New Novels
Moscow. By Theodor Plievier. Translated from the German by Stuart Hood. (Muller. 12s. 6d.) The Image and the Search. By Walter Baxter. (Heinemann. 12s. 6d.)
HERR THEODOR PLIEVIER'S Moscow, which describes the course of events on the Moscow front from the Get-man invasion of Russia on June 22nd, 1941, until the tide of battle turned with the onslaught of the killing winter of that year, would be called, I suppose, a docu- mentary novel. I suppose, too, that is what it is. Yet in one way the documentary aspect of the work seems to me to matter less than its imaginative insight into the nature of war, today's or yesterday's. This is an unrhetorical book, firmly disciplined in narrative power, but shattering in its illustration of the -error and irresponsibility which go with the strategic and tactical direction of battle. No military plan, Moltke said, survives contact with the enemy. Of course. But what Herr Plievier brings out here, drawing as every novelist of war nowadays must upon the prodigious lesson of War and Peace, is the inherent incapacity of the military leader to control events and the recklessness and inhumanity to which he is urged by failure. What really baulked Hitler and saved Moscow and perhaps Russia ? Not the generalship on either side. You can take your choice between what must still be called chance and what is known as morale.
A companion piece to the author's Stalingrad, which as a picture of war is perhaps even more searing, though it has less formal unity, the present work similarly owes a good deal to the circumstance that Herr Plievier, then a Communist of some standing, spent the war years in Russia, chiefly in Moscow itself. He writes, needless to say, out of an impassioned disillusionment with Stalin's Russia and with the idealistic face of Soviet Communism and also, it would appear, as a German fully restored to a sense of national identity. The one weakness of a narrative which plainly strives for unimpeach- able justice is that it touches all too lightly upon the enormities of the Nazi administration, military and civilian, of occupied Russian territory. In all else, however, or nearly all else, Herr 'Plievier writes with the pen of the recording angel. The scene moves con- stantly from the German to the Russian side and back again, with the whole vast and terrifying confusion of battle projected in clear, precise, brilliantly illuminated fragments of military action or personal history. On the Russian side, it is to the monstrous corruption of power, above all among " the men in leather jackets," that Herr Plievier returns again and again. Allow for something at least o the distortion of German perspective which springs from Germany' defeat, and this is an overwhelmingly truthful book. It appears to have been well translated, though the German style of transliter- ation of Russian names may now and then confuse the reader.
The astonishing fact about Heirs of the Wind, a small whale ot novel by one of the younger Italian writers, is that what on the realist c face of things gives every sign of being a fantastically improbable tale leaves an impression of complete and sober verisimilitude. Imagine a sergeant of carabinieri in a small and secluded town in southern Italy who marries in succession, always for their share of the property, four of the five 'daughters of a landowning family and who, when the book closes, is about to marry the fifth and last. Could anything be more unlikely, even in southern Italy ? As Signor Priscci tells it, the tragi-comic story of this string of marriages carries lively and indeed eloquent persuasion from start to finish. This is an acute and very truthful study of provincial life in the south, its dramatic edge a little blunted now and then by a too even narrative rhythm, but done with insight and resolute candour. The five sisters, more especially' the passionate Francesca and the dry, watchful Lisa, are extra- ordinarily good, each a more telling portrait, as it happens, than the monster Nicola, the sergeant turned landowner, who is just a bit wooden. The novel is very down-to-earth and lacks something, I think, of transfiguring power, but is an impressive piece of work for all that.
I have looked in The Image and the Search, refusing to be put off by its dreadfully jejune opening, for an unambiguous stamp of truth or imaginative truth, and have found instead the extreme of emotional susceptibility to shock and a desire to shock in return. Mr. Walter Baxter attracted unusual notice with his first novel, Look Down in Mercy, a war novel with Burma for its setting and clearly drawn from outraged experience. Its power was undeniable, though it seemed to me that the agony was piled high. There is something of similar power, a similar incantatory strain of horror, in parts of this second novel, though on analysis this is surprising, since Mr. Baxter's epithets are so frequently hollow and his language in general is apt to be stiffly and awkwardly commonplace. The obsessional violence of his air of conviction apart, I can see only an inverted convention of magazine fiction in this story of a young woman, rich, beautiful and undistinguished, who wallows in a trough of promiscuity looking for the perfection of sexual satisfaction she had experienced for a year or two with a husband who is missing, believed dead. Sarah Valmont's fantasies of the ecstasy of lust, which she combines for a space with prodigies of efficiency in the shellac business and which take her to Spainend then to India„seem to me, all things considered, trivial. What view .do they hold of life, after all, outside magazine fiction ? The Indian scenes are much the best in the book—the descriptive writing here momentarily catches fire--but for the rest Flaubert found it unnecessary to tack on metaphysical glooms and mystificai ions to the figure of Emma Bovary.
R. D. CHARQUES
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