Fiction
Bing Cotton. By Thomas Armstrong. (Collins. 12s. 6d.)
READERS who approach The Tables of the Law expecting to find a novel of the order of pseph and His Brethren will be disappointed. Dr. Mann's paraphrase of the book of Exodus, originally written for a fictional symposium entitled The Ten Commandments and now re- issued separately, as an afterthought, in a limited edition, is a sketchy affair better calculated ter-reveal the author's weaknesses than to bring his stronger qualities out. The writing has all the expected urbanity and sly humour, but at the end one is left asking whether the thing was worth the carriage. It is hard to see what precisely was Dr. Mann's intention in writing this study. It cannot have originated In . an imaginative impulse. One must take it, presumably, as an intel- lectual exercise whose object is to present the workings of primitive religious genius in terms comprehensible to the modern rationalistic mind. If so, the effort to force a giant bulk into that dwarfish strait- jacket has the effect one might have foreseen—it doesn't succeed. Dr. Mann's explanation of Moses—he makes him, by the way, the illicit offspring of a Jewish labourer and an Egyptian princess—is sometimes plausible but never convincing. Consider the facile therefores in the opening paragraphs :
"His birth was disorderly. Therefore he passionately loved order, the immutable, the bidden, and the forbidden.
"Early he killed in frenzy ; therefore he knew better than the inexperienced that, though killing is delectable, having killed is detestable ; he knew you should not kill.
"He was sensual, therefore he longed for the spiritual, the pure, and the holy—in a word, the invisible—for this alone seemed to him spiritual, holy, and pure."
It goes on rather like that all through. Sinai is a volcano ; manna is a variety of lichen, and so on. The tremendous possession of Moses by the idea of the holy, which drove him forward with such irresist- able dynamic force, a possession which is inexplicable in rational categories, Dr Mann shows himself wholly incapable of treating or of comprehending. Thomas Mann is a great novelist, no dotibt; no one has claimed that he is a great thinker' and so it will be charitable to put down The Tables of the Law, which is not so much a novel as a speculative essay, as an unimportant minor excursion.
An Avenue of Stone is a skilful piece of contemporary reporting about our post-war lives, or the lives of a few selected personages whom Miss Johnson happens to have had, it would seem, under her observation. Her central character is a reluctantly ageing, but still captivating, beauty whose last bid for youth and life takes the form of a pathetic attachment to a spineless young man who apologetically sponges on her until he finds the girl to make him the kind of capable and dominating wife he requires. It is an authentic piece of observa- tion, with few false notes, and has the unintense interestingness which the opportunity of peering into other people's lives, so like our own, and so unlike, always carries. The fact that it hasn't any other qualities, that the whole thing is flat observation without background or depth, is in one way rather . . . frightening? . . . depressing? . . . while at the same time it sharpens the factual authenticity of the tale as a depiction of contemporary life. Miss Johnson puts the whole thing together with the most expert unobtrusiveness, so that one reads rapidly to the end, to find the story has merged imperceptibly, as it seems, into the world around.
With King Cotton we leave the realm of literature for that of in- dustry and publicity. The industry is that of both the author, who has written what is claimed to be the longest novel of the century, "and the publishers, who seem to know in advance that this is to be "another Collins winner," justifying "the biggest first edition print- ing we have ever made" (the subject-matter happens to be industry, too—the Lacashire cotton trade) ; so what with the reviewer's in- dustry in boring through several hundred of the 928 pages, the em- ployment the monster has given to the printing trade, and the industry with which its prospective mass of readers will plod doggedly through it, it will have a good claim to have wasted more time than any other single comparable phenomenon in post-war Britain. Mr. Armstrong is one of thos&tough minds for whom the visible world exists. When he takes you on a tour he takes you on a tour, and nothing is missed out. His hero, Kit, doesn't just " say ": he "grins," "laughs," " chuckles " and "guffaws." The style is, to put it politely, uninspired : "five sick and sorry young men, after toying with breakfasts to which normally they would have done full
justite. . ." . . . " a couple of dock porters, promised the wherewithal for a quart of ale each, made light of delivering the bags. . and so on. If you can stand that for 928 pages you can stand anything, and
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