FICTION
By FORREST REID
EACH of these five novels is written with a different aim and in a different mood. Roughly speaking, they represent romance, psychology, satire, history and religion, though when I call Mr. Thorne romantic, perhaps I mean only that he writes with charm and has a sense of beauty. Fruit in Season is the story of the four Dyneleys—Catharine, Glen, Douce and William—and of the old house, Runeham Hall, at Steeple Goring. The novel is constructed in two parts, separated by an intermezzo during which for seventeen years the house remains empty. The first part gives the summer holidays of the Dyneley children in 5920; in the second they return, grown-up, to spend a fortnight together at their old home : then the curtain drops.
It will be clear from this that at any rate the conception of the book is poetic. The house and gardens play their silent parts—gay in the beginning, sad at the end. For the return to them is merely an experiment—Catharine's experiment —and one guesses that it will not be repeated. It is not success- ful : perhaps no attempt to return to the past ever is. The happiness of childhood cannot be recaptured, since it was a part of childhood itself, and changes with the changing mind and body. In those days the present seemed eternal, and friendship and affection had not been supplanted by the dubious substitute of passion :
" rdtais libre et vivais content et sans amour, L'innocente beaute des jardins et du jour
Allah faire a jamais le charme de ma vie."
La Fontaine wrote those lines nearly 300 years ago, but the feeling they express, the desire behind them, the home- sickness and the sense of exile, are reborn in a certain type of temperament with each generation.
Not that Catharine is a dreamer. She is practical, she has her job in London, and knows she can only afford to reopen the house for this one fortnight. She invites her brothers and sister and they come—Glen bringing with him a bored and sophisticated wife, the daughter of a millionaire, Douce her husband Robert, an unsuccessful musician. William, the youngest, is still unmarried, but time has not improved William, and even in this brief visit he finds the opportunity to commit an act of singular baseness. Nor is this all, for to Catharine herself a tragedy happens : she is thirty and falls in love with a boy of twenty who has come down from Cam- bridge. She realises that it is hopeless, but cannot help confiding in Glen, who gives her the only consolation he can find : " Catharine, in the end we're most of us alone." It is true : it is obvious that his own marriage has been a failure and that to escape from loneliness he drinks too much. His wife has a lover—her chauffeur—and perhaps more out of boredom than anything else she announces this to the assembled family, and so brings Catharine's experiment to a climax. Possibly it is not so disastrous as it sounds, for it leaves Catharine and Glen free to return to London together, where they may patch up their lives, and though an outline of the plot accen- tuates its darker side, actually the story contains a just pro- portion of happiness and unhappiness, the early years are irradiated by sunshine, and there is always the beauty of place. The governess who looks after the children in the beginning, and later marries, plays an important part. It is she who marks the flight of time and the progress of change when, in the intermezzo, she wanders through the deserted gardens. She is wandering there again, musing on the past and looking at the-four fir-trees, planted on their birthdays by their father for his four children, when the scene closes in.
In Eiream of Freedom the nature of the subject precludes charm. From start to finish the book is a psychological study, and essentially the study of a single- charaeter; Rtidolph Schillder, a Viennese physician, professor of medicine in a New York medical college. This Schiilder is brilliant in his own line, but temperamentally he is so self-conscious, irritable, and suspicious, that it is surprising we shoUld feel the least sympathy with him. - Nevertheless we do. His •
unhappiness is none the less real because it is almost entirely the creation of his own tormented spirit which, while longing intensely for affection, makes it impossible for him to keep a friend. He falls in love with the wife of one of his patients, risks his whole career in pursuing that love, and no sooner is it returned than he himself fails and the dreamed happiness vanishes in misery and doubt. These agonies of distrust, of bitterness and despair, come through ; the whole book reflects a state of mind from which there is no escape. Yet beneath it we feel that there was a capacity for something very different could it have found freedom, had it not been poisoned by a fatal morbidity of temper, an exasperated sensitiveness that creates the illusion of slights and enmity where none exist. Schiilder is not a pleasant person, but the novel is a genuine achievement : the portrait lives, the man is there in his surroundings, and the tragedy, since it springs directly out of his warped and jealous nature, is inevitable.
Mr. Aldington's Seven Against•Reeves fails, I think, for two reasons : the satire is exaggerated and the book is too long. I found the first chapters amusing, but my amusement waned as the thing continued, always on the same note. Reeves himself, the astute little business man, is a likeable figure, but nearly all the other portraits are caricatures. His wife is a fool and a snob. Her one ambition is to know the " right " people, and she drags her reluctant husband after her. But the " right " people prove expensive, and after all they are not really " right," merely shams and sharks, pseudo-intel- lectuals, pseudo-artists. In real life Reeves would not have been taken in by them for a moment ; his education may have been defective, but his mind is remarkably alert, and his character firm, downright, and honest. Had these people been genuine they would have impressed him, for he is intelli- gent, knows his own limitations, and is anxious to acquire knowledge. Hence his struggles with a book on relativity. He does not understand it, but the thoughts it inspires in him are far from foolish. In the end, of course, he puts his foot down, but not until a great deal of money has been spent, all the puppets have been set dancing, and invention is exhausted. A comedy-farce, Mr. Aldington calls it, and I leave it at that. But one can see how with a little more subtlety it might have been made more entertaining, and a great deal more convincing.
Mr. Thomas Burke has always been fond of inns, and now he has written a novel about one. The Winsome Wench is a good deal more than a background for the Woden family : the management of the inn itself; and its changing fortunes under three generations of Wodens, form the real subject of the tale. In 1825 the Winsome Wench had reached the height of its prosperity as a great coaching inn ; then first the railways began to hit it, and later the omnibuses, and the coming of the great hotels. It might still have survived, however, had Lucian Woden been the equal of his father and grandfather. But Lucian—an incredible figure, it must be confessed, with his dandyism, his Elizabethan oaths, and bookishness—takes no interest in the business. Finally he sells the property, and on Mafeking Night, 1900, when the entire staff has gone out to join in the celebrations, he sets fire to it, allowing himself to be destroyed in the flames. This is not among Mr. Burke's best books. It is readable, because of the pictures of the inn—particularly in the old coaching days—but as a family history it is scrappy and per- functory. The earlier Wodens are uninteresting, while the introduction of Lucian in the last chapters merely produces an effect of melodrama.
Like Mr. Burke, Mr. Thompson, I think, would have produced a better book had he not cast it in the form of fiction. To try to make a novel out of the character and teaching of Buddha seems, on the face of it, a thankless task. One remembers Kim and his lama, and the warm glow of human sympathy and affection that made of their story a 'living, significant and lovely thing. Mr. Thompson expounds Buddha's doctrine clearly and intelligently ; but he is presenting a saint who has passed beyond the reach of human emotions, therefore the relations between master and disciple remain arid, cold, and-lifeless. On the other hand, the book should interest thOse who wisirtcr learn-something of -a great religion:
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