New Novels
PHILIP CALLOW'S The Hosanna Man (Cape, 13s. 6d.) reminds Me of Lawrence : the young Lawrence of The White Peacock. There is something about this first novel of the same piercingly accurate eye, the same disquieting directness even through a flurry of prose, and its places (Nottingham and about there) and people workmen-intellectuals, young, restless, articulate—are rather similar. He has a way, rare in a young writer, of managing to dovetail the general and the particular; of being able to make statements about life, about his views and outlook, without either sounding pompous or damming up the stream of his action. A concrete imagination saves these generalisations from ever being remote or woolly; this kind of thing : 'The roar of the world has grown less frightening, steadier, more like a pulse-beat. I can remember when its noise used to madden me, shrilling in my ears, full of petrol, brains, insanity.' Mr. Callow's people are curious and violent; with just a phrase or two of description, a couple of words of their own, they smoulder into life, real and recognis: able, intensely alive. This reined-in vigour, this oddly brim-fillt feeling of vitality, seems to me something quite out of the ordinary, the sign of a talent—more, an outlook, a personality—that should go (who knows how) far. Even so soon, Mr. Callow fairly bursts the seams of promise.
P. B. Abercrombie bursts through nothing : with intelligence, with quiet good taste, she has arrived by gentle laps at her third novel, a literate, agreeable book called Victor and the Vanquished (Gollancz, 12s. 6d.). Victor, a near-spiv, is on the climb in the art-dealers' world : with not-quite-ruthless-enough spurts of Machiavellianism he is trying, not very successfully it turns out, to rise out of his particular social rut, where a vague atavistic feeling links him with chauffeurs and other people who 'open doors.' The Vanquished are a seedy collection of misfits who live in one of those peculiarly fictional boarding-houses (do they really exist? I thought bed-sitters and gas-rings had taken over long ago). Miss Abercrombie is one of those well-tailored novelists whose qualities come on you gradually. When you have left her you find her characters still hanging about—not ghostly but matter-of-fact, people you once met and talked to and got to know rather well. Victor is splendid—horrid yet not wkolly horrible; and Sydney, that difficult person to make real—tile sensitive, intelligent, understanding, rather put-upon young woman—is remarkably good, her very dimness, beside Victor's sparkle, a kind of moral quality, and the attraction between the two near-opposites very shrewdly and credibly shown. This low- pitched, likeable book steers clear of the many traps that lie in wait for women novelists, and its style is a delight. I like to see 'gingerly' used as an adjective on the, first page, and other unaffected bits of boldness of the sort.
I hardly count Bela lust's The Gallows and the Cross (Gollanci, 10s. 6d.) as a novel, for it is a plainly documentary book about three years as a Roman Catholic chaplain to the condemned prisoners of a Hungarian gaol in the Forties. Non-political, in the best sense undenominational, to me it seems to ring most movingly true. The portraits of the prisoners, and above all of the humane, 'ordinary' hangman, destined from childhood for his terrible craft, are haunting. I only wish it had been written 'straight,' without any fictional disguises, for a slight uneasiness exists between the documentary and the disguised, in so obviously authentic an account as this.
Kate Mary Bruce's Felicity (Heinemann, 13s. 6d.) I nominate the most readable novel in months. It rattles at conversation speed through a family love story seen through schoolgirl eyes. Affected, but enormous fun.
Ethel Mannin's The Living Lotus (Jarrolds, 15s.), which seems to echo the Dutch girl in Indonesia's story of a few years back. is about an Englishman's daughter turned by the chances of war I into a Burmese peasant, whom father reclaims, married, at I fourteen, and whisks away to London, where she behaves just like the ladies of A Passage to India, in reverse. A mine of information about East/West differences, pleasantly worked— though the heroine is a dreary little prig.
ISABEL Otik"
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