Fiction
Young Men in Love. By Michael Arlen. (Hutchinson. 7s. 6d.) 'Tins promising title is deceptive, for the book is chiefly a serious satire on old Men without love, on the sinister trinity of financier, politican, and newspaper king, among -whose plots, somehow, the young men lose their hopes of high romance. Scattered the bright mirage of Mr. Arlen's Mayfair, wherein moved raffish, sometimes caddish, people who yet had something of an air, and a picturesque swagger that gave us a secret pleasure akin, to the irresponsible delight wherewith we view the raffish, mostly caddish, people swinging, also with an air, through Nigel Playfair's interpretation of The Beaux! Stratagem I In such a book as Those Charming People, there was silvery surprise, authentic grace, and even a breath from Camelot, all conveyed with a certain mocking ease of style. And one was aware that the something cynical in Mr. Arlen meant something serious.
Wearied, it seems, of his fantastic Mayfair, conscious, he appears to confess, that he overstressed and vulgarized his extravagant folk in his last too-successful romance, he is now taking courage to express the something serious. Since all transitions arc uncomfortable, this novel lacks the gay competence of the limited light convention he has already made his own. So, though he often says quite sanely bitter things about the powers that crush our social existence, he cannot yet handle tlteni savagely and surely enough to illuminate nor despairing ennui over these plagues. And though he makes sonic sincere and touching statements about his lovers, the young men destroy themselves too blindly ; and the " beautiful friend," -Venetia, should use a sweeter kind of speech. But if this novel of its author's transition be perplexed tind uneven in performance, its promise of imaginative develop- ment leaves one extremely interested in its successor.
R. A. T.
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