New Ncivels
Honey Out of the Rock. By Barbara Collard. (Eyre and Spottis- woode. 10s. 6d.) • "Ha realised," says Madame de Born of Freddy Stirmer, who lay awake at night contemplating his marriage to Francine and not liking the look of things at all, "he realised that nothing was more distorting than the mirror of conpcience, that self-observation and analysis of one's own character was as much a pose as any other. . . ." An acute observation, very much in tune with the present habit of conscious relativism in psychological matters, and yet perhaps not entirely true. That margin of doubt runs almost the whole length of Daughter of the House, Madame de Born's third novel and an extremely intelligent and fine-tempered piece of work. Precise and pointed in statement, spare and ironical in feeling, the novel is always lucid in purpose without somehow being quite lucid enough. I think the author cultivates the truths of experience a little too hard, so that her values in the end remain bleakly impersonal. But this is higher and grudging criticism, and to be discounted accordingly. The story, set in the period of the 1930s and after, is of a member of the commercial aristocracy of a Flemish port, a rich, dry, elderly bachelor, who was a collector of paintings, and of the child he adopted and his all but despairing love for her. Ferdinand Haverman had given little thought to his niece Francine when she lived with him, had not been greatly disturbed by her unhappiness with Freddy, and had laiown nothing of her untaught and stifled talent as a painter. What he felt for the adopted Aloysia, the illegiti- mate and not too pleasing child of his housekeeper, was something very different and wholly unexpected. The heart, runs the unspoken argument, even the most desiccated heart, retains its devotions, and Haverman fought for Aloysia with her odious parent, watched over her—and his pictures—during the German occupation, and so impressed himself upon the child's imagination and affections that she tried to commit suicide after his death. A dubious conclusion, it seems to me, to a subtle and rational enough study of an obsession of love. The author's observation is often lightly mordant, her favourite novelist may well be Stendhal, and there are very good things in the book. The Orchid House, a first novel, has less subtlety but more warmth. It is a vivid piece of story-telling, touched now and then with poetry, about a West Indian island and the three daughters of a decaying family long settled there who revisit the glimpses of the moon after an interval of years. Stella la touchante, Joan la temeraire, and Natalie la tenace make a charmingly lifelike group in the foreground of the tropical picture. One returns as the wife of a German-American farmer she will probably not go back to, another as the elective affinity of a left-wing husband in England, the third as the gay and volatile widow of a rich man. All are caught up again in the senti- ment of a childhood they had shared with a father who is a drug addict and with the mercurial and competitive spirit who is now the consumptive and dying Andrew. Although the story is innocent of false emotion, Mrs. Allfrey tends to queer her own pitch by piling up the vagaries of the female heart. It was a mistake, I think too, to choose as narrator the old Negro nurse of the family, shrewdly conceived though Lally is, since here and there a slackness of design necessarily shows in her recital of events. But the novel as a whole has a taking liveliness and sympathy and reproduces in fond and confident strokes the brilliance of the Caribbean scene.
A deposit which is something like uranium, lending itself even better to nuclear fission, is discovered in the soil of a small farming and fishing island somewhere off the French coast. It must needs be exploited in secret in the interests of peace and security and the tiny Population of the island be removed to the mainland. That is the simple theme of The Fugitives, a quiet and unaffected piece of work, plausible in a soberly thoughtful vein until it explodes in sudden melodrama. Mr. Thomas touches in sympathetically the French island community and its leading personages—mayor, blacksmith, schoolmaster, cure, rich widow—and makes something of a pale , love affair between the mayor's daughter and the scientist, a son of the island drawn away to Paris, who is responsible for the discovery. But his sincere plea for the claims of human sentiment in the maw of Leviathan is so explanatory as to make the story a little lifeless.
Honey Out of the Rock, another first novel and a very short one, is clearly well meant, but seems to lack most of the things, perhaps mere years and experience above all, which make a first novel like Mrs. Allfrey's good reading. It is about two married couples in London, Helen and Alan on the one hand, Victoria and Eric on the other, and especially about Victoria's hunger for passionate and Painful affairs with other men. The story, told in the first person by Helen, is slight of substance and naive in style, and appears to be quite unrelated to the Roman Catholic doctrine which is evidently very much in the author's mind. After all, as the Chinese have it, disorder does not come from heaven ; it is brought about by women.
R. D. CHARQ1JES.
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