Fiction
Nobody's Darlings. By Margaret Iles. (Gollancz. 9s. 6d.) Grand Opera. By Vicki Baum. (Bles. 8s. 6d.) The Three Bamboos. By Robert Standish. (Peter Davies. 9s. 6d.) , Northern Star. By Russell Green. (Rich and Cowan. 8s. 6d.)
THE evacuees are the Nobody's Darlings of Miss Margaret Iles' novel, which continues the history of the central figure in Perry's Cows. He is still the same Perry, stiff and dogged, a determined match for the country folk who think a townsman easy game. This book, which is light in tone, has a distinctly subacid flavour. Miss Iles handles the general muddle of the evacuation with skilful ease, presenting a tragi-comedy which is both informative and amusing. And it is very pleasant to remeet Perry, who is now anxious to move from Broomhurley. For some time he has had his eye on a nice little property, called Brackendown Farm, which would be just the very thing, only it has been badly neglected owing to the carelessness of the previous tenant and a mean land- lord. Tenant and owner both try very hard, but Perry is not to be hustled into taking the place on a seven-year lease. The war looms up. The farm is let to a grass widow, wife of a local middle- wig ; Perry does not want a war, so there won't be one ; but he does want the farm. He takes great trouble with the new tenant, the weepy Mrs. Strance, and in no time at all the property is con- siderably improved. The outbreak of war finds Perry installed at Brackendown ; having got what he wants, he has to fight to prevent it being taken from him: "Perry hated to see other people calcu- lating. He watched Mrs. Small and blazed inwardly. He had a sudden and violent vision of cutting up the black material, pinning it up at the windows of the farm and the cowsheds, and packing four squealing children off to bed. He was not going to have a war! Who was the blooming Government to fill up his house with children and to charge him for darkening his own windows? He would have no black-out. He would have no children. Let the lights of Brackendown show and let the Germans bomb it. lie didn't care. In any case, they were certain to miss and as likely as not hit old mother Small instead, and blow all the pantaloons stuck round the walls over the countryside. 'Keep your blasted black-outs! ' he snapped and walked from the shop."
The nightmare quality of autumn, 1939, is epitomised in the chapters dealing with the reception of the evacuees ; it is a war within a war.
Miss Baum does it again in Grand Opera as slickly as ever! Here is a galaxy of types drawn from all classes of society, under a single roof, this time the canopy of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York one evening 'before the war. Carmen is being per- formed. For leading lady we have the big-hearted, much-married, careless, polyglot-tongued slut Madame Kati Lanik. She is the conventional figure of a temperamental prima donna past her best
period, but fully determined to keep in the limelight for ever. She is supported by an enormous cast which includes her unhappily married pregnant daughter, her playboy architect son-in-law, her ex-husband, who is also conducting the performance, with his latest wife and an ex-mistress or so in the audience. Then there is the collapsing Russian singer, Bhakaroff, and his pupil, Sybil, whom he is soon to marry, singing the role of Don Jose. Then there is madame's dresser - and an old old flame and a young new flame with a whole host of other minor characters (including Pro- perty-man whose only child has chosen to have an attack of appendi- citis and is rushed off to hospital) for make-weight! The evening is heavy with catastrophe ; two people die, one back-stage, the other in a box. Two stars—both male—are born, a woman is hustled from the audience to a maternity ward, &c , &c., &c., and &c. Both too much and too little happen really; giving the whole the mechanical ease of a well-greased escalator.
The Three Bamboos is yet another novel about Japan, where the author lived for some years, as he tells us in a brief preface: " I will not be so blatant as to say that I understand the Japanese, for I do not." The story opens in 1851 the year Commodore Perry broke the blockade of isolation imposed by the Tokugawa Shogunate. The tale covers four generations of the Fureno family. Mr. Standish's methods are rather clumsy and awkward, he suffers from an excess of material and a lack of objectivity in his long- detailed study of ruthless ambition. The characters are all a little wooden and theatrical ; they would be more credible if the author had been content to keep inside the scope of his own limitations. The elder Fureno, a Samurai, living in poverty, by an act of piracy is enabled to send his three sons abroad. From China, Tenjo, the eldest brother, goes to London. Soon after his return the family assume the power conferred by wealth. Tenjo is the unnamed head of the patriotic Society of the Little Flowers, which enables him to arrange the deaths of his son's American wife and his own grandchild. Tenjo marries again, this time a national heroine who had sold herself to the keepers of a brothel in order to pay her father's debts. The son of the marriage, a second Tenjo, has „inherited all the ruthlessness of his ancestors, ends his life in the attack on Pearl Harbour, which brings the book to an end.
In Northern Star we are given a further volume concerning the life and opinions of Mr. Green's boy-hero, Roland Eyre, against the incredibly remote Edwardian period of the present century. The background comes over to some extent, but Roland, at fifteen, remains a spoilt father's darling, smug and self-assured, developing an aptitude for scholarship which prepares the way for Oxford. Mr. Green's style is verbose and jocular, he deals tenderly, too tenderly, with Roland, so that the inner problems of adolescence, while hinted at, remain unexplored. JOHN HAMPSON.
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