Fiction
Take The Cash. By Elinor Rice. (Heinemann. 12s. 6d.) THIS week's novels seem to be rather a jolly lot, pleasant books about likeable people with an unusual amount of plot to hang their stories on. I'll deal with them in order of gaiety rather than merit. The most cheerful is a simple American novel called Take The Cash, about Adam Farway, one of those richest men in the world, who looks back on the orphanage that reared him with the respectful admiration other men traditionally give their moms. Adam has a very beautiful and very silly wife, a large.estate replete with every luxury refinement can suggest (including an air-raid shelter and a year's supply of canned goods), and two pretty innocent twins with an old Nanny who seems to stem from a rather more European tradition than all the rest. In a somewhat disjointed way this book covers a lot of ground, both in time and event, and, without ever departing from an air of perfectly inoffensive satire, gives a charming picture of what Americans always refuse to admit is a class-structure.
Green To Pagan Street is an English book, very gentle, very nice. Pagan Street is a working-class street in almost any town, and people who didn't live there might even call it a slum. But Johnny lives there and he is happy there, delivering the papers as he dreams of becoming a writer and one day marrying Feona, the pretty daughter of old Poppa Morici at the corner café. And a lot of other people love Pagan Street and the life that goes on'there, and if they're all seen through a very thin veil of rosy sentiment, they're none the less real for that—they're only less realistic in the depressing contempo- rary sense of the word.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about The Compassionate People is the surprise so many reviewers have shown at finding a " good " book in which two people fall in love and self-sacrificingly do nothing about it. Mind you, The Compassionate People isn't as good as all that. It's a very sincerely written first novel in which a young English soldier, in a prison hospital in France, falls in love with a nun who has not yet taken her vows, as she with him. He knows that, if he wishes it, she would desert the church for his sake : he believes he has no right to ask this of her. And, to be brutally practical, he'd be foolish if he did, since they barely exchange half-a- dozen words with each other, and we're still only in 1940 with the rest of the war to get through, and Raymond about to be sent to prison-camp in Germany. I myself thought the most successful part of this book not the very spiritualised love but the purely mascu- line companionship between Raymond and the Frenchmen who become his friends in the hospital.
A Tale of Santa Croce, about his own childhood in the slums of Florence, is said to be Pratolini's favourite among the novels he has written. This is extremely interesting, for while all his books are basically moral tracts, this particular one demonstrates a simple morality of goodness with exactly the same kind of punch as the moral Victorian novel. Indeed, the similarities between those books and the Socialist Realism of today are striking and far from co- incidental. " She's my mummy," cries the pure young girl. "What- ever she says or does, it's all right with me 'cause she's my mummy." This is a Pratolini character speaking, and it is just this aspect of Socialist Realist novels that makes me wonder whether I won't, perhaps, come to loVe them too, a hundred years after publication.
MARGHANITA LASKI.
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