FICTION
By HAMISH MILES The Citadel. By A. J. Cronin. (Gollancz: 8s. 6d.) Thieves Like Us. -By Edward Anderson.-: (Heinemawt.
THERE are some novels which, even on the day of unveiling, seem not to have had all the stonemason's poles and scaffolding removed. It is embarrassingly obvious how the monument was built up : here a slab and there a slab, a figure here, a festoon there. The work has a sort of unity, inasmuch as the parts are somehow fastened together in an apparently logical ordering, and fill up the allotted space of ground according to specification. But stonemasonry it remains, not sculpture, something contrived, not growing with the spon- taneous logic of art.
These grave remarks are intended to apply to Dr. Cronin's long, purposeful novel, The Citadel. Here, at the outset, is Andrew Manson, a poor and shabby and graceless young medical man, starting off on his first professional job as underpaid assistant to a mortally ill G.P. in a Welsh mining village. From the word go we recognise that Andrew is primarily' a figure through whom, by appropriate manipula- tion, his creator is going to expose and expound a series of problems and criticisms of the medical profession. And so he does. Neglected responsibilities of public health, laxity over lunacy certificates, strictness of medical " etiquette," jealousies and trickery amongst colleagues, bad hats in the profesdiOn, the panel system, the moral clash between Harley Street.-racketeering and disinterested research, the stick-in- the-muds of a Gm: eminent department handling medical affair 'the attitude of._ihe General Medical 'Council to unq ed practitioners—all of this, and plenty more, is laid on th4 not very capacious shoulders of Andrew Manson. He stumbles along bravely'and- quite successfully, doing hit duty 10 the novel'S purposes ; but as a living character` he is not coirvincing bedause one fedi that his actions and reactions are soLoften imposed on him by Dr. Cronin, and just aren't naturally in him.
A lavish supply of accessory' personages keeps him on the move: Andrew marries a nice little schoolmistress, who helps him no end during his early struggles, fights his bout of Harley Street materialism, sticks to him through some brief marital conflicts, and is rather needlessly killed by a' 'bus 'when buYing his favourite cheese just as things are all right again. (Why, by the way, does Dr. Cronin speak of her " queer calvinistic " protectiveness towards Andrew ? And what did Christine really feel when the rich mineowner's wife kindly sent her an offering of narcissi and the " whole of Trollope," whose- novels number fully fifty?) There are good doctors and bad, a rather lovable dentist, deserving patients and very undeserving ones, lots of words like psoriasis, serpiginous, nystagmus, apicolysis, a big scene where Andrew speaks his mind in-public to the G.M.C. (but isn't struck off the Register), and masses of local colour from coalmines, the Welsh valleys, a Paddington practice, smart and bogus consulting-rooms, and so on. It all makes a large, meaty, very readable piece of dramatised pamphleteering. Calories abound, but subtlety of flavour does not.
Change of tempo. Mr. Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us shoots us violently into the world of Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart : or mote precisely, Oklahoma and Texas. Within two minutes of Opening the book we are in the middle of a jail-break and kidnapping by Elmo (Three- Toed) Mobley, T. W. (Tommy-Gun) -Masefield, and Bowie Bowers, robbers and murderers all, tying up a ta3rirn211 to his steering-wheel with barbed wire, on the run with a hundred miles to go to reach the first hide-out, and bloodhounds baying in the woods. And through 28o pages and nine months the pace keeps up like this. The lingo is as exciting as the tale— how authentic, who but an Oklahoman jail-breaker could say ? Mild sample : " On the fourth night, Chicamaw came, his eyes like a dog sick with distemper his face the colour of ham rind. Bowie's head quivered on his neck and he called, but Keechie left the Bunk without speaking to Chicamaw.
" You look like you'd been making it-all right," Chicamaw said.
" been-all right.' I've thrown every. cent r' I'll swear; Chicamaw. What'S been the trouble ?' ' ' Chicamaw said lie had throVen a''Tulsa hotel garribling. He did have a new car though and-some guns. A tommy-gun tot). By God, he had a Big Papa out there now and he was as ready-as
anybody to start a Little War-. . ." • .
