Fiction
Spring Fever. By P. G. Wodehouse. (Herbert Jenkins. 8s. 6d.)
WHEN is a war novel not a war novel ? When it's a " blurb " perhaps. The dust-jacket synopsis of Mr. Lister's moving and very readable novel of a sailor and the sea, The Wind that Blows, leaves out all reference to the war. And yet the war is the backbone of the story. Without it Mr. Lister could certainly have written another novel, but it is unlikely that he Would have written one as good as this. Certainly everyone is tired of books that give only an uninspired account of the superficial aspects of war. But all uninspired books are tiring, whether they are about war or sex or ambition or anything else that one may build into the backbone of a story. If a book is dull one does not want to read it (though perhaps in the case of war books there is always a period during which topicality can camouflage dullness).
But if, like The Wind that Blows, a book is vivid and true, and uses its setting to give us an insight into human character and problems, one will enjoy it, not regardlesS of, but actually because of, the fact that its setting is a war-time one. For war, by com- pressing a great deal of human experience into a very short time and showing human beings at high tension, reveals a lot about them and gives a writer a wonderful opportunity to do the same. Mr. Lister has taken this opportunity with both hands. He has made his sailor tell his story of love and war not only in the first person but also in the language of the mess decks, and the effect of simple authenticity is extremely moving. Many people seeing a young sailor in a corner of their railway carriage during the war must have wondered where he was going to, what his life at sea was like, what his family background was and what he did on leave. The Wind that Blows supplies answers to such questions about one particular sailor with an admirable combination of unself-conscious- ness, humour and narrative skill.
It is not only the war that needs to justify itself as a setting for a novel. No setting is justified unless it is part of a general purpose or interpretation of life in the book. Although in Bernard Clayre James Farrell gives the well-written conscientious account of city life (New York, 1927) that one might expect from the author of Studs Lorigan, the balance between setting and purpose does not always seem to be properly held. Following the self-conscious twenty-one-year-old hero with literary ambitiorrs through the details of his seedy existence, selling cigars, selling advertising space for a directory, having a love affair with a married woman, one gets an impression of too much slack rope, of occasional loss of purpose. It is as if Mr. Farrell himself had been sold too much space for too small an advertisement.
The balance between setting and purpose is also lop-sided in Mr.
Baker's My Friend the Enemy, but the opposite way round. -Mr. Baker has a very real interpretation of life to make and something very interesting to say. He is concerned with the infinite com- plexity of the human personality and the inadequacy of passing human judgement on any one element in that complexity, however apparently black or white. He makes his point by a study of cruelty. Vincent Collins, the sadistic county cricketer, who bullied Morgan Vale, the successful playwright, when they were both at school, dogs his life both as a symbol and in flesh and blood in later years. The sceptical reader may have detected what is wrong from the names. Yes, there is a false ring, a flavour of some woman's magazine, about the world in which the story is worked out. Though Mr. Baker may have been primarily interested in his• characters as symbols, they would have been more effective ones if their world had been more real.
What one wants, of course, is not so much a balance between setting and purpose as a harmony, such as M. Chevallier has achieved in The Eufje Inheritance. This detailed satirical study of bourgeois life in Grenoble with its gossiping, scandals, ambitions and intrigues has the wry wit and quality of a good French film. And Jocelyn Godefroi in her translation has done more than merely supply the captions, though it is perhaps difficult to see how M. Lacail managed to keep brandy in his wallet. The book is long and leisurely in spite of its essential frothiness, but then to enjoy it to the full the reader must begin to feel himself or herself a Grenoble gossip, too, and must know every detail about everybody. And M. Chevallier has made his wit all the more scathing by allowing one character to remain delightfully unscathed.
Finally, of course, there are those readers who, legitimately enough, do not want books to tell them anything about this life, but about a fantasy escapist existence. For them the setting must be. all- important, for its fantasy must carry the book. And for them there is Eastward in Eden by Claude Silve, and Mr. Wodehouse's Spring Fever. Eastward in Eden is a lush sentimental story about a little boy in the middle of the last century who was carried away by gipsies to an old Turkish palace in North Africa and who pined to death for love of it when he was rescued. The book has a com- pelling dream-like quality for a time, but perhaps it would have been better as a short story. Even the most enthusiastic lover of creme de menthe would probably grow pale if faced with a pint of the sickly stuff.
Impecunious peers, rich Americans, artful butlers, hang-overs, wasps, an apparently unending series of crises, solutions and counter crises—surely no one needs to be told what Mr. Wodehouse's world is like. And if he has perhaps lost some of his old fire, he has
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