Fiction

By SEAN O'FAOLAIN In the Second Year. By Storm Jameson. (Cassell. Is. 6d.) Crusade. By Rupert Croft-Cooke. (Jarrolds. 7s. 6d.) Hell's Belts. By Marmaduko Dixey. (Faber 'and Faber. 7s. 6d.) Picture of Nobody. By Philip Owens. (Cape. 7s. 6d.) Mud and Stars. By Robert Clive. (Constable. 7s. 6d.) Othersmith. By George Woden. (Hutchinson. 7s. 6d.) She Loved an Old Man. By Elizabeth Schucht. (Cape. 58.)

THE awkwardly interesting thing about modem fiction is that

to review it properly one would like to treat always of " types of fiction "—for where there is little original work all merit is in proportion to the writer's success in varying old methods.

To speak of a book in the vague as if it. were not Zola's great- grandchild or a by-blow of Flaubert (ninety per cent. of modern novels derive from these two, whether they know it or not) is to do injustice to everybody concerned. But there are so many books ! All one can do is to suggeit in passing certain obvious comparisons.

Take Miss Jameson's new novel, In the Second Year. All that is to be said in a general way is what Maupassant said in his preface to Flaubert's letters to George Sand—Tout livre

tendances cesse d'être un livre &artiste: and for the rest let the old problem of social art go hang and agree heartily that this kind of book could hardly have been done better. England is under the dictator Hillier, backed by his friend Sacker's million and a half Volunteers, who have put the Socialists and the Liberals into Labour Camps, and bully, starve, and flog the Communists and their like in so-called Training Camps.

But the bankers arc pressing Hillier into retrenchment and reconstruction, and Sacker fears for his Volunteers : he there- fore conspires in a muddled, brainless way, is impeached by Hillier and executed ; his wife kills herself.; several others are also killed. The sorry business ends on a note of despair for the future of poor old England. It is all done in a mood of regretful sorrow,. even lyrically, odd as that may sound ; so delicately that one wonders why a finished artist like Miss Jameson thinks it necessary to buttress creation with criticism.

For in effect In the Second Year is a thriller by a first-class amphleteer. It makes one furiously to think ; stirs the mind ; and is like a rod poked into the nerves. What more would you have ? Well, as Dempsey said of Tunney's lectures on Shakespeare, " If it helps her racket its okay with me "- but. I fear this effort to make literature useful. However, I may be just tut old-fashioned Liberal like Miss Jameson's Mr. Andrew in thinking that in this utilitarian world beauty can still be an end in itself:

In the Second Year weds the novel to politics : Crusade to religion. When I say that I could have wept as I read

Crusade I want to make it clear that it was purely to see such gorgeous material flung out the window. .Why is it that people who write novels about ideas always cease to be interested in character ? It happens in religious novels over and over again : in Bazin, in Iluysmanns, in Gertrud von le Fort, in everyone I have read' except Mauriac. This novel takes a railway clerk, Barry Wheelen, who becomes converted suddenly to Christianity (he had been brought up- by an actively atheist father) and sets out on the road as a tramp, taking with an almost comical literalism the command of Christ to give up all and follow "me. Harry meets a rough diamond, Bert, and Bert for sheer pity sticks by what he considers a decent, poor lunatic. Harry has a number of experiences, including many in workhouse wards ; he is taken up by a rich woman. and a good-hearted farmer ; enters the London Stock Exchange to convert the money-ehangers (painful, this !) and finally sees nothing before hint but to die for his Redeemer. It is, unhappily, Bert who dies.

