Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER The Virgin of Skalholt. By Cudmundur Kamban. Translated by Evelyn Ramsden. (Nicholson and Watson. Ss.' 6d.) The Son of Marietta. By Johan Fabricius. Translated by Irene

Clephane and David Hallett. (Gollancz. 9s. 441.)

Regency. By D. L. Murray. (Hodder and Stoughton. Ss. fid.) The Exile. By Pearl S. Buck. (Methuen. 7s. 6d.) - By a Side Wind. By Norah CS James. • (Jarrolds.. 7s. 6c1.) Canon to Right of Them. By Brute Marshall. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) 'DIE first three books on this list contain together well over two thousand pages, and may be recommended to those time- killing people for whom length in novels is in itself a virtue.

To the many others who tend to be deceived by bulk and the publicity which draws attention to bulk, and who are ready to belieVe that any man who has the energy to write a long.

novel must be a heaven-sent genius, especially if he is a foreigner, I would say, look before you leap. More confident-' ially, and to a smaller number, I would say, you may find that one of these three long novels comes up to your standard. of what a novel ought to be. The Virgin of Skalholt not externally alluring, being dressed in a loud-and messy jacket,. and concerned with Iceland in the seventeenth century. The

book is prefixed by a list of .characters bearing formidable names (the heroine is called Ragnheithur Brynjolfsdottir),.

and you may shy at sagas and all the ponderous asperities of the Nordic prosaist—but still, here is something different.. Sexual intercourse, with which all the books under review are to some extent concerned, is a subject which a reviewer.

may come to regard as the most potentially boring it is possible . to choose ; while the hero presses his lips to those of the heroine those of the reviewer are apt to be stretched to their fullest extent in an ungovernable yawn. But in Iceland in the seventeenth century sexual intercourse was an activity subjected to the strictest taboos, and the dangers it provoked,

whenever . it went outside the bounds of law and custom, raised it-(t6 judge from what happened to the virgin of Skal- holt) to an heroic, an almost mythological level. Ragn- heithur was the daughter of the Bishop of Skalholt, fell in love with her tutor Dathi Halldorsson, who had already got

another woman into trouble, and as a result of gossip was compelled by her father to take a solemn public oath pro- claiming her innocence. Dathi betrayed the Bishop's trust in him, and Ragnheithur perjured herself. After a time she found herself with child, and was separated from her lover. After her child was born it was taken away from her, and she was obliged to do public penance.

" They had torn her child from her. When for the last time she had loosed him from her arms, at two months old, she rode direct from Braithratunga to her public absolution on the Cathedral floor. From the bitterest moment of her life she went straight to the most humiliating. Now she was in Skalholt, and they told her to beware of gaiety. She sprang from her chair with the paper in her hand, stamping her foot. as an ewe with a lamb beneath its udders to a dog approaching."

Later, in secretly attempting to see the child, she was stopped and brought back by force, and later still died of the plague.. " Do you think, father," she asked on her deathbed, " that there is Church discipline in hell 1'. " After . her death, a letter came from Copenhagen, from the King, pardoning her and " saving her honour." The beauty of this tragic story lies partly in the orderly. . simplicity with which it is told—the design is good, the style unforeech; the characters natural—and the skill with which its dramatic qualities are brought out, and partly in the Which it is related to the social and political life going on in a particular place and

time : thus the Cgossip about Ragnheithur, velut inter ignes ham minores, is shown not simply as gossip, but as an express- ion of personal, class or religious feeling.' Professor Kamban,

whose name, it seems, has been mentioned in connexion with the Nobel prize, is known as a historian, and is clearly something of a poet as well.

I do not propose to. give a detailed abstract of The Son of Marietta, since this book has received a great deal of attention • in the daily and Sunday Press, attention proportioned more

to its size, I think, than its merits. ‘- It is about Italy -in the eighteenth century, and the author Manages to make that a

duller and vaguer world than Professor Kamban's Iceland. An orphan girl groWs up- in the town of Todi and has a child by the bishop : the child grows up into a good-for-nothing, goes to Venice, and dies -on ,the ;gallows.. The length of Mr. Fabricius' novel is quite inordinate, the manlier, undis- tinguished, the invention too thin for 'a romantic-picaresque essay of this kind, and the general effect rather flat, but it flows on smoothly and asks time rather than any.special effort of the reader. If it leaves no very Clear impreision on the

mind, that is because the author has chosen to • be diffuse and has done very little to convey a sense of place and period. Place and period are of great interest to Mr. D. L. Murray, who writes of Brighton in the nineteenth and • twentieth

centuries with considerable gusto. Regency is described as

a " quadruple portrait." He calls the, various sections. Mor- esque, Gothic, Babylonian, and Ferro-Concrete, and details in turn the existence of four women, linked to one another by blood. Perhaps the most successful section is the third, and

the least successful that which .deals: with the preient day. The whole thing is somewhat in the manner of Mr. _Hugh

Walpole, and should please those who like sprightly caval- cades.

It is with some muscular relief that one takes up a novel of a more ordinary length. Mrs. Pearl Sydenstricker Buck tells us of an American woman who went to -China in Victorian times as the wife of -a missionary. - Cariebad " hazel-brown eyes, gold-flecked, under dark brows," like her father she was " delicate, flaming, proud, loving beauty to passion," used to

living in " spacious, dignified, beautiful " . surroundings and in "a room indescribably fragrant and simple and pure," and on the whole was just a little too perfect to be trite. Appar- ently missionaries in 'China in those days did as 'the Chinese do, and bred like rabbits and died like flies, for Carie and Andrew had seven children and lost four of them. Andrew was very much taken up with his vocation, and after -being

married for thirty years he and Carle were " yet very,apart," for " she had married a man for the stern puritan: side. Of her but as life had carried her on it was the rich humanside of her that had deepened and grown." This- is a book that will

appeal to women. Though slightly sentimental, it gives a true suggestion of the devoted and energetic life of a woman in exile, of the trials of a godly husband, frequent child