Fiction
Life Story. By Phyllis Bentley. (Gollancz. 10s. 6d.)
The Living Wood. By Louis de Wohl. (Gollancz. 9s. 6d.)
French Village. By Jean Louis Bory. (Dobson. 9s. 6d.)
Storm at the Hook. By Richard Dimbleby. (Hodder and Stoughton.
9s. 6d.) Little World. By Douglas Fisher. (Sylvan Dress. 9s. 6d.) Field of the Stranger. By Olivia Robertson. • (Peter Davies. 9s. 6d.)
THE levelling of English social life during the last thirty years has been carried over into literature with even more monotonous effect. Geniuses always were scarcer than millionaires, but, while there are still a few millionaires left, there now seem to be no geniuses at all. However, the literary gourmet who complains of starvation may draw cold comfort from the fact that the popular-fiction public is receiving, whether it wants it or not, better fare than it has ever done before.
So we must examine this week's review ration without undue complaint. There is nothing in any of these novels to shock or astonish the reader, nothing that will disturb him half as much as does his morning paper. Through them he may escape from the strangeness of every-day life into those familiar fictional worlds where there have been no changes or developments for years. He will probably feel most at home in that of Miss Phyllis Bentley. She tells the life story of Hannah Moorhouse, member of a West Riding mill-owning family, 'who suffers the usual-vicissitudes of sensitive childhood, marries, has children and, when her weak husband goes bankrupt, retrieves the family fortunes by her own energies. Hannah, unlike some heroines in this genre, is not a rebel against her era ; she is a true Victorian, snobbish, conservative and- rather smug. There is nothing here to shake the confidence of the life-story- reading public, though some of its members may be surprised at the end of the book to discover that Miss Bentley has attempted in it to deal with the problem of " how to wield authority without oppression." Hannah triumphs through her strength of character
that permits her to overcome initial handicaps; the price of her strength is the tragic hardness that stands etween her and the understanding of her daughter. She is a simple character, made easily acceptable to the reader by the fact that her biographer, using an effective nineteenth-century technique, presents her quite frankly from the outside. Miss Bentley tells her story well, but this mild, accomplished novel touches no more than the fringes of a psycho- logical problem, the understanding and presentation of which would call for the powers of an Emily. Brontë.
Mr. de Wohrs novel, The Living Wood, is also the biography of a woman_ Although his characters speak, according to modern con- vention, in the modern idiom, this is an old-fashioned historical novel that does not set out to present a parallel between events of remote history and those of the present day. Here the past is the romantic past, and, whatever problems of human passion this book may touch upon, its story is, we take-it, told purely for its entertainment value. Read on those terms, it is a successful novel. Whether historically accurate or not, this story of Helena"' daugher of King Cod (the "merry old soul ") and discoverer of the true cross of Christ, is a good one—the sort that every reviewer wants to retell so he may romp easily through his review, destroying the reader's interest in the book and the author's sales in a hundred words or so. Anyone who likes historical novels should read this one for himself.
M. Jean Louis Bory's novel French Village has won the Prix Goncourt ; like most prize-winning novels it is disappointing. The films have skimmed the cream of our interest in life in occupied France, and M. Bory has surprisingly little to add to what they have told us. His - characters and incidents were over-familiar before we opened the book. Here we see the village priest, the prostitute, the old maid hiding a past-career as a trapeze artiste, the prosperous collaborator shop-keeper, the young men called Pierre and Marcel, members of the Maquis, and the pretty girl who loves them both, all behaving on the page much_ as they behaved on the screen. The narrative passes from the mouth of one character to another, but only the name at the top tells us which is speaking. The incidents are told like a string of anecdotes in a dispassionate staccato that becomes tedious. One wonders if the Prix Goncourt judges, in picking on this novel with its once fashionable style and lack of plot, were not like those of the Royal Academy who feel at once safe and daring when they hang a picture that looks something like a Cezanne.
Mr. Dimbleby, well known as a journalist and broadcaster, has now published a first novel called Storm at the Hook. Popular fiction may be distressingly easy to produce today, but it is not quite as easy as Mr. Dimbleby thinks. His book is entertaining enough, but an account of the problems of the passengers on a stormy cross- ing from the Hook to Harwich, interleaved with an account of the capture of a dog-doping gang in Fulham, the two accounts con- nected by the most flimsy of threads, does not make a novel, as hard-working writers like Miss Bentley and Mr. de Wohl could cer- tainly point out. Nevertheless I enjoyed Storm at the Hook, which was as easy to read as it will be to forget.
The last two books on this list, both by younger writers of talent, are alike in being not really novels but personal reminiscences of country life. Mr. Fisher's Little World is that of the Cotswold village in which• he was born and which he here describes with unpretentious clarity. Miss Robertson's book, chosen by the Book Society, recounts the endless conversations of Irish country society in which gossip merges into legend and legend often grows from gossip. She has wit and humour. The drawings are a pity. OLIVIA MANNING.
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