FICTION

Sanda Mala. By Maurice Collis. (Faber. 7s. 6d.) IN my experience of fiction-reviewing I do not think that

until now I have found a new novel which I could commend to all readers, feeling certain that those who could not read it,

or reading, were not moved and searched by it, would be shown up and to be condoled with, whatever their arguments of defence or attack. But here is that novel—Grey Birds, by Arthur van Schendel, and translated from the Dutch by M. S. Stephens. It is the first of this master's works to

appear in English; but now that so good a beginning has been made we must hope that in due course many more volumes of his work will be made available to us.

Before attempting to describe the book, perhaps I should qualify my condemnation of hypothetical skippers or non- readers of it by saying that it cannot be measured by lending

library tests and so, whereas its classic quiet and its unre- lenting sadness may seem impossible today or unalluring tomorrow, there yet must be in every sane adult life an hour on which Grey Birds will lay its imprint Memorably, some-

what as when we were younger a line of Virgil, perhaps,

sealed us to acceptance of eternal things, or as a parable of the New Testament illumined and simplified morality.

Not that there is any specific simplification of moral values here, or any claim for it. But following the greatest examples, and as Saint Teresa attempted to illustrate the mystical ecstasy by metaphors of kitchen and garden, so this Dutch writer pre- sents the eternal, unresolved theme of Stoicism, or rather of victorious virtue in an unbelieving and savagely ill-rewarded Christian, by framing it within the simplest possible pattern of frugal labouring life.

The story is that of the Book of Job, the devices of which

are lightly and humbly adjusted to a plot which is, of course; much more quiet and unassuming than the patriarch's. A Dutch boy, humble and having to be assisted by charitable people, dreams of becoming a botanist, but has to earn his living as a market-gardener. From childhood he notices the inexorability of events against human will, but though faith in the Providence of his tradition forsakes him early, he de- velops neither arrogance nor self-pity. He possesses natural goodness and, innocently armed in it, he walks upright through a life of mounting sorrow to a culminating tragedy which neither defeats him nor leads him to the faith which his three friends, his " comforters," desire him to find as the resolution of his story. He cannot forsake his humble integrity, but neither can he altogether, throughout his irrational trials, shake off the idea that an evil genius pursues him in the person of his stepbrother, whom he once accidentally injured and who is, indeed, the author of his most heavy sorrows. But he cannot escape either into the luxury of this superstition or into self-pity before the feet of God. He is bound by his conviction of blind patience and, at the end, " late as it is, I still have to work, for my daughter."

The story is timeless and noble. It is unpretentious ; it has irony and even a wintry humour. It sets down the full pain and cycle of life without an unnecessary stress, placing its personal events into relation with the eternal question of the fall of the sparrow as naturally as it stretches the little neat rows and furrows of a market-garden under the vast, milky skies of Vermeer. And to praise the faultless manner of its translation into English would seem as if to separate the bark from the tree ; I cannot imagine how a very difficult task could have been better done.

Any ordinarily entertaining novel is bound to be flat and

unprofitable when read in the same week as such a work as Grey Birds, but The Green Tree and the Dry, by Mr. Mor- chard Bishop, has actually a certain freshness of manner and shape. It tells, perhaps a little too facetiously, in its first pages, of the rise to a very limited and dull success as a play- wright of an insurance clerk, and shows how, safely retired into Devon with iris limitations, his neat income and his prospect of lifelong idleness, he attempts to get himself dully married. But an impulse prompts him to read the letters and look through the souvenirs of a love of long ago, when he was twenty-one. So the author reconstructs what was done in the green tree, and one reader certainly found it rather shy- making, as we used to say. But tenacious as all reviewers must be, I found when I had gone through the endurance test of the dead Katherine—were we really as embarrassing as that in 1924?—that Mr. Bishop made his point—that dread- ful, wordy, crude and sentimental as the days of salad were, yet they were, they are, the best days of any life, at any level. The moral is " give me back, give me back the wild freshness of morning," even if it has to be as wildly fresh as 1924. I expect Mr. Bishop is too right.

Sanda Mala is light reading of the easiest kind—a very brightly coloured fairy tale. An unknown painter who in youth, funnily enough, used to dream about a half-visible Burmese girl, is summoned suddenly to Burma, all expenses paid, and with a good commission to paint the portraits of an aristocratic, not to say royal, Burmese family. Thereafter, with a great deal of light comedy and picturesqueness, and with a few little ups and downs to give body to an idle dream, he woos and wins the hitherto half-invisible Burmese girl, who is immensely rich and very delightful. He plays for his own side, incidentally, by becoming a lord half-way through the story. And everything ends most entertainingly in an all- night gala on the island hill of Patit. Scenery and character are gracefully touched in, and one Irish reader was reminded sometimes of the saying that the Burmese are " the Irish of the East." Is Mr. Collis then its Somerville and Ross?

KATE O'BRIEN.