Fiction

SEAN O'FAOLAIN B y 7s. 6d.)

Nancy Brown. By H. P. McGraw. (Heinemann. 7s. New Arcadia; By Maurice Bedel. Gs.)

" An ! yes ! " sighed a furniture-remover man to a friend of mine. "The Pictures are all right, but you get used to them. And books, too," he sighed again as he lifted a box of them.'

" Books are the same. Read one and you've read 'em all ! " I recalled this wise pantechniconite as I read my colleague,

Mr. William PloMer, last week complaining of the sameness. • of modern novels:' I recalled his sorroWful words again as

I finished the th&d novel of/in? batch' in-which there was' either the love-tangle ofa man and two women or a woman and two men, and opened the fourth in which once more .tr-zlo-ve-

tangle wound up its ravelled sleav,sof care. Then I remembered the shOck I got in my first yoUth when a too-clever friend asked me if I didn't think that everything had been said in literature that could possibly be said ; and how I returned to him, triumphantly, a year after, to quote him from old John Butler Yeats :

" Change-is the law of life. There are not two ways of &Sing the fifth proposition of Euclid—either you know it or you don't. But when you leave ideas and come to feelings and sensibilities; no two men are alike—they differ as a leaf on a tree differs from every other leaf:' In each is concealed a lovely surprise if only someone

would dt:aiv the curtain." • - -

I am afraid Miss Hinkson has not drawn any curtain in The Dpiy Rooted. She has an idea, to be sure, that is some- what new—the Irish exile of the Big House sighing for her roots, much is -e. Russian aristocrat might sigh for his. But whether

it is that her characters are a little too closelY shuttered by _ .

convention—like those prim suburban houses behind whose curtains one feels there may be a Tchekov comedy or a Strindberg tragedy but which never reveal anything— or whether she has not the talent to be a drawer of curtains, she has not, in John Yeats's words, given us any " lovely surprise." Her Kathleen Lavenham, the deeply-rooted, who has married into England and must stay there, moves rather too prettify through her nostalgic moods for that, and there is over much of the scent of cut meadows, and of phlox, irises, bronze-tipped chrysanthemums in low bowls, and birds " who never sing so sweetly as to an accompaniment of pain." In that sense her book is scarcely original enough to detach itself from one's memory of dozens like it, even if one can and does luxuriate in the touching tenderness of its nostalgia or enjoy its pictures of house-party ," characters " like Mr. RandOlph.

One does not say the same of Mr. Lance Sieveking's The Perfeet-Wiich simply because he revels unashamedly in the senti- mental convention which Miss Hinkson attempts to rehabilitate. His novel- will please the maiden. of bashful -15 because it is frankly. a story as old as the hills, and it will interest the rest of us because its setting is as new as the B.B.C. where the heroine is an announcer. The old triangle—the simplest instru- ment -in..the orchestra of conventional situations—is rung sweetly,-between the Prince, the Princess, Virginia the actress, and Sally the good-little-girl, but though " there is no lady in the laird half so sweet as Sally " the joke is that Prince Fabian is ensnared by the Tragic Muse while wishing she was for all her mystery sweet and innocent like Sally. It is neatly done and for his sake and Sally's sake we are sufficiently terrified of the perfect witchif is Witch-L-to be' titillated throughout by a PleaSurable suspense. The .man with the pantechnicon say, might say, " Same old story," but he would be unfair because he would not say it until he had turned the last page and

enjoyed himself to the full. • - •

A very different story is Mr. Carleton's Saturday to Monday, which tells of the present but hopeless and somewhat calf-love of the bank clerk Peter Kendall and the lost love of the Egyptologist Robert Lyster. The characters are so much more individualized and their actions have so much more of that :unexpectedness which one never gets from the con- ventional writer ; but it is all done in what has come to be known -.RS " stream of consciousness " style, with much Joycean allusiveness, and elusiveness, and a great parade of suspicious knowingness. Certainly it is one way of getting 7s. 6(1.) readers to feel inside a character,—to tell us nothing but what 6d.) they are thinking—though always open to the greirt'danger of Allan.. them to feel, rather, -inside the author wtise moods gd.) tend to impose themselves on the whole quality and atmo-

