lacks this pas- sion, and is a bad, because a bored, farmer. After making desperate efforts against poverty and disharmony in his father- in-law's house, he arranges to go to America—but at the eleventh hour Margareta refuses to leave " the land " and-accompany him. He therefore, as he thinks, sets Off alone. But Mar- gareta's young sister, Rosalia, has stolen her passport and tickets and runs away to join Andreya on the boat. The two are happy in Illinois, Rosalia geta a job and takes to the customs of her new country with contentment. Andreya, working in a factory which makes farm machines, &c., dis- covers a passion for machines within himself and, somewhat inexplicably, within eight years and without training, becomes an expert designer of those mechanical combines which aim at the elimination of rural drudgery, but also, of course, 'create rural unemployment.

In success he becomes lonely for his little son, and goes back to Jugoslavia to fetch him, and to buy off Margareta —who meantime has taken a -lover and 'is fairly happy. The events of d:nouement are somewhat drawn-out and are unsatisfactory, and to my mind the personality of Margareta is a muddle, not to say a boring one. But the book, though humourless and a little laboured, has tradition and knowledge in it, has a living theme of the conflict between town and land, and between hand and -machine—and many will enjoy the details and bright pictures of simple Jugoslavian life.

The last book on my fist this week is in fact the one I read with most pleasure, for though it is frequently sentimental— all about the last journey of an old four-masted sailing ship manned by sailors with " steel and longing oddly mixed in their eyes "—it -has-something real and eternally exciting to tell : of how the Notre Dame des Vogues set sail from Copenhagen for Port Adelaide in desperate circumstances of 'Poverty and anxiety for the future, but skippered by an old sea-giant, Captain Andersson ; of how she made a marvellous, ,almost a record journey, through perils and beautieS knowledgeably described ; and how, when off the Australian coast, she was signalled from port that she was' sold' for scrap, so that the skipper headed her for Cape Catastrophe and drove her aground for ever on the rocks, without loss of any life save his own. " A beautiful piece of seamanship." And a foolish, romantic book if you like, perhaps overweighted by the introspections of its one passenger, a rich young German, fleeing in panic from the dreariness of contemporary life and even from the love of his beloved wife and children. But a book that I frankly loved reading. Albatrosses, flying fish, the 48th

Parallel. Antarctica. The good crash of the mainyard on the Captaiti's- body. The fitting death of the lovely ship.