. Fiction

By PETER BURRA • Far Forest. By Francis Brett Young. (Heinemann. Ss. 60.) A Prayer for My Son. By Hugh Walpole. (Macmillan. 7s. Gd.) Recoil. By J. L. Hardy. (Collins. 7s. 6d.) City for Conquest. By Abel Kandel. (Michael Joseph. Ss. Gd.) Fear in the Heart. By Constande Malleson. (Collins. 7s. Gd.) Tin: earth of fiction, like the earth of fact, is for sale. It is the most obvious circumstance which the two possess in

common. . From the slums to the fells there can be few plots of English ground left in which some speculating novelist has not staked out a private claim. Small wonder that so many have been driven abroad, others into their Ruritanias. Hardy's imitators, appreciating as always the manner but not the spirit that had prompted it, have left the countryside almost uninhabitable.

This fascination with Place is simply for Place's sake. Almost nobody since Hardy has used it philosophically as he did, as the temporary incarnation of an idea. A few have treated it symbolically ; but the majority finds it useful for its own picturesque and atmospheric charm. Eminent among these writers are Mr. Hugh Walpole and Mr. Francis Brett Young, both of whom add to their already long lists of regional fiction within a few days of each other. Before these two names one does well to remind oneself that it all depends upon what one expects of the novel. The writing is careful and often sensitive. There is a feeling for landscape in the best manner of water-colour observation. The story is full of invention and well told. They disdain the most obvious means of popular appeal. Yet their popular success seems somehow too easily achieved, and one looks in vain for any- thing which is memorable or illuminating.

Far Forest is the story of three generations of Wildens and their stone cottage in the idyllic Gladden Valley on the

northern border of Shropshire. David and Jenny, cousins of the youngest generation, fall in love at first sight as children.

They become separated, and the cottage is deserted. Manifold are the adventures and sufferings of each, almost sordid, indeed, at times, but always adequately picturesque, before their inevitable return to the old cottage in each other's arms.

On every page of the book that conclusion is so obvious that it vitiates the possibility of any serious interest or anxiety in their fortunes. It can only be a matter of time—and reading a little further. If things are so manifestly going to come right in the end, why did they ever have to be complicated at all ? To provide the material of a novel, of course, the novel being a perfect fairy-tale world of pretences about the real world. It is charming to be the spectator of scenes so excellently produced, and nice to learn all about chain-making, the training of teachers, hop-picking, and—special tit-bit offered on the dust-cover—" the repressed lives of girls who

serve in farm-houses." (Really somebody should make an anthology of publishers' puffs.) All these- separate items are, in fact, thoroughly enjoyable, but one is too conscious of the futility of suspending one's disbelief.

Mr. Walpole seems positively to boast of writing fairy-tales. " No characters or incidents in this book," he states at the

beginning of A Prayer for My Son, "have been in any way suggested by characters or incidents outside this book." What on earth were they suggested by, then ? The extremest inventions of fiction can but be re-arrangements of things with which we are famili'ir. And it is caricature, rather than fairy- tale pretence, which detracts, in this case, from distinct actuality. Benz, it seems, a kind of fable, it has. rights to caricature ; but being cast in the form of a. novel, it meets thereby witli difficulties. Aunt Janet, for example, a frus- trated spinster, is converted. by the events of the novel into a human being. Unfortunately the conversion is unconvincing

because the picture of the spinster was so extreme. A cari- ( atured character cannot develop—a truth which the story

itself is concerned with as a human 'fact. Rose, the husband- less mother of a child, John, whom she had surrendered some years before the story's opening to her lover's father, as she then thOught, for the child's sake, is now fighting to save the_ child from the grandfather's megalomaniac tyranny. . this takes place in Mr. Walpole's. t.43144ritP...4aJidand,_and the incongruity of the setting is, in this case, its dramatic function.

It is an amusing and exciting story, as a story, even though it does, not extend beyond its anticipated successful conclusion. But in, itself it has a secondary interest, the grandfather, Colonel Fawcus, imagining himself to be a kind of Hitler, Goering, Mussolini,, rolled all into one. The fact that Rose has worked at Geneva suggests that we are to take the story of John's deliverance as a fable, though it can also be taken at its face value as an account of symptoms that are everywhere

in the air. The Colonel himself is a caricature ; but then so, as far as others are permitted to see them, are Hitler, Goering, &c. They are all extravagantly playing parts which they dare not or cannot change. A caricature cannot get better, and must get worse. And the unreality of the Colonel is in this case the closest version of the reality.

Recoil handles the theme of a would-be " enlightened " dictatorship in a German province called "Mideuria" annexed

by the neighbouring Russians after the war. -The story centres round the platonic affair between a Government intelli- gence officer and a German cabaret girl who is mesmerised into working for the other side. It is intensely exciting, though one or two points strike one as over-extravagant, the mesmerism business for one, and the device by which the Dictator saves the girl's life. I am not quite sure why it is so important for the officer to conceal from the Dictator his personal knowledge of the girl ; and I feel that the resolution of everything in a postlude after three years' interval is unsatisfactory ; it should have been worked up continuously to a climax. Apart from that the story is as well planned as one could wish, and all the material of character and circumstance is there for a drama of Dostoev- skyan' proportions. However, the author prefers for the most part to leave everything in terms of pure story, and its many poignancies rise directly out of it, without further interpretation.

City for Conquest is an extreme example of the Place-

obsession. To quote the dust-cover mice more :

" If ever a man laid bare the soul of a city Abel Kandel has done so in this fighting, thrusting, shouting tale of New York. . . . It symbolises the whole travail of the United States to produce modern America."

At least, it aims at this peculiar object, by taking the lives of some five or six different groups of New Yorkers and presenting them ,cinema-wise in flashes and fragments across the years from 1907 to 1927. Each group provides in itself material for one ordinary novel. Does the sticking together

of five or six ordinary novels make the total result any less ordinary.;? Nowidays when novelty of method is the first

thing =we we all look for, the general answer will be Yes. Not that this is particularly novel ; but it is, for once, particularly well done. There is a distinct interest in thees parate lives, and the writing is vigorous and full of ideas. Eda, the fanatical journalist—" I am sick with love of the town. I am big with New York "—provides a focal point for grasping the City as an entity, but we never quite get there. The moving camera gives us quick glimpses of many items. What it never allows us is to see one thing steadily and whole.

With Fear in the Heart we are once more intimately involved with the English countryside ; this time it is North Somerset. It is an ambitious-piece of work, the Most ambitious in this list, but I am doubtful if it can be reckoned the most

successful. It describes the attempt of two very different people td overcome their neuroses through love, and the writer's sensibility seems to be too distinctively feminine to handle the hard parts of the psychology convincingly. It is a symptom of this weakness that in describing the struggles of her artist-hero she relies largely on recording his interest

in special:, pictures ;and trooks, in particular Miss Waddell's Peter Abelard, as well as--other obscurer and unacknowledged ' sources. There is no denying the force of certain passages, especially the nervous breakdown at the end. But the humour is strained, and the circumstances too exclusive to hold. the- reader's- interest consistently.