New Novels
ONE unlooked-for effect of the numerous American novels attacking the political witch-hunters may be a feeling with English readers that things can't be so bad as all that. Convinced that things may even be worse, they must admire the courage of the authors and the American publishers and booksellers, to say nothing of the public. Dare such a novel as David Karp's All Honourable Men (Gollancz, 15s.) be openly offered for sale? Dare any government servant—dare attyone—take the risk of being caught reading it?
Familiar as the theme has now become, from the hands of David Karp it emerges fresh as wet paint. It can't be brushed off. One reason is that it most ingeniously springs its surprises. though some are not unlike Irwin Shaw's in The Troubled Air. In both novels the defender of his colleagues is let down by them : they have failed to tell him the whole truth. Here it is Dr. Milo Burney, director of an Institute (in embryo) for American Studies, who, by standing up for an economist applying for a post, uncovers in the `investigation' to which he consents the once-innocent and generous but now, in. prejudging eyes, dangerous and traitorous youthful activities of an increasing number of friends and strangers. As their defender he becomes
himself suspect. Useless to object that he ought to have known better than to take on a job under such employers as a millionaire industrialist and a fascist-minded general, with the millionaire's vamping wife and a slickly cynical dramatist in attendance. His motives were of the best, though tinged perhaps with a desire for more excitement that his orderly academic career had afforded. He gets much more in the way of excitement than he had bargained for—and so will the reader who approaches this novel with the suspicion that he may have heard it all before.
American novelists, it seems necessary to say, are not better than British novelists: they are merely different, the chief difference being that our native novelists invite, because they can expect to receive, more in the way of imaginative co-operation from their readers. The success of Gabriel Fielding's second novel, In the Time of Greenbloom (Hutchinson, 16s.), depends upon our willingness to respond to mood and to master method, to look before we leap gaps in the narrative and keep our memories dry. It is a distinctly original novel, concerned with the innocence of youth destroyed by a hideous tragedy, and the pursuing desire for revenge contending with the desire to forget. Young John Blaydon, grown to manhood, cannot rid his mind of the scenes and sensations accompanying the murder of his sweetheart aged thirteen; at school, university and thereafter his career is a failure. One hope remains: that his friendship with a strange intellectual, Horeb Greenbloom, may lift his burden. After episodes idyllic, dramatic, bizarre and horrifying, we are left unenlightened. We must follow John Blaydon into Mr. Fielding's next novel: we must. Readers who come to this author for the first time would do well to look at his earlier novel, Brotherly Love, and get properly introduced to a talent evidently capable of contributing something of unique importance to the fiction of our day.
By comparison, Hubert Nicholson is an old hand: he has won the esteem of good critics, and Sunk Island (Heinemann, 13s. 6d.) will advance his reputation. For Mr. Richard Church, the jacket informs us, this novel brings to mind both Manon Lescaut and Ethan Frome. For its publishers it recalls Far From the Mad- ding Crowd and The White Peacock. Ordinary readers will not be reminded by it of Cold Comfort Farm, though, massy me, they have it bad up there at Humberside, always summat going wrang. Roger Wellincroft had courted Louisa Kilner, at the request of his father, but he fell in love with her sister Ida and married her instead. Poor Ida developed consumption and died. Taking the period and the place into consideration, those facts can be clothed in tragedy. Mr. Nicholson more than adequately robes them in the Hardy manner. He has written a drama of singular intensity in which the elements play their customary parts and the conclusion, by ifs inevitability, leaves nothing to be desired.
We make the acquaintance of a new novelist in No Great Magic, by Lalage Pulvertaft (Seeker and Warburg, 12s. 6d.)— a comedy of archeologists on a 'dig' in Ireland. The comedy, which leans heavily upon the support of fictionally traditional lrishness, is chequered by perhaps an excess of love-making in jest and earnest. What is found on the chosen site is not what was expected and it conflicts with the theories of the archaeologist- in-chief. It leads almost to an international 'incident,' Ireland's denunciation of the English interlopers lacking nothing of ancient virulence. Miss Pulvertaft has the right touch.
Jack Jones goes in for broader effects. He has to because his people are not intellectuals: their emotions are unrefined and unrestrained, never discussed, still less dissected. In Come, Night; End, Day! (Hamish Hamilton, 13s. 6d.) he tells, with his charac- teristic warmth of feeling, the story of a theatre in a South Wales town, Old-timers should enjoy this yarn, though they come with surprise upon a soprano giving a fully aspirated rendering of Who's it to be? her or me?
Don't be afraid to say.
with Tor you and 1' in the line 'For you and me still friends can be. . .
Come to think of it, that song is the quintessence of all fiction nowadays when the liquor and violence have been strained off.
Previous page
