Fiction
Scene for Death. By Norah Hoult. (Heinemann. 8s. 6d.) Upside Down. By Denis Mackail. (Hutchinson. 8s. 6d.) A Matter of Duty. By Edward Cranston. (Longmans. 6s.)
IF versatility, adaptability and an easy, realistic touch on the surfaces of things as they come are good parts in a novelist—and they can be—then Miss Norah Hoult's recent oddly varied novels, lively, kind and tinged with commonplace, sustain with these unlooked-for merits, we must suppose, the reputation she won with earlier books, when fighting on a harder field, when she had things to say more bitter and exact than anything she chooses to offer now. But I must ,not bore my readers with this lament of mine—now becoming a perennial—for the vanished author of Time, Gentlemen, Please and Holy Ireland. Those books were not entertainments ; they were mercilessly imagined passages of life. But that may not seem to some like a recommendation of them, and at present there is a very great deal to be said for entertainment ; particularly if it is expertly done, as in Scene for Death. So in a time of remembering and doing without let us be thankful—as we are for spam and the national loaf—for goodish things that carry us along and keep us in fair temper.
Scene for Death is such a thing. It will leave the withers un- wrung, and brain and nerves will not remember it, as they have remembered some of thz writing of its author's younger days. But have I said that before? This time Miss Hoult has had—for those many who like a story to be complicated in its superficies—a very good idea, and I am not going to spoil it by trying to describe it. She takes us to an English village during last year ; a village carrying on with the war like any other, but deeper set than some in rural English tradition. She places in that setting one of those tiresome, semi-literate, self-confident grass-widow women who think they think ; who read pamphlets and articles, go hither and thither to lectures, dissociate themselves from general sympathies, and without understanding what they are about make trouble in a society to which they are alien. She takes a guess—or rather, and perhaps the more entertainingly, allows the Vicar of the village and his crony, the Chief Air Raid Warden, to take a guess—at what might happen —even murder?—in a humble community when a too old and easy tradition is exasperated by a far-from-easy, Puritanical-progressive disturber of the peace. The theme is worked out amusingly, and with fresh devices of construction ; and it is adorned by happy speculative debates and moral philosophisings between the Vicar and Mr. Ironside. For my own part, I preferred the conversation and company of these two to the whole of the rest of the book ; and I did not think that the unfortunate character of Mrs. Muddlecombe, cause of all the trouble, was imaginatively proved. But the whole thing is lively, deft and gracious and, as I said earlier, an' expert piece of entertainment. Upside down is, as the title suggests, a light piece of recreation by Mr. Denis Mackail, who has succeeded in doing something which is more difficult than it sounds : introducing to readers a collection of likeable people who are at the same time thoroughly recognisable as human beings. Mary Jesmond is a successful actress, suddenly confronted with unheard-of difficulties in an already difficult profession : lack of plays, revolutionary hours, scarcity of capital, playwrights who rush into Ministries• and write no more, audiences who ask only for farces or revues. She has a daughter—and it will be a relief to some readers to find the two on affectionate and friendly terms—and the daughter has a love-affair with one of those touch- ingly immature young Englishmen of whom Mr. Mackail has made a speciality. The background is London during the Battle of Britain,
and if the major tragedies of that scene are left out, its minor miseries are faithfully, and often amusingly, depicted. The best character in the book appears all too seldom: the egregious, intolerable, middle- aged secretary suddenly transformed, much for the worse, into Junior Commander Bates.
A Matter of Duty is in reality a series of sketches—with indeed some repetitions of the same sketch, very slightly altered. The scene is the Navy at war, and the writer's knowledge of that moving and heroic atmosphere is obviously firsthand. But it is perhaps under- standable that he should for the most part have shirked realism and favoured the conventional " happy ending." KATE O'BRIEN.
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