-Fiction
Financial Times. By Ronald Fraser. (Jonathan Cape. 8s. 6d.) Mrs. Morel. By M. H. Tiltman. (Hodder and Stoughton. Ss. 6d.) Our Little Town. By Adelaide Phillpotts. (Rich and Cowan. 9s.) Financial Times is a lively, erratic book - its theme is the plight from cradle to grave of the natural-born Philistine who finds himself inescapably the child, brother, husband and father of artists, eccentrics and extreme individualists, none of whom can he manage, influence or tolerate. He becomes immensely successful, a wizard banker, and lap lives in a whirl of irritation and confusion, to the din of values and exaggerations which he finds pernicious and ridiculous and dies in the Queen's Hall at the age of seventy while listening to his son's Pilgrim Symphony and undergoing some kind of revelation.
Because Mr. Fraser writes at speed, keeps up his design of excess, overstatement and satire, sustains in all directions, pro and con his hero, a sense of non-reality, and presents a crowd of amusingly mythical figures, formal, grotesque, decorative and theatrically- lighted—his inverted theme, which might have been merely a state- ment, untenabl-: as an effect of fireworks, develops into a Sustained amusement, imperfect and uneven, but well worth reading, and con- taining much that is colourful and out of the common. Hit or miss anyway, it is non-pedestrian, and aims at being an entertainment. And, since we mentioned fireworks, it might be likened to one of the great Victorian set pieces of that art, of Crystal Palace days ; for it assembles the 'eighties, 'nineties and pre-1914 years in baroque apotheosis of philistinism, politics and aesthetics, which is good fun, if you are in the mood, and holds the eye—but which is also, nostalgically and exasperatedly, a tribute. Titian Woollacombe, son of William Longfellow Woollacombe, RA., who was famous for his pictures of cows, had a poetess for a mother and had brothers and sisters called Perugino, Carpaccio, Rubens, Francesca, Ingres, Lippi, &c. They all grew up in an enormous house in West Kensington in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. Titian, because he liked money and became a banker, was cut out of his father's will. But the story need not concern us ; it is a parable to carry Mr. Fraser's exuberant interest in the excesses and self-expressions of a period and class which began to look odd when the aeroplane and movie came in, and which is now pretty well buried in the general rubble of air-raids. The book is not really a novel, since its author is content to joke and generalise on character and emotions, sweeping them in broadly, as Woollacombe, R.A., would not have handled his cows. The novel is properly the field of the particular—but Mr. Fraser allows himself to be a novelist in that'sense only when he turns to objects and settings. For these he has an exaggerated passion, a realist's mania ; but people, and feelings he prefers to leave cloudy—and sometimes, in spite of his sense of absurdity, he exacts too much that is lyrical of them. His danger indeed is his tendency to speak with the Voice Beautiful. But in the adventures and frustrations of Titian Woollacombe—a non-realistic, symbolised, inflated Soames Forsyte—he has built up a curious, lively design of the past. Mrs. Tillman and Miss Phillpotts show, by contrasting methods but to the same consolatory and reasonable end, the English village drawing up to the present war. Mrs. Tiltman is the more emotional and personal writer ; she is not concerned, as Miss Phillpotts is, With
exact details in rural evolution, or with the debating points of scientist, socialist and pacifist ; she gives her own sense of the past, in houses, traditions, habits and the twisted patterns of love. Miss Phillpotts keeps her own final emotion out of this book, and offers only a naturalistic pattern of the obvious conflicts, domestic and social, in a small community of the present day. She makes her characters argue too much for truth perhaps, and she sacrifices individualism to dialectical rules of thumb—whereas in Mrs. Morel the shoe is on the other foot. But both authors offer sound and pleasing pictures of contemporary life in English country places.
KATE O'BRIEN.
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