Fiction
By Wrnmast PunsEn.
Pond Hall's Progress. By H. W. Freeman. (Chatto and Windus. 7s. ed.) 'I'ns: author of His Monkey Wife is the possessor of an original talent, a gift for imaginative and poetical story- telling, which he has now exercised upon a talc of the future. The scene is England ; the time is 1995. Mr. Collier's purpose, it seems, was " to describe emotions and events totally incompatible with present-day life 'here." What he • • describes as occurring in Hampshire and Wiltshire sixty years hence he sees no reason to account for. He simply states, in an introduction, his belief that, " given a certain impetus, things may take this sort of course, and in as short a time." So when the reader comes to the book itself, it is not his business to cry " Impossible ! " or " Improbable ! " for we none of us know what 1995 will be like ; and as one of the characters remarks, " What a small thing a reason is, compared with what may hang on it ! " Besides, Mr. Collier offers us a tale, and is not " concerned to document it with all the artistic untruths of why and wherefore:" Evidently there has been a vast catastrophe, or a series of catastrophes, and a few direct indications of this occur in the narrative. A wild cat, for example, has made her lair in the remains of an aeroplane that had crashed in " one of the earliest battles "4 re hint is thrown out about " war, defeat, revolution, and blockade," and another, in italics, that millions can die of plague and famine as quickly as can one. England has all gone back to brake and bog, and such of her inhabitants as remain are scattered about in little settlements out of touch with each other. Some of these communities have reverted to the basest savagery ; others retain some faint sense of the past, and show signs of hanker- ings, in the midst of offal and plottings, after sweetness and light.
The community described by Mr. Collier includes among its members the harridan Lady Alicia Willoughby, a law lord's daughter left over from the past, besides a patriarch known as Father, but these two do not influence their juniors to try and revive the machine age—indeed, one of the young men exclaims : " To be like the mob of your yesterday ! Better die out rather, for that's to be damned on earth. To live in that tradesman's world—ugh ! " The community finds itself short of women, and the first half of the book is largely taken up with preparations for a raid on another settlement, culminating in a kind of Rape of the Sabines. The hero, Harry by name, is the moving spirit throughout, and is in all things aided by the devotion of his half-brother Crab. He captures a girl called Rose, who brings him the greatest joys he has known, but in the end betrays him and brings about a tragic ending. Another important character, known as the Chief, leads his creator to meditate on the psychology of government and leadership, and we encounter references to Machiavelli. The moral, if there is one, is perhaps to be found in the following passage between Harry and Crab : " We're rough stuff,' said Harry, but we're the stuff of life after all.'
" Yes, stuff that's so compounded -that, stir it as you will, it resettles itself sooner or later into the same forms.' " Tribute must be paid to Mr. Collier's descriptive and narrative powers, to his feeling for landscape, for life, and for words. He has made a vigorous attempt to afford glimpses of " that quite exact and abstract beauty, that possible form of life, that one sees through the picture of an archangel, or in the cruel poetry that describes a god."
It is a far cry, both in space and time, to Yellow Flood. An American engineer in the interior of China .loses his twelve-year-old son in a flood, and then spends years trying to find him. Meanwhile the boy, with youthful adaptability, has " gone Chinese." They are not reunited until the very cad of this uhusual and rather fascinating book. There are
psychological subtleties and there are obvious faults in the construction of the story—for instance, instead of the interest being concentrated upon the father and son, it is suddenly diverted to the father's, friend Colfax. But there are some excellent situations, and Mr. Anderson manages to convey a sense of the swarming cities of China and of the charm of their inhabitants. He has a zest for the everyday things of life, and • his writing -has sensuous qualities which vivify the descriptions. It might be objected that he describes people too much from the outside, but he has tackled an original theme, and the book gives the impression of having been written for pleasure. Mr. Anderson can probably tell us some more about China.
Mr. Lindsey's sixth novel is not likely to gratify anyone who teaches or professes the Christian religion, for it symbolizes the exultant spiritual nudism 'of' those who flee from self-control to birth-control, and from family ties to sexual escapades.. Mrs. Pursy was the wife of a clergyman in Suffolk. " She was forty-five. She had spent twenty years in the village; had seen her husband change from a fine man to an old embittered man ; had hated him because of his bitterness, because of the disintegration of his body, had hated him because he held her down,• imprisoned her." And what did she do ? She eloped with the gardener, and " she smelt in her nostrils the rank good smell of him . .
a smell of men who toil with the earth ; of sweat and the great winds which ride inland from the sea . . . and the scent of a thousand flowers, of manure . . . " It is not inconceivable that the middle-aged wife of a country clergyman should elope with such a fragrant employee, but it is improbable, and great pains or great skill would have to be employed in a novel to make such an event seem inevitable. Mr. Lindsey belongs to the Dot-dot-dot school and also to the school of D. H. Lawrence. He prefers rhapsody to analysis or the patient accumulation of circum- stance, and the outlines of his characters are somewhat blurred. But he writes in high spirits, and his book is symptomatic, not only of the influence of Lawrence but of certain tendencies now hard at work, especially the tendency to try -and " put from one all the preconceived notions of right and wrong, to forgo the luxury of saint and sinner."
When the clergyman in Mr. Lindsey's novel buys a novel by Galsworthy he murmurs to himself : " Sound man, Galsworthy . . . Sound man.". Mr. H. W. Freeman is a sound man. The humanity of his viewpoint and the carefulness of his craftsmanship enable him to produce a sound novel. He has a sense of composition and drawing, and an easy naturalism, of a peculiarly English flavour, permeates his work. Pond Hall's Progress, the sequel to Fathers of Their People, deals with life on a Suffolk farm during the years immediately following the War. Handsome Dick Brundish, a sergeant in the gunners, brings back a temperamental Italian bride to Pond Hall, and, like the numerous fictional intruders who have been bringing a touch., of ,exotic romance into conventional English sur- roundings ever since the Signora Neroni began flashing her eyes in Barchester, Teresa Brundish (nee Cristofoli) does not fail to bring colour to East Anglia. She does more than that, for she becomes an unwitting instrument in the gradual reintegration of her surroundings. It is one of Mr. Freenuiris merits that he knows his country well. He is not only able to create characters as unforced as Abner Cobb the shepherd and George Gale the smallholder, but is keenly aware of changing conditions, and introduces such figures as Toni, the ice-cream boy ; Stanley, the ironmonger's assistant, who whisks village maidens off on his motor-bicycle to dances ; and Major Hanney, the manager of the Industrial Farming Syndicate, who arrives to herald the doom of the small capitalist farmer and the coming of mass-production. Mr. Freeman is able, to suggest at once the urbanization of the country and the continuance, in spite of it, of country ways, and he brings an unpretentious talent and a certain tenderness
to thel.taak. - . -
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