Fiction
Return Journey. By Beatrice Kean Seymour. (Heinemann. 9s. 6d.) Enter Three Witches. By D. L. Murray. (Hodder and Stoughton 9s. 6d.)
I Live Again. By Warwick Deeping. (Cassell. 8s. 6d.)
HERE are three library favourites, all writing up to their us standard, which means that their admirers will doubtless get w they have been looking forward to. But a reflection arising to
reviewer of these books is that if their authors are—as assured' they are—library favourites, that covering phrase is a very loose on
and no kind of yardstick ; for Mr. Frank Swinnerton, in a rece article in The Spectator, has dismissed many of the most promisin of his own generation of novelists under it—and if the works Rose Macaulay or Aldous Huxley are to wear the same label the three sedative and unexacting novels listed above, then it clear that the frequenters of lending libraries are an unaccountab lot, and nothing general as to taste or wit is to be deduced fro their vagaries.
Return Journey starts slowly, and rather confusingly ; I susp the author of having begun one book, and allowing it to devel into quite another. We start off with an immense amount of p1 A rich and attractive young woman wakes up one morning in h very fine flat to find her cad husband dead in .his twin bed at I side. She had—rather oddly, considering what we learn later his glowing health—administered some sleeping stuff. There h to be an inquest, which she gets through all right; but there is catch in the business, and we have to work out the past, as think. But, in fact, we never really do so. The return journ of the title turns out to be no more than the • somewhat labour examination of the restoration to normal happiness, and to lo of a rather slow, self-pitying woman with some odds and ends trouble and disappointment on her mind. We never really get do to the plot, any more than we are allowed to understand or resol in any sense Claudia's odd experience in the tomb of Tutankham which, seeing that it led to no more than her becoming a se supporting writer, is unduly wrapt in mystery. However, troubled Claudia does fall in with a lot of very nice, kind peop and helped by them and by the exactions of the present war events of which, from the civilian point of view, are very faithf recorded—she " wins through," and gets a nice husband, with nice little stepchild thrown in.
The ladies—God bless 'em—were, indeed, witches in a lit Victorian society that admired piled-up masses of hair, fine figo flashing eyes and teeth. And these attributes are, in fact, all
one reader can find in Mr. D. L. Murray's three witches, in spite of three labels hung round them to the effect that Josie had astute- ness, Violet an artistic temperament, and Rose integrity. The decor of this long and carefully executed period-novel is much better than its characterisation. Only Sam Rubens, the Whitechapel-born Jewish financier who makes and loses fortunes in the South Africa minefields, is well enough drawn. There is a story, and it is full of incident, from weddings to blackmail ; there is also a spirited description of "glorious Goodwood," and a final panorama of the Diamond Jubilee.. The lives of Sam, the three bewitching sisters, and some rather unconvincing Society lights, are of less importance than the background against which we see them.
I did not get the point of I Live Again. A soul, an entity, a what- you-will, chooses his own existences, and we are shown four of them. We assist at his four births, and go through his four senti- mentally depicted lives—in each of which the same She turns up, to be his doom, until he finally masters her, under the influence of true love. First he is a cad footman, in the eighteenth century; then a Victorian merchant peer, still caddish, but growing softer; then a poor and self-centred Edwardian, self-educated, and the son of a widow ; and, finally when the latter is killed in the 1914-18 war, he elects—an odd business this ! —to become his own son. And so to this war and the air-raids, and the evolution to true love noted
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