FICTION

By WILLIAM PLOMER

Plague in Bombay. By Nora Stevenson. (Cape. 75. 6d.) Green Margins. By E. P. O'Donnell.- (Eyre and Spottiswoode. 75. 6d.) Burmese Silver. By Edward Thompson. (Faber and Faber. 7s. 6d.)

People in Cages. By Helen Ashton: (Collins. 75. 6d.) No Escape. By Randall Swingler. (Chatto and Windus. 78. 641.) To The General, which was one of last year's most interesting novels, Mr. C. S. Forester's new novel bears a certain resem- blance, for it is likewise a study of the character of a man in authority in time of war. But there the resemblance ceases, for The Happy Return takes place in Napoleonic times, and its central figure is a sailor. Captain Hornblower sails from England with sealed orders from the Admiralty. He is to make for a certain spot on the Pacific coast of South America, and there to lend aid to a local mad dictator in rebellion against the Spanish rule. This he does, and it involves the capture of a Spanish warship, the Natividad.' But news comes of a new alliance between England and Spain, so he is obliged to make another attack on the Watividad,' which ends successfully.

On his return voyage he has a distinguished passenger in Lady Barbara Wellesley : the general, in the book of that name, married a duke's daughter, but Captain Hornblower, who is married already, just manages to resist the blandishments of the sister of a duke-to-be; and makes his " happy return " to England. This story has several notable virtues. The behaviour of Hornblower, saddled with responsibility and caught up in tricky and dangerous circumstances, is a remarkable illustration of a solid, dignified, and typically English character.

Then the incidents of naval warfare are admirably described, and suggest to one ignorant of these matters a backing of expert knowledge. Finally the whole book produces a sense of period without any cheap straining after period effects, so that the reader is convinced that he is reading about a real contemporary of Howe and Collingwood and Nelson.

Miss Nora Stevenson takes us on quite another sort of voyage. There is plague in Bombay, so a luxury liner bound for that port carries only a handful of first-class passengers. We have been offered many novels about handfuls of passengers on liners, but Miss Stevenson has a special feeling for the emotional atmosphere that is engendered among people in some isolated or oddly intensified situation. In her last novel, Whistler's Corner, this situation was a sanatorium on the Karroo, and I can imagine that in the future she might examine life on a remote island or in a prison. Meanwhile she takes us aboard the R.M.S. ' Asphodel,' which is carrying, among others, a Jewish multi-millionaire, a respectable peer with a " dangerous " daughter, a pair of Portuguese newlyweds, that enigmatic young woman Anna, Freiin Siegel, and also Horace Appleby, a suburban clerk who has a temporary job as secretary to the . millionaire. *Appleby, though " conceived

in cold and rain, among the squalor of a million chimney- pots,"" has always- been' a dreamy; 'romantic fellow, and on

this voyage his dreams have a brief but intense fruition, for the passengers " drifted in a state of emotional detachment, indifferent to the future, forgetful of the past. In this inter- mediate stage, - influenced by neither, they constructed for themselves a world of their desire. Time had disappeared."

The millionaire is all that a -millionaire ought to be. He stands enough drinks to float the ' Asphodel' herself, and even has a pie made to contain twenty-four children from the

second and third class : dressed like blackbirds, they emerge

when the crust is cut and present the first-Class prassengetS with gifts. The women shine in their expensive setting; and Horace has the time of his life. But perhaps we had

better call this a novel of atmosphere.

The same may be said of Green Margins, which has been popular in the United States. In this case the atmosphere is rich ; indeed, the Boston Transcript has found the hook " unique in its atmospheric. richness." It is ROL only rich, but warm and strange with the warmth and strangeness of the Mississippi delta, the region of bayous and levees, where the tree bends with fruit and salads fill the basket, where

crabs hiss in the pot and piles of oyster shells wink in the moonlight, where night-herons swoop, -whooping cranes

whoop, and novelists collect copy. It is a world of which New Orleans is the centre and which supports an extremely mixed population—of the warmest blood, it seems, and the easiest virtue. Open the book at random, and you find yourself in a bizarre and in some ways Firbankian world

" Occasionally they heard Miss Pretty John inside singing a Creple ballad over her dishwashing. Miss John cherished her white blood. She ate alligator tails only in secret. . . She culti- vated her white relatives, fishmongers and ruffians all; sending each a frosted fig-cake on his birthday.. . . ' Soon as you smell white,' John would tell her when a group of sportsmen approached looking for a guide, ' you start actin lak you got a mullet-bone in yo' bridge-work.' "

But mostly you are asked to follow the fortunes of an Acadian- Dalmatian girl called Sister Kalavich. A depressing note is sounded by one or two socialites and highbrows from New

Orleans, but Mr. O'Donnell is-'a good-natured and leisurely

guide, and his book should weaken your sales-resistance against the time when you may be tempted to buy a ticket to those green margins. Mr. Edward Thompson's exoticism leads us in a different direction. Take a speck of Conrad, a grain of Kipling, and a pinch of Rider Haggard, then put Mr. Thompson to season and prepare the dish, and you will get Burmese Silver. An ex-Indian civil servant has founded- a kingdom in the wilds of northern Burma, and an old friend sets out to visit him. The journey is picturesque, though the river-boat is navigated by one of those rather tiresome Scotch engineers. The white rajah is not easily accessible, is troubled by would-be concessionaires and various officials and adventurers, and leaves some of the cares of State to his beautiful daughter, Princess Perdita, alias Pradita, or Dita for short, who has been finished in England and queens it among the head-hunters. " I want nothing of your jade or your silver or your rubies, Princess Perdita," says the visitor, but then his quest for the Sawbwa of Buddhawbwe was colourful enough without those minerals.

And so back to England, but it is not altogether a happy return. Miss Ashton takes us to the Zoo and keeps us there, rubbing our noses frequently against the bars just to remind us that it doesn't much matter on which side of them we live, for it is not only iron bars that make a cage but destiny and circumstances. In order to turn an account of an afternoon at the Zoo into a novel she has found it necessary to build her story round a framework of coincidences that are rather too improbable. A man home from Kenya goes with his wife to look at a lion he has given to the Zoological Society. His wife's first husband also happens to be there, a crooked financier named John Canning who is being shadowed by the police. Then Canning's female friend is there with her husband, two children, and secretary, who is Canning's sister ; then the female friend's butler happens to be there, besides other adjuncts and acquaintances. The various emotional tangles, memories and hopes, are worked out at length before the background of cages, and directly and . indirectly we are told again and again that Nature in the raw is seldom mild.

No Escape is much more _distinguished' Ann many a slick first novel, but there are many things about it flip may provoke a reader to find fault.' The sigaifihnftings about it are that Mr. Swingler has beliefs and gifts. One would say he believes that wealth and poverty may be equally corrupting, that society and the individual are beholden to one another, that the individual can only give of his best in a society unlike our own,

and that mar is hopelessly Wasteful: At the same time it is evident that he has a lyrical imagination and_ a real power of shaping images in words. He is a poet and may be described,

I think, as an Anglo-Communist. What he offers us is a picture of English country life before the War, but it is not easily acceptable. His nineteen-thirtyish hero seems out of period, and this nation cannot be easily divided into the -.oppressive rich and the oppressed poor, for it• is on the whole middle- class, or bourgeois, in its habits and ambitions. It looks rather as though Mr. Swingler is less interested in what people are like than in what they would have to be like to fit in with _Anglo-ccsnmunist