And when these gentry of the South West get back to work and T-Dub carries out his thirtieth bank-robbery, at -Zelton; Tex., the fun- is only beginning. It goes on with much sound and fury to the bitter end, with sentimental interludes Witha= Lula and Keechie and another and more ingeniouS jail-break, until the whole lot, are wiped out. 'Mr. Anderson has a pretty knack of keeping the Story, at top speed all the time, and produces with skill that air of-ruthless toughness which is the fashionable inversion of sentimentalism. To .Bowie and Company, bankeri and shopkeepers and other victims, not to mention " the Laws," are simply " thieves just like us," and are treated accordingly. But artifice, as usual with these novelists of the tough, keeps breaking in.: sometimes in the self-consciously phrased writing-':-" the 'car .sliced the highway:.
wind with the sound.of simmering water," or " the moon had an eye-squinching brightness, radiating six splintered beams, broad as planks "=-sometinies 'More obViOuily,' as Where Bowie sees Keechie's eyes " like 'petals '§ubmetged tiny bowls of unchanged water." But one swallows the story : whole, or not at all.- - Miss Dark's Szin Across the' Sky is an odd blend of the sensitive and sententious, the dramatic and nieladrimatic. -Its setting is a little mysterious at first (to the uninformed reader), abut the sudden apPearance of a shark on page 55 ,clinelies' the matter : it is Australia. Thalassa is a surf- bathing resort, the profitable creation of the paunchy -Sir Frederick Gormley, - and Sir Frederick longs. to round off his 'isensnouily satisfactory property by getting hold of the ram- shackle tut honest township of fisherfolk alongside which, his Own slightly raffish colony has 'been founded. But in his way stands Kavanagh, Its owner; who is also, would seal; a literary genius of world-wide fame (though -weliaire`tO'take this rather on trust). Here, in simple terms, is a good part of that element in the story which, according to the ptiblishers, " makes us think " : mammon versus spirit. There is also- Dr. Denning, with a beautiful but frigid wife, and in love with Lois, widow and artist. Denning is a-somewhat unconvincing blend of introspective sensibility and blunt humanity : he ',- were really so subtle in his feelings as Miss Dark depicts lira,' say in Chapter 8, he could surely- have done more with the Helen than he manages to do. The Melodraina of . Sir Frederick's arson by proxy and Denning's rescue of. the Kavanagh manuscripts from the master's funeral pyre makes a dubious .climax But Miss Dark has gifts, and there are,nuite, good moments. • The same may be said of Miss Leitch. If Interval Before Birth is a first novel, as it appears to be, it shows promise much of its writing, particularly in occasional landstia-Pe grounds. But her choice of subject-is questionable. A French authoress who set out to draw the Modes 'of feelirig and action amongst English. villagers in, say; Cumberland, would be putting her gifts to -an unfair test. So, turning the caserroundaT. about, with Miss -Leitch. Most of her characters are primitive folk of a Provencal village ; " bou diou," they may exclaim; but to my ear they talk much more oddly, and the extreme violence of their feelings and behaviour would have to be 'more insinuatingly conveyed to be convincing. When old Mlle. de Tellousac's house passes into the hands' of some .rich, amoral cosmopolitans, various waves of corruption and, in the end,' tragedy are set up. But despite the feeling that Miss Leitch lavishes on her chafacters, native and invading, the story seems to work itself out in a void.
Boy in Blue is an exercise in the American novelist's stand-by —the Civil War. This time 'the scene is the 7ennesSee and Georgia battlefields; and the -author does little' more than follow, to the death,; he fortunes of one earnest young soldier in the Union armies, Robert Thine, It appears to incorporate some authentic memories and letters; but beyond that there is little to make it stand from .the-iinnual -platoon , of these novels. • " (-Well, I been doing so well.
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