i sphere of the book to the exclusion of the atmospheres that

exit : tapesize, grey cloth, alizerme, clubbing, slashing; Seutelhing ; and the terms, meaningless to them of his : • fractional burial, extended builal, Contracted -burial, monochromatic geometric decor, polychromatic naturalistic decor- r krasis, mimation, apoco- pated finite-'verbal forms. He dismounted slowly, putting with care his left foot first to the ground, before the Metropole. What would one .eall such architecture. I wonder. Byzantoanglican Indeed; it is':basked like a weasel . . . "

And so on:- It is clever: But, - meanwhile, what has hap- pened to the unfortunate Character ? :However, if one can ' enjoy the hard metallic exteriors of things, and is not in search of other wealth; the Competence of Mr. Carleton is undeniable, and he is not 'without: p'enetration and ,human sympathy.. My only -quarrel with him is that he has 'chosen to give these qualities a fair chance.- , In its own way Nancy Brown is also a love-story (with the 'usual 'triangle): Brit this time 'we get vigour, reality and, what is most to beadinire- d'in Mr. McGraw, an intuition

—to some degree an intuition of genius about the emotions of, in Whitman's phrase, " men and women in their ordinary clothes." .• Everything- is here done so objectively that one sees as in a picture the ugly town, the factory, and the greyhound track,or.Garsden,; and...those _rude characters whose lives centre about both—Nancy, the lovely, Titian- tinted, unlettered, sidestreet guttersnipe ; Evan Driscoll the self-assured and go-ahead Welshman who is prepared to get on in the world by marrying Gwyneth Mortimer,---the unattractive but masterful and intelligent daughter of the factory-owner ; and equally real are the usual upstage characters—none of whom (unlike Miss Hinkson's and Mr. Sieveking's supers) are non-functional, and all of whont help actively to create the necessary illusion of a large and varied life about the central figures.

Novelists are easily praised for their -",courage" in these days, but Mr. McGraw has the right kind of courage : • he has not been afraid to dive into the rather muddy pools of common souls, and if he has not exactly found pearls of great price there, he has at least found in them something that satisfies one's innate belief in :the deeency 'arid fitness of life. That is what I call literature—to find the lovely surprise where one least expects it; and that, too, is realism in the best sense, a quality of penetration that saves what might so easily have been a drab bock abrOut drab people. The more timid and less sympathetic will not feel this way; I

know, about Nancy Brown, and they will prefer to wait

before becoming fellow-divers with Mr. McGraw until he chooses to take humanity on a less circumscribed level than this of inddstrial

Novelists (and publishers) are deceptive wretches. I left

till last M. Bedel's satire on Communism, hoping to finish my fortnight's reading on a merry note.. But .this farcical picture of a group of French idealists 'who plan to raise a new arcadia in a country-house under the guidance of a female Soviet shock-worker is not as merry as one might

wish. It is surely obvious to set a pacifist talking pacifism and then show, him attacked by a grass-viper;? It is also surely

rather mechanical to show the Soviet 'gird easing UP' rimier the influence of wine and ending by falling in love ? I very much fear the book is published, not because it is a good satire, but

because it is a satire on what people like to see satirized. For if it were a satire, on, say, Sport, or the Church of England, where our sympathies would not be pre-engaged, I feel certain that it would be recOgn4ed at _Tree by its publisher for what it is—jejune to 'the point of ithbecility. But; then, as an old bookseller once - said to nrii; " Ail publishers are -like Bacon's young menL-they see visions and dreain alreafas."

'belong properly to each character. . When I .read a passage like the following I do not feel a real character at all :

" PeOple—trio-ied in Cotton Square, passing along Southgate, entering and -leaving by Crozier Street, Bent Road and Oldthorpe Road. All moved on their concerns wound up by needs. Watching them he considered the terms, meaningless to him, of thekemploy- m