Fiction
THE DISENCHANTED is of extraordinary interest to an English reader. Set in the 'thirties, it tells at great length the story of the heyday, decline and-fall of Manley Halliday, an outstanding American
novelist of the 'twenties, who intended, it ii said, to. represent Scott Fitzgerald. Halliday, diabetic, dipsomaniac, down and out, lands a job collaborating on a ridiculous film-script with a young writer, Shep, a devotee of. Halliday's writings but convinced that nowadays —.i.e., in the 'thirties—great writing can only spring from
full social consciousness. Halliday's attempted new start is a failure ; he -turns to the forbidden bottle, and, after suffidient remi- niscence to retell the story of his glorions 'love and life 'in the 'twenties, to death. The book has very many merits. It is always interesting; tech- nically an admirable job. It is often extremely moving, a tribute to Mr. Schulberg'S consistently-brilliant characterisation. But what seems so very• extraordinary is the argument, the matter, the story itself. To us it seems strange that Shep should assume that the 'twenties are so very far away from the 'thirties, should take it for granted that Halliday, in his forties, is probably already dead. It seems strange that_the author should find the American- 'twenties a period of legend, a decade so sharply, so irrevocably, divided from the one that follows. The book is implicit with the assumption that the fantastic playboy-writer Halliday has a proper place in any gallery of American heroes. Contemporary readers are, of course, used to the 'novel in which- the central figure does not attempt heroic stature • but here we have a novel obviously planned on a heroic scale round a central figure who to the English reader could never be-more than the peg for a minor tragedy.
Books about Brighton to-day are always depressing, though some of them are very good and one, ftrighton Rock, was brilliant. The West Pier, the first novel of a projected trilogy, is very good but rather old-fashioned. The last year or so I have had the impression that we (in England, at least) are moving out of the period-in which the only way to write a good navel was to think of a nastiness
and then embody it in a hero. Mr. Hamilton evidently still approves of this method, and his book is an examination of Ernest Gorse from his nasty childhood to the completion of his first suc- cessful confidence trick. For sheer sociological observation the book could hardly be bettered, and, whether describing the process of " getting off " or the details of Gorse's sordid coup, it provides obviously reliable source-material. But both the theme and this mass-observation manner of treating it-recall the 'thirties rather than today, and West Pier should primarily be recommended to those who still hanker after the uniformly depressing writings of that era.
The Cradle of Neptune should have a strong appeal to those interested in the Navy and to those interested in social anthro- pology ; if these groups ahywhere overlap, the book should be a wow. It is the account of a boy's education at Dartmouth Naval College, told with wit that is occasionally adolescent but usually enchantingly crisp ; for instance, the comment on a master's choice of furnishing, that it " had fallen between two pouffes." The educational system itself seems to have been one of unadulterated horror from which the only practical escape is voluntarily embraced disgrace.
Proud Adversary, obviously born out of Buchan and Dornford Yates, has every ingredient for success, France, chases, a beautiful Countess, a gentleman's gentleman and an oliphant. Indeed, I should say that it is a definite improvement on the latter progenitor, though not on the former, there not being quite enough restraint about the thrills which are fast and furious. This is a first novel of, one HANITA LASKI.
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