FICTION
MEN AND MONSTERS
The Informer.. By Liam O'Flaherty. (Cape. 7s. 6d.)
AMONG the hundreds of novels which appear there are, each rear, only two or three which rise so far above the normal as to become permanent literary achievements. The rest is :current fiction. But on this lower level there are comparative *heights, books which are not, indeed, events in the lifetime of 'those who read them, or books of destiny, but which in their :own field have so much merit that they call for warm praise and serious attention. Such may be of any kind, detective or :adventure stories—like Masefield's Sard Harker— or tales of ,sentiment and character or new windows into a shadowed -corner of life. Mr. O'Flaherty's The Informer is of the last type. Ireland has become a terra incognita to us of late, -Dublin a town of mystery, and its inhabitants strangers. The -Irish writers we know already wrote of a past era. And so Mr. O'Flaherty's story of the Dublin underworld to-day is, in , all its grimness, so much of a revelation that for this alone it compels our interest. He never makes the common error, either, of falling into sentiment about Ireland or slipping out of the world of reality into that non-existent world of petulant, half-godlike and utterly fictitious Irishmen that other writers have created out of their false vision and saccharine fancy. The Informer is the terrible story of a revolutionary ex- policeman's betrayal of his bosom friend, a gunman wanted by .the police. This hunted creature, half dead of consumption, had crept home to see his parents. Gypo Nolan the ex- policeman knew it : "A monstrous idea had prowled into his head, like an uncouth beast straying from a wilderness into a civilised place when little children are alone . . . Two facts rumbled about in his brain . . . .First, the fact of his meeting with MePhillip. Second, the fact of his .having no money to buy a bed for the night."
Gypo' hangs about all evening in the possession of his terrible idea. Then, yawning and slouching, he goes into a police station and claims the reward offered for information concerning MePhillip. The consumptive is killed the same evening.
But this is only the beginning of The Informer, the basic situation. The stuff of the book is Gypo's relation to the dead man, to his antagonist Gallagher, head of the revolutionary force to which he belongs and whose ruthless power he so much fears, and to the dead man's mother. To disarm suspicion he goes to McPhillip's home, in a state of inarticulate misery and apprehension, and sees the misery he has caused. The dead man's mother sits there, the tears streaming down her fat checks :
"She held Gypo's attention like a powerful magnet .. . He was thinking how good she had been to him. She had often fed him. More precious still, she had always had a word of sympathy for him, a kind look .. . These were the things his strange soul remembered and treasured. There were no others who were soft and gentle like she was."
Though his dark and confused soul is chiefly concerned for his own safety, the strange relation which always holds between murderer and victim affects the giant Gypo. And there is another bond—the link between pursuer and pursued, strong as any passion—between Gypo the brute man of muscle and his Chief, the intellectual revolutionary, Gallagher. In the conflict between them Gallagher wins. Gypo is convicted of his treachery and shot down by gunmen comrades. Gal- lagher stands by with his hands in his pocket, .smilieg. The dying Gypo crawls on his knees up the steps of a church, where his dead friend's mother is praying for her son :
"He set out with a great sigh, towards her. He fell in a heap in front of her seat ... People were rushing to him talking. He waved his hands to keep them away. It was very dark. He swallowed the blood in his mouth and he cried out in a thick whisper "Mrs. McPhillip, 'twas I informed on yer son F rankie. Forgive me. I'm dyin' ."
For all its ominous atmosphere and its horror, The Informer is singularly restrained and full of sanity. There is no attempt to make our blood curdle, only a wish. to show us an aspect "I forgive ye," sho sighed ... " clidn't know what yo were
doin'." _ ,
of truth. Its author, -neither- for nor against - the -revolt*: tionaries, simply exhibits them to us as men of virtue and vice mingled in dangerous proportions, men of action gone mad in a chaotic and disordered time and place. Gypo, though a brute, cunning and malevolent as any hungry tiger, is truly a man and dies like a man, strong in his soul. The dark vision of him which Mr. O'Flaherty gives us is not disgusting, though very awful and agonizing. We look on the gross figure of a contemptible wretch, but we can see, as only a serious and salutary writer about crime makes us do, even in that blood,- stained monster Gypo, a reflection of a part of ourselves and of all humanity which we choose to forget, and hope to banish by forgetting. But it is good sometimes that the Beelzebub in humanity should be made manifest ; for he is anything but vanquished, and Mr. O'Flaherty's fierce picture of revo, lution does well to remind us of it, lest we grow too self-coraT placent and come to be taken unawares.
In The Elder Sister Mr. Swinnerton had no such excuse as had Mr. O'Flaherty for digging in dark places. He writes of a foolish typist, half dead of love for her brother-in-law and at last falling into adultery with him. Here was also an inhuman as well as an anti-social treachery, for his wife, her own sister, loved the man. There is no reason why crime should not be the motive of literature, else we must banish half the Bible stories, and Greek tragedy and much -of Shakespeare. But Mr. Swinnerton illuminates horror with lin more beauty than does a newspaper report. His story merely distresses and disgusts, and therefore it cannot on any account be justified.
'1 he scene of Mockery Gap is close by the rural setting of Mr. Powys's former book, Mr. Tasker's Gods, but nearer the seashore. Greed was the subject of the last book and stupid malice the subject of this. It is a pity, seeing that he is a painstaking writer gifted with an agreeable clarity of vision and economy of style, that Mr. Powys's hatred of mankind so completely gets the better of him. He has sympathy only for the weak, foolish ones, like the little old maid in Mockery Gap who is dying of cancer, and still waiting for the reply to a love. letter she wrote to a neighbour fifteen years before. The bearer of the letter is a mean lunatic, and all the other inmates of the seaside village depicted are as bad or worse. The reader Is not convinced. True, in a country village there is mischief- making, there are cruel and terrifying rumours, much folly and some suicides. In Mockery Gap there is nothing else. In Hans Andersen's story, The Snow Queen, the devil constructs a ghastly distorting mirror which is smashed to pieces, and tiny fragments of it settle in srime folk's`eyes, making them full of bitterness and hatred. Such a wicked mote seems, surely, to have drifted Mr. Powys's way. Were it to be washed out, he would still see envy and beastliness in plenty in the world, and not only in the remote village ; and he would still see clear enough to suffer (even more deeply) with the suffering. But he would see, too, that men are not as base as a Misanthro- pist thinks, and he would no longer repel us by crowding several suicides on top of each other in the same book as he now does in Mockery Gap. For, indeed, the world is not so wholly in the power of the devil as he thinks.
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