FICTION

By ADRIAN BELL Star Begotten. By H. G. Wells. (Chatto and Windus. 6s.) A House in the Park. By Ronald Fraser. (Cape. 8s. 6d.)

The Happier Eden. By Beatrice Kean Seymour. (Heinemann.

7s. 6d.) The Outward Room. By Millen Brand. (Cassell. 7s. 6d.) The Heathen. By Honor Wyatt. (Seizin Press and Constable. 7s. 6c1)

Star Begotten is a small book about a big idea. The Kingdom

of Heaven is at hand ! Not perhaps a new idea, but a perennial one newly clothed. It is the idea of the ulterior, the super- human influence, a vibration raining into man from more advanced spheres, instigating a new birth. Mr. Wells is a storyteller, and the stuff of metaphysics is to him the stuff of drama. Writing with his usual gusto he manages to relate a fantastic starry conception with the tensions of daily life among individual men and women. The idea originates in a club conversation and fastens itself on one Joseph Davis, a historical novelist, neurasthenic from overwork. It leads him to doubt the work he is engaged on, his past work and

even the very basis of his domestic relationships and beliefs. Others too, ripe for an obsession through the nerve exhaustion of modern life, are attracted by it, among them a newspaper

magnate who turns it into publicity. The idea dies down, leaving a new sort of hope in the minds of a few thoughtful men, evoking from Professor Keppel a Wellsian vision of the Millennium, and bringing Joseph Davis back to serenity and

confidence in the future, as he tears up what was to have been his magnum 'opus in the symbolic presence of his sleeping son.

It is an entertaining little story, inasmuch as Mr. Wells

has the wit to be witty at the expense of his own idea, at least to admit the fantasticalness of his paraphernalia of Martians

and invisible rays. They are, as it were, the conjurer's top-hat and rabbit. But even while he is distracting the reader in this way he is planting in him the grain of serious intention, to make him exclaim at last—" it's quite fantastic, of course, and yet. . . ."

There is an " other-worldly " idea also in Mr. Ronald

Fraser's A House in the Park, though it is not fully declared until the final pages, and one is apt at first to think that this

is merely a rather rambling though well-told story of childhood and early maturity. It is the story of an affinity, followed from a late Victorian childhood to the present time. The House in the Park is the home of the twins, Bobbie and Hella, who are so alike as children that they dress up in each other's clothes and are not known apart even by their mother. The mother is a woman of Spartan characteristics and high ideals for her children. As they grow up circumstances begin to react upon them differently, changing them at least outwardly from their early closeness of identity. Yet their community of spirit is not really broken ; and Uncle Harry, who appears first as a kind of jaunty epicure, develops through the tale into the advocate of a mysticism, some gleams of which penetrate at times to the twins themselves.

Bobbie becomes a painter, seeking beauty in the solitude of ideas ; Hella becomes engrossed in human contacts. The • War and its aftermath give an ugly twist to the bewilderments of their adolescence, and there follows a period of attempts to manage the pressure of ideal and physical desire, which involve them in equally unsatisfactory alliances. Their very characters appear to begin to suffer under this strain of disillusionment and lost values ; and when their mother dies the home of their childhood becomes the scene of a quarrel between them as bitter as it is without true basis. Finally, when Bobbie's wife leaves him, he is about to solve the tangle of his personal life by suicide. Instead, it is solved by a sort of mystical experience, a getting outside of his suffering self, which Uncle Harry • interprets. Hella, by a momentary act of unfaithfulness on the part of her husband, is brought to the same pass, and together sitting with Uncle Harry overlooking the lake of their childhood, they experience the same visionary peace. It is to Mr. Fraser's credit that through this long and episodic life-story he makes this final consummation not a piece of verbal wand-waving, but something that seems inevitable and real.

TRAVEL WITH BAEDEKER

More obviously than butchers and bakers, certain novelists deserve the " family_" prefix. Mrs. Seymour is a family novelist. In The Happier Eden the family is that of a Victorian

novelist. They are grown up and married when the book starts—all except Rome, who is the only one whose character appears to have no backlash of bitterness on anxiety due to circumstances marital or social. Just when they had all con- sidered her resigned to spinsterhood, she marries Miles Faringdon and settles down to an idyllic existence with him in the former family home. The germ of authorship seems to have been left about the house, for Miles beccimei a novelist too, and writes an Episode in the Sun, which is translated

from his own past. To common people such: tiiings -would occur in Hants or Herts or Bucks ; only to someone with a

name like Miles Faringdon is it given to have had a Brazilian passion. Ronda Etchevezzia is a creature of just that sensuous charm that episodes in the sun are made of. Unfortunately, by a series of coincidences, that past raises its snaky head in this Happier Eden. However, it works out through a dangerous period in which Celia, the modern niece who marries one man in order to have an intrigue with another, and Mark Alton, brother-in-law, lady-killer and blackmailer, take a part. At last the shadow is dispelled ; Rome and Miles are restored to bliss, and Mark Alton, obviously destined for a bad end, takes an overdose of sleeping draught.

Of this book one can only say that it will please those who wish to be pleased, without being made to think too much or otherWise unduly disturbed.

From the praises lavished upon The Outward Room by Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser, one takes it that one is in for a novel of the " powerful " kind. Sure enough, it opens in a mad-house—at least the modern equivalent, a kind of psycho-analytical laboratory. Harriet Demuth has been for seven years unhinged by the death of her brother. She too, she feels, is dead. For the first part of the book we are led through the whirl of her thoughts, fears, dreams, and their investigation by Doctor Revlin. But as soon as Harriet escapes, the thing becomes quite a beautiful, bare

little love-story- She escapes _into the -life of very poor. Mr. Brand's evocation of sprini in a New York tenement is

good ; and thottgh feel'thaCthe Point-Of his book is the final resolving. of Harriet's -" death"' complex in the death of her lover's " bkother; the real point of it is in its perfectly simple presentation of love flowering under the very wheels of industrial life, and_ the. people of the New York tenements.

Whitman thought he could turn and live with animals ; Martha, the central character in The Heathen, is sure she can live satisfactorily only with things.. She tells her story from childhood, when the chairs of her mother's drawing- room seemed so much more real to her than the people who sat on them. After her mother's death she is bandied about from one set of relations to another, is educated in a boys' school, works as a servant, gets married she does not know why, has a child, runs a toyshop, and walks out of married life with a suitcase, leaving the field to her rival, Jane.

That things are more real than people; in the sense that things of necessity are true to their natures, whereas modern people have lost theirs, is .a tenable -thesis. But to state that people should be subservient to things is a mere personal whim ; unless with the idea that by serving things and understanding their true nature, • humanity can find a clue to its own nature. But Miss Wyatt does not state the case at anything like that level. Certainly she " de-bunks " romantic Nature, Mit- only to—substitute her own - dream world.

A novel is a novel, and however much you believe in the superiority of things to people, people are the life of a novel, not things. There are plenty of people in this book, quite convincing people, but the implied- superiority over them all on every occasion of the " queer," the " unfeeling " Martha grows irritating. The pretty, self-dramatising Jane becomes 'Only' as- inversion, a sort of parody, of Martha herself. -