New Novels
The Balloon. By Henry Phelps Brown. (Macmillan. 12s. 6d.) The Balloon and A Song of a Shirt are both about life in the army during the last war. One is concerned with the early months in France, the other with the last in Cairo; and each stresses the energy with which officers and men insist on and evade the regulations laid down for the conduct of an army in wartime. The opening chapters of The Balloon are convulsed by the freezing-up of a van and the loss of twelve thousand ft-ands from the imprest account. A Song of a Shirt seethes round a point of spit-and-polish etiquette. These themes, minor and incidental, are inflated by occupational insanity to an importance greater than survival or the overriding fortunes of war.
1 do not know whether Mr. Brown has written anything before, but there will certainly be a concert of voices demanding that he write again. Mature, skilful, and honest, The Balloon is the work of a writer who knows his fellow men and likes them. Candid to their least attractive quirks, it radiates a feeling for character and idio- syncrasy which is never sentimental. Many stOries of war are warmed by a boozy good fellowship which blurs what Dr. Johnson (quoted in the novel) would call the anfractuosities of character. Mr. Brown gives us the warmth without the extenuating haze. The Major, the Padre, Geoffrey, Adrian, the Colonel, the various sergeants and privates, are drawn in the round. The dialogue is excellent—Mr. Brown has that rare gift, an ear for the rhythms of individual speech— and there is never too much of it. The story comes to a climax at Dunkirk, whence the Padre does not return. The portrait of this man, in all his awkwardness and obdurate nobility of purpose, is almost embarrassing in its truth; but officers and men see below the surface. Quiet, accurate, and unrelenting, The Balloon is a triumph.
Mr. Sykes shows us the machine at its stup:dest. Charged by one General to deliver an envelope into the hands of another, and nearly losing his life in the process, a young officer is cursed for presenting himself improperly dressed.
"You had ample time to get a uniform and a cap. To appear as you are in that shirt is a deliberate insult to the King's Commission and to General Gittle, to say nothing at all of your own superior officer. , . ."
The recipMnt of this rebuke unfortunately allowed himself a moment of left-wing humanity in his reply: upon which lapse and its punishment follow a number of things. The Officers in this story discuss Kafka and Gauguin, and their idiom differs in other respects from that of those in The Balloon, but the book shows with equal clarity what the army does to men, for good or ill. Mr. Sykes is the more sopit sticated, the more nervously intellectual writer, and the whole story is brilliantly ink 11 gent; but, somehow, his abundant gifts do not seem compl t ly adapted to his theme. There is often a sense of imperfect Mance, as if a powerful engine were being driven by someone who has not quite mastered the gear-changes, or an actor accustomed to a large theatre having difficulty in adjusting his vo:ce to a small one.
The Quiet River is i.Lo about war, but from a different angle. Its scene is Korea. A mother and her daughter, fleeing from horror, find themselves in the hands of some British gunners.
"How could we guess you would be so different from those who took my daughter? • . . You are fighting for something more important than land, more important than riches, even more important than life itself . . . for tolerance."
Pleasantly and sincerely written, it sounds a little naive after the other two: tendentious, even if in the right direction. - Whar Nobody Told the Foreman, the fictional autobiography of a woodworker, is a stubbornly likeable mixture of insight and crudity. Shrewd always, sometimes heavily laboured, it brings an honest whiff of sawdust and"The Rcigged-Trousered Philanthropists: and I suspect that its humane and crotchety message will go home to many readers whom a more polite address would never reach
L. A. G. STRONG
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