FICTION
By LOUIS IgacNE ICE Devil Take the Hindmost. By Frank Tilsley, (Seeker and Warburg. 7s. 6d.) One Life, One Kopeck. By Walter Duranty. (Hamish Hamilton. 7s. 6d.) The Other Side. By Stephen Hudson. (Cresset Press. 7s. 6d.) The Moon in the South. By Carl Zuckmayer. (Seeker and Warburg. 7s. 6d.) Hallelujah, I'm a Bum. By Louis Paul. (Methuen. 7s. 6d.) Perilous Sanctuary. By D. J. Hall. (Harrap. 7s. 6d.)
MR. TILSLEY'S last novel, I'd Do It Again, was an excellent thriller and a serious piece of reporting. Devil Take the Hindmost is equally thrilling and even more serious. The hero, or villain, is on the model of his last but on a much grander scale. Instead of a scientifically embezzling clerk we have an Elizabethan Machiavelli, a price of business and banking—a highly fantastic character but quite believable. Like the earlier novel, this is a one-man story. Not that all the characters are not very well sketched, but they are, by comparison, in the flat. The hero, David Bortoft, is very sympathetic, as such dangerously perverted and concentrated characters ought to be. He begins as a tough young man with oligarchic principles—the world is there to be exploited by the strong—and ends a crusading idealist who wishes to expose the capitalist system on which he himself has been pinnacled. The crusade never comes to the birth.
The whole account of Bortoft's earlier career, running a bogus tax agency, muscling in on business, ruining his rivals and making a fortune from armaments, is quite as exciting as any American gangster novel, say one by W. R. Burnett. What is more remarkable is that Mr. Tilsley should equally hold the attention with pages of dialogue on the vices of the banking system. Mr. Tilsley humanises his hero by allowing him a sentimental honeymoon and occasional spasms of fun when drinking with his one friend, an equally Machiavellian but not so acceptable character. The whole book moves fast. Mr. Tilsley can describe scenes and faces with remark- able artistry, and one is surprised when he occasionally makes an incoherent sentence or a bad slip in grammar. I recom- mend Devil Take the Hindmost to anyone as a thriller, to all left-wing readers as another nail in the coffin of capitalism, and to all right-wing readers as a Puzzle-find-the-Fallacy. A very exciting book.
Mr. Duranty, one of the world's most famous journalists and also a famous conversationalist, has now written a novel. Most novelists would be better for an apprenticeship in journalism, or at least in conversation, and Mr. Duranty's book shows all those qualities which the better American periodicals share with the better Hollywood films. It is fast, slick and vivid—beginning with the teats of a sow and ending with five tons of blasting powder. And what a nice change it is to read a Russian novel which is not by a Russian. It is as if someone had gone through the story with a blue pencil and cut out the soul-stuff. But the action is extremely " Russian " so that the sensation-loving reader gets all the advantages and none of the padding. The hero commits murder while still in his 'teens and indeed in some places the blood-motif runs almost to parody, e.g—" Then she cried wildly, ' My brother was a murderer, and you are a murderer ; there is blood on your hands, there was blood on my lap. But your eyes are blue ; my little brother murderer. Will you be my little brother ? ' " The hero escapes from Siberia, fights in the Great War and takes part in the Revolution. He is the antithesis of a Tchekov hero. The German front, the death of Rasputin, underground intrigues in factories, the war conducted from trains between the Reds and Whites, all these things are reported with complete efficiency. And T was struck by the scene where the hero, to his own surprise, finds himself torturing a prisoner for information.
The Other Side is a narrative in the first person of a nineteen- year-old boy's first experiences in America fifty years ago. " New York was an ugly, untidy town." Looking through the boy's eyes we notice the significant details of period which might be boring if recounted as straightforward third-person description. The boy is the son of a wealthy English family and has a passion for horses and hunting, so that we hear :a lot about buggies and sulkies. This is. where the period novel scores over the historical novel. The properties of the latter are merely museum pieces ; those of the former have the glamour of obsoleteness but are still credible and palpable because we know them quite well from illustrations or because our fathers knew then in their youth. The hero of The Other Side, being horsey, is a welcome change from the usual adolescent hero who is cultured, neurotic and horribly intro- spective. And it is a great asset to a hero to be a good mixer because it leads to action and introduces us to other characters. So in Mr. Hudson's book we get plenty of action and characters. He writes quietly, lucidly and with much humanity. An attractive book.
The Moon in the South, by the author of Der Hauptman von Kopenick and well translated by Mr. Moray Firth, is a strange book, loaded with atmosphere and sensuous descriptions of landscape in the Tyrol. It centres round an aristocratic brother and sister who live in a castle and whose love and understanding for each other ruins their relationships with other, people and eventually merges with the death wish. The sister is somewhat fey—she does strange things to doves and fishes—and I very much doubt whether her kind could be found in any contem- porary novel in England. I prefer the waitress in the inn, with whom the narrator has an admirably flesh-and-blood affair —a good portrait. If there is any moral to this book it is, I suppose, the doom of inbred aristocracy and inbred culture. Thus., the tragic brother, a playwright, on being told that America has great possibilities, answers—" Not for me . . People like me are superfluous . . I do not metal people who write poetry, who mould things, who create form. Such people are more necessary than ever . . . . Whole generations of poets will have to appear before the amorphous raw material of the new earth even becomes visible." This melancholy theme underlies all the book's colourfulness.
Hallelujah, I m a Bum is claimed by its wrapper as a " Rabelaisian masterpiece." This is a big overstatement, but it is a very readable essay in the picaresque though some will find Mr. Paul's high spirits a little tiring after two hundred pages. Some idea of its quality can be got from the names of the characters—Resin Scaeterbun (the hero), Corporal Ootz (usually called Corpril), Wenceslaus Jones, Nina Gumbottle, Florio Marsala (the comic lawyer), Tony Burnseed (the gangster), Wartnose Scrorogenheim, and many others all on the same pattern. The hero comes back from the War, is gaoled for publiihing ot:scerie -fitetature, takes a turn at bootlegging, promoting a Priie-fight "and writing scenarios ui "Hollywood. Like Mr. Eric Linldater's heroes he combines bawdiness and practical gusto with the habit of writing and quoting poetry, and carries round with him copies of Boccaccio, Villon and Petronius. But he is not such an amusing enfant terrible as Mr. Linklater's Magnus Merriman, while the crazy America which he ramps through is not as amusing for an English reader as that of Juan in America. A little more wit and a little less fun might be recommended for the next recipe.
Perilous Sanctuary is a depressing story about New Mexico. A tough Englishman (who is to experience a change of heart through these harassing experiences) takes refuge after killing a man in a colony of Penitentes who, though banned by- the Catholic church, practise flagellation and crucify one of their order every Good Friday. Apart from this sensational material we also have the inevitable native dance to the beating of the tombe. Mr. Hall tries hard to put over these hectic occur- rences, probably too hard. He overwrites, and his descriptions do not come alive. And I cannot swallow the following remark about Oxford (or is it Cambridge ?)--." He never knew the spirit of that place which unseen walks the streets and haunts the ill-lit rooms and corners of dark courts, that strong yet gentle spirit, loving enthusiasms, rebuking excess, cherishing serenity; allowing no distinction of, race or class or creed." This is a fair sample of Mr. Hall's writing. He lacks style. At the present day prose style is no longer the first thing to bother about but the local-colour novel needs it ; one must either not write such novels or write them seductively, for the genre is aft .all. a meretricious one.. - - -
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