Fiction

By WILLIAM FLOMER

Sanfelice. By Vincent Sheean. (Hamish Hamilton. 8s. 6d.) Duet for Female Voices. By Sarah Campion. (Peter Davies.

• 7s. 6d.)

Main Line West. By Paul Horgan. (Constable. 7s. 6d.) Forward From Youth. By L. A. Pavey. (Grayson. 7s. Od.)

Af.r. four of these books are in a sense historical novels. As stories of man's inhumanity to man they are characteristic products of a period when that has been brought to universal notice. In each we see the novelist playing a more or less didactic part, endeavouring to guide and influence our under- standing of historical events and persons, or at least showing the private havoc that results from public turmoil, from ambition, from war, bigotry, patriotism and racial prejudice, and in each case drawing a moral or a conclusion, more or less

explicit. The principal characters are .chiefly moved by love,

which alone seems to enable, them to endure their existence : here and there idealism fights a battle, but is generally defeated by self-interest, or by the forces of power and privilege arking upon or worked by some herd-instinct.

Mr. Vincent Sheean has written one of the best historical novels that has appeared for some time. It is about Naples at the very end of the eighteenth Century. Naples at any time is picturesque, and it cannot have been less so as the setting for an unsuccessful revolution when Marie Antoinette's sister was its queen. Mr. Sheean has evidently gone deeply into his subject, and takes evident delight in the colour of the iteriod and in presenting revolutionary types and situations. His style is unobtrusive, his invention fertile, and his dialogue plain, but it is questionable whether he has succeeded in making the romantic figures of his story anything like so real as the well-known historical ones—Nelson and Lady Hamilton, for instance, and Maria Carolina, whose

"love for Lady Hamilton, sincere enough while it lasted, was in the last analysis only a love for the triumphant possibilities Lady Hamilton represented, the friendship and support of England, the discomfiture of France, filo vengeance of the Hapsburg. Bourbons . . ."

A couple of sentences quoted from a letter of Lady Hamilton's, vibrant with effusive vulgarity, seem more alive than all the perfections of the aristocratic Luisa Sanfeliee, who becomes a revolutionary heroine by an irony of circumstance and is in the fullest sense a martyr to love. But there are many things

that make this book readable. Narrowly .avoiding at times the meretricious appeal of " historieal " films with their

marble halls and fancy balls and courtiers all in a row, it is much more rewarding. The romantic story is enriched with historical detail and thoughtful comment. Mr. Sheean is apt at filling the great staircase at Caserta with "ornate figures of courtiers who might have been designed by Vanvitelli himself to populate his ornate marble fantasy," but his curiosity about the workings of the human mind in times of

revolution is more valuable. He sees the pattern made by diehards, opportunists, idealists, cowards ; he is especially good on the lazzaroni, whose way of life " was one of the lowest the human race has achieved " ; and he is sensitive to the unreasonableness of human behaviour. The lazzaroni "must have gone mad," for they fought their friends in defence of

their enemies, and even Nelson seems "more than a little mad." But Mr. Shecan's Nelson is not the Nelson of the schoolroom. He finds in him "fierce xenophobia and militant ignorance," and hints that although "a magnificent naval commander, a seaman of surpassing genius, a patriot of the fieriest breed," it is possible to regard him as "an ignorant barbarian of no more real value to the human race than the tufted savage brandishing an assegai." He tells us that Nelson "acted as if he thought himself Almighty God," that his whole victory at Naples consisted in the delivery of some hundreds of unarmed men, women and children, who had

surrendered to him in good faith,- to the gani.ei and the execu- tioner," and that "his name was associated with treachery and cruelty for ever afterwards among Italians." In short, Nelson and Emma and the Queen seem to have stirred him

more than the creatures of his own imagination.

Miss Sarah Campion also has her own ideas about history.

We may perhaps sec them exemplified in a casual allusion to a man whose principal memory of the Retreat from Moscow was that in the course of it he had lost his watch. She is

writing, however, of recent German history ; she puts at the head of her book a quotation from Wassermann to the effect that what people do to each other "is more than flesh and blood can bear " ; and the two "female voices" of her title are those Of Elsbeth Wishaw, an Englishwoman, and Anna Bernstein, a non-Aryan German. The story begins before the

War, and Miss Campion conducts us with skill through the childhood of the two girls. In anything that has to do with

young girls, with those who teach them, and indeed with women in general she is extremely 'knowledgeable and has a light satirical touch that is delightful. But if her governesses and school girls are first-rate, she does not contrive to make her male characters either so real or so amusing', and however much the reader may enter into the fortunes of the characters and Miss Campion's interpretation of them he may feel that

in the more "-serious parts of her book, as when she describes the effects of the War and of Hitler upon Germany, she is leaving her own special field for one that has already been well

tilled. It is interesting nevertheless to have a feminine view of politics, "regarded," to quote the blurb, "not as rational results of any policy, but as irrelevant disturbances in the

emotional business of life." One or two examples may b given of Miss Campion's telling way of making important events seem absurd by magnifying some detail. A schoolmistress

is so busy persuading a child to keep the elastic of her hat straight that she fails to notice that an air-raid is going on. A soldier describes the death of a comrade :

"When Jorgen was killed he wasn't doing anything ; he wasn't even in the trenches. We were sitting in a field behind the line, in a meadoW with Very green giass, and he was blown to bits by the only -shell that came that way in the whole week we were there. . . We were eating, and he was cutting his itautiage, telling us how his aunt had sent him the knife to sharpen his drawing-pencils with, and then there was a roar, and a hole in the meadow, and blood and sausage' on the front of my shirt."

. .

Some German girls have swastikas painted on their toe nails, and their mother says, "Now you see, Hans, what the Dritte Reich means to our children.", But Miss Campion is_at her best when she makes us hear the party bracelet jangle complainingly on the governess's wrist, or when she quotes from Elsbeth's report : "Until Elsbeth learns to control herself we shall have- to treat her as a" quite irresponsible member of the Lower IV."

Mr. Horgan's story also begins before the War. It looks quite a simple one but is told with an unusual narrative skill and with a kind of zest and sensuousness more common at present in the American than in the English novel. In the early nineteen hundreds a cheerful, bouncing 'commercial traveller in the Middle West takes a quiet, good girl from a farm and marries her. When she is going to have a baby he deserts her, and she has to bring up the child as best she can. In due course she gets "that old-time religion" and has a fairly successful career as a nomadic evangelist. (The scenes of revivalism, it may be remarked, are purely negroid.) Finally, when the War fever is on she preaches peace and falls a victim to mob violence. That is all, but as Mr. Horgan says, "one has to see the very familiar as the very strange in order to discover its meaning." This he. does,- not by amassing detail in the Sinclair Lewis manner, _ but by sympathetic insight. The _story is set out in - short, vivid chapters, the unfortunate Irma is a recognisable woman, wife, and mother, and her son Danny's childhood is well Set forth. ..There is a not unwelcome hint that his career is to be followed in later volumes.

Forward From Youth is based on the true suggestion that a single situation, an instant even, may be the most important thing in a man's life. Mr. Pavey has constructed a very ingenious "psychological mystery story" about such an instant in the life of a man ruined by shell-shock. Brian Ferrands is found dead on a piece of waste ground outside a small Midland town. He has died from exposure, so there is no question -of hunting out a murderer : the question is how and why Ferrands came to be there. One of, his friends determines to find out, and gradually reconstructs the dead man's life until there emerges the secret of Ferrands' most important experience. The whole story is quite out of the ordinary.