It is all done with great earnestness, but the solemnity of it. in spite of all my sympathy and interest, made me burst into laughter a dozen times—simply because Harry iv not real. I must give all credit to Mr. Croft-Cooke for his .sineerity. If you can get over , the essential weakness of characterisation, you will read on and on, eager to know what happened to this obsessed idealist, though, really, nothing dees happen to him ; he is left just as he began, a little fuddled. But the inconsequentiality of this ending is inevitable since the beginning was so poorly prepared.. For those who May like to see a real poor-saint I would recommend The Saint and Mary Kate by Frank O'Connor. Still, Crusade well deserves to be read. (And to be re-written. If Harry could be made as plausible as Bert it would become a real book.) If Hell's Bells is a first novel, then I intend to read several more by this author : he has a promising quality of brain rare

in modern fiction, a sarcastic wit peculiar to himself, and—

it is not to slight his achievement—plenty of room for develop- ment. The scheme of his story is bizarre, the death of Lord Heston's solicitor, Mr. Pilgrim, whose Bunyan-ish adventures in Hell and Heaven are the scaffolding for Mr. Dixey's sar- casms about life in general. For Hell is just the modern flashy world, a cross between a Lyons Corner House and a Blackpool restaurant with electric bulbs in paper flowers and fountains playing over coloured lights.' One must not think, however, that Mr. Dixey is just an aesthete to whom Vulgarity is infernal: he has much more than that to say about the present world in terms of the next : indeed, he satirises Mr. Arty Crafty just as cruelly as Mrs. Yearning, Mr. Push, Pukka Sahib, Church- man, Chapple, and the rest, and a -savage chapter deals with the cathedral service of Hell_ where the hymns are a in carte and the tabernacle is a belly. He is witty, savage and sincere.

It may suggest the quality of his book to say that it reminds me here and there of Mr. Chesterton, as when he says the world cannot make the love go round ; or that lawyers make good shepherds in Heaven because they can handle crooks ; or that an Academician had his poetic licence endorsed. It isn't because " one-cannot-tell-whether-the-picture-is-good-or- not-if-one-doesn't-know-who-did-it " that one refrains from beating the big drum over this book ; but simply that it wears

a regrettably casual air, as if the author were saying, " I won't

promise to do it again "—and while Hell's Bells is a good piece of work it will take just a little more earnestness to hit the earthly ones. Wherefore we hope that Mr. Dixey is young and there are many more books to follow. It is an entirely enjoyable satire.

Picture of Nobody is prefaced by Mr. L. A. G. Strong. It is a literary man's book in that it hits upon the happy idea of depicting Will Shakespeare as he would have been in modern times, and there is a certain amusement in Mr. Owen's imagin- ings of all that harum-scarum company of Kyds and Marlowes and Oldcastles hanging around pubs, betting on horses, spong- ing on publishers, reading superior Spectator reviews and what not besides. It may be a little disconcerting now and again to come on such references as to " Kyd " Lewis, or his Spanish Tragedy of Alphonse the Thirteenth ; or one may feel that the greater part of the fun arises from these juxtapositions rather than from anything really creative : but there is fun in these pictures of Falstaff as an absconding traveller, and Greene as a reviewer, and the book may be taken as a frolic well worth its hour.

Mud and Stars is one of those novels about XYZ by a young man who has met XYZ and decides to make a novel out of it : a light love-story interlarded with kaleidoscopic pictures of the German revolution. Whether " I " and John are the two men who saw stars and mud through the same prison bars, or whether Love is astral and Nazis are mud (as the jacket suggests), is not clear. But for those who like an easy story of adventure and sex, here is the very thing.

The Othersmith Of Mr. Woden's book behaves, suffers, yearns in his little middle-class milieu just like any other Smith in the world. That is the merit and the disaster of such books. No window of revelation is opened into this particular Othersmith's heart that makes him different, never met before, without precedent. In other words, this, is a photographer's album where life is embalmed in sepia.

The best wine last—a lovely, tender, real book, She Loved an Old Man. It is all in the title. She was married to a war- cripple and she was faithful to him, and her love for Henrik

van Straaten, who was years older than her, came with a brief but delusive joy. I-don't suppose the-book, Heaven help it,

will be widely read. Elizabeth Seim .3ht is neither slick nor topical, and for her beauty is an end in itself, and that is not popular. But she is a writer of the first, class. One wobid

-wish to shout it, if anyone would listen : a lovely book, full of feeling at the price of a seat in a cinema I And only a few hundred wise people will have the sense to buy it ; and refuse, in any circumstances to, lend it to a soul.