Fiction
The House by the Medlar Tree. By Giovanni Verga. Translated from the Italian by Eric Mosbacher. (Weidenteld and Nicolson, los. 6c1.) Quorum. By Phyllis Bentley. (Gollancz. tos. 6d.) Chinese White. By Burgess Drake. (Falcon Press. 9s. 6d.) The Colonel's Children. By Jules Supervielle. Translated from the
French by Alan Pryce-Jones. (Seeker and Warburg in association with Sidgwick and Jackson. 8s. 6d.) IT really does seem sensible, when a new book appears, to read an old book. That, at least, may be a means of restoring one's faith, in this extravagantly bleak season of the art of the novel, in what threatens to become a lower-grade form of literature. Though it is only comparatively old, Verga's / Malavoglia comes to us today with something of an effect of revelation: this, just this, one feels, is the sort of more abundant life that a novel- can offer. It is a wonderfully good book, vivid, powerful, beautifully illuminated in its truth to nature, which Mr. Mosbacher has rendered in a new and extremely well-considered translation. None of the other novels on the shelves this week has a suspicion—or, at any rate, more than a suspicion—of its compelling imagination and humanity. And if novels are to lack imagination and humanity, is there any particular reason why they should continue to be written ?
Though Verga died only in 1922, 1 Malavoglia—the English title is very apt—goes back to more than forty years earlier, and in some degree bears the stamp of the purposeful realism of the period. But Verga's is a highly individual style of narrative, terse and pithy, its realism warmed by the compassionate fire and generosity of his Sicilian sentiment and lit by brilliant imaginative resource. The documentation of the Goncourts or the romantic naturalism of Zola trails a long way behind the instantaneous effect he produces. The story of the decline of the Malavoglia family in their fishing village, told with a grim; sly and touching humour and pointed with a rich expressiveness of Sicilian peasant speech, is informed by a tragic view of life that comprehends more than poverty or the oppression of the poor. Sorrow and misfortune come by chance in Trezza, but it is the innocent whose pride is-broken or whose hope is taken away. Disaster piles up from the moment grandfather 'Ntoni buys a load of lupins—fodder and food—on credit from the rapacious, cheating Uncle Crocifisso. A grandson is conscripted into the navy. and is killed at sea, a son is drowned, the fishing boat Provvidenza ' is smashed on the rocks, the house by the medlar tree is lost, and grandfather 'Ntoni is carried off in the end to the poorhouse to die. Nothing in all this suggests for a moment that the dice have been loaded ; each disaster rings as true as the superb comedy Of the village gossip and scandal. The power and fidelity of the story, in which a score of scenes—Mena's parting from Alfio, for instance —attain a poignant simplicity of statement, are an object-lesson to the clever and unimaginative novelist today.
Good intentions like Miss Bentley's, unhappily, still leave room for something more. Honest, conscientious, sensible, workmanlike, Quorum follows rather too closely the home-spun convention Miss Bentley has herself helped to establish to engage one's interest very deeply. It teases curiosity but does not excite. The construction of the story, which introduces in turn the eight members of a civic- minded committee in a West Riding mill town, is very, very neat and orderly, as neat and orderly as a good child's exercise-book. The eight characters themselves—the liberal, square-headed, bluntly honest, septuagenarian millowner, the sultry young woman, the shady business magnate, the Labour Councillor who began as a
half-timer, the aggressive and simple-minded Communist, the rather nice schoolmarm, and so on—are observed with shrewd professional competence, but they are, after all, mere types only. In its library- list kind, this is a sound if not very imaginative job of work, a good choice for two or three evenings in drawing-room or sitting- room or lounge, or indeed anywhere else, during the August holidays.
Chinese White is set in Chungking and the hinterland to the north-west in 1943 or 1944, and is uncommonly interesting as a semi- documentary piece of fiction. Mr. Drake, who was born in China and taught for some years at a Japanese university, served as a British Intelligence officer in the war-time Chinese capital. His description of Chinese affairs, of the subtleties- of corruption and intrigue of the Kuomintang regime in its terror of Communist influence and apathetic prosecution of the war against Japan, con- tributes a good deal to one's understanding of recent events. Almost every Chinese figure that he draws, though his brush is lightly dipped in gall, is horribly persuasive. But Mr. Drake's first-hand know- ledge of the scene serves also as background to a curious and often touching story of a Chinese theatre girl, a mere child, and the middle-aged British officer who loved her as though she were his daughter and yet almost as a woman also. The story straggles and is patchy in texture—Intelligence and "the finesse of the casual trifle" cut across it somewhat arbitrarily—but the pathos of the odd relationship is suggested with telling candour and delicacy.
What the effect of The Colonel's Children (Le Voleur d'Enfants) may be upon the English reader for whom M. Supervielle has so far been only a name I have no idea. Mr. Pryce-Jones has translated the book with evident zest and affection. Its flavour, he says; is of the kind which attracts or repels ; in his own view, "either as a fairy-story, a parable, or a poetic experiment," Le Voleur d'Enfants has- permanent place in French literature. It tells of a South American rican exile in Paris, an impalpable Don Quixote of a man, rich and childless, who borrowed or abducted other people's children in order to make them happy. In adolescence, however, Marcelle and Joseph fall more or less in love, leaving the anxious Colonel to wrestle with his own timid and overmastering feelings for the girl. The flavour of the story is of a poetic and not easily calculable fancifulness ; inanimate Objects acquire character and a tongue, the characters themselves belong to an exotic caprice, while situa- tions develop not so much from events as from unexpected phrase to unexpected phrase. Tell me, where is fancy bred, In the heart or in the head ? Latin fancy, I think, is nearly always-of the head.
R. D. CHARQuis.
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