New Novels
IF you write down the plot of Mary Lee Settle's 0 Beulah Land (Heinemann, 18s.), it looks quite remarkably like that of a score of Amber-coloured historical romances : which shows you can never go by plot. Pretty London pickpocket Hannah Bridewell (born in Bridewell, hence the name) meets handsome Squire Raglan in Newgate Prison. Saved from the gallows by her pregnancy, Hannah is shipped to Virginia, separated from her lover, captured by Indians, bears the child, escapes, endures weeks of starvation, anguish and wild beasts, is found and brought to life by Jeremiah, a pioneering Bible-thumper with a kind heart by whom she has nine children, no less. Squire, Hannah's worth- less ex-lover, turns up to disturb the domestic routine, at which Jeremiah shoots him; then Jeremiah and Hannah go on to a new life in a new valley, dimly seen by Hannah during her adventures with the Indians . . . etc. etc. Leaving out the innumerable subplots and secondary characters, we finish with Hannah and Jeremiah's rather unexpected scalping by Indians (this last, of course, is hardly in the Technicolor tradition, for the heroine always comes out on top in the end, whatever the vicissitudes getting there). Yet, as readers of Miss Lee Settle's previous books will know perfectly well, there is no point of comparison at all, beyond the mechanics of the action, between this sepia-coloured reconstruction of an age and outlook and the glossy best-seller. And as for incredible action, every second immigrant's story in eighteenth-century America must have been incredible enough by present standards, transportation, serfdom, scalping, starva- tion and the terrors of unknown country being all in the day's work.
0 Beulah Land's originality is not in its structure, either. It tries, as historical novels generally do, to reconstruct the past through the limited experience, outlook, and interaction of a number of characters at various social and intellectual levels..Its originality is, of course, in Miss Lee Settle herself, for just as no originality of construction or events can ever make up for the lack of it in the author, so no external banality can obscure it; and Miss Lee Settle is one of those writers one comes across once in a very long while whose quality of mind strikes one with quits cnscoacerung Lorcs.i can Wait of only one other novelist
of whom I have felt the same thing (much more strongly, though, in his case) during the past year or two—Mr. William Golding; and it is a measure of Miss Lee Settle's effect that she can be compared, however remotely, however different their methods and styles, with him. What strikes one most about her reconstruc- tion of events is the fantastic physical crudity of life so short a while ago—the shortness of youth, the violence of physical degeneration, even the plain lack of dentistry that made mumbling crones out of women in their twenties. The conversations and the letters, wildly stilted and strange as they are, ring true in every phrase : the accents—cockney, Virginian, eighteenth-century, all combined into a wonderful ancestor of Southern speech—make very amusing listening. Even the stylistic affectations—and there are a number—become part of the impression and the originality, until you have a rather baffling and paradoxical feeling, not so much that 0 Beulah Land is an extraordinary book, as that Mary Lee Settle has an extraordinary mind.
After this, a novel about schoolgirls sounds rather uninviting reading, but Rosemary Timperley's A Dread of Burning (Barrie, 12s. 6d.) is a small masterpiece, within the narrow limits Miss Timperley has set herself, almost flawless. The story of an un- happy child's regeneration through the interest taken in her by her form-rnistress (the narrator) suggests all the pitfalls that await the 'sensitive' novel; so I must stress how entirely unlike the women one might expect to write about adolescent girls Miss Timperley is. Like the best—but rare—sort of teacher, she is passionately interested in her work and world and at the same time humorously aware of its position in the larger world around it; beautifully balanced between the two. There is, in fact, just a pinch of Searle in the mixture. Tender towards her characters, she is robust and funny and adult towards them too; and her staff- room chit-chat is lethal. This is Miss Timperley's first full-length novel : her qualities are already recognisable and mature.
Dorothy Wright's Laurian and the Wolf (Macmillan, 13s. 6d.) is at first sight more amusing and accomplished, being—yes-- very amusing and accomplished in its way, with some wonderful slap-happy dialogue and a nice sense of social differences (vertical, not horizontal : the Army middle class edging up to the rich middle class overlapping the bohemian middle class, and so on). But it is disappointing because, with all its bright eye for the recognisable surfaces and noises, it has little to note beyond them. An edgy, flinty, clever, unsatisfactory book, all starts and stumbles, like Laurian; but, attractive, again like Laurian.
Robert Cross, the author of Death in Another World (Putnam, 13s. 6d.), is plainly full of talent but rather unorganised, so that his novel, intense and personal and in parts electrifying though it is, has too wildhaired an air, too juvenile a psychology. The other world in which death (I won't say whose: it is really a most surprising book) occurs is a valley in the Andes so remote from the world that it seems to have addled the brains of Mrs. Connell, a widow who owns a vast finca and advertises for a manager in The Times. The young man who turns up keeps a—rather too literary—diary, in which Mrs. Connell's oddities are recorded, and her gradual emergence from dragonhood into love: only the love comes, when it does, rather abruptly, so that one shares poor Charles's embarrassment. However, comical though this all' may sound, it is a strangely endearing book, written with enough conviction to make its particular form of madness authentic.
Oliver Moxon's The Brigadier (Peter Owen, 7s. 6d.) is about a brigadier who kills himself because his pension isn't quite big enough; an odd reason, rather like that of the woman who killed herself on the death of her peke. Dry and dispassionate, and with' out a word too many (the book is only fifty-three pages long), Mr. Moxon has made a more moving tale of it than really one feels it deserves.
Siberian tiger-hunts and concentration camps and slave labour, from all of which one gathers the author once escaped, are part of Ivan Bahriany's The Hunters and the Hunted (Macmillan, 15s.)' but (death to any novel) large tracts of it seem to have been written merely to convey information. And it is written in Or perhaps translated into) such curious journalese as kills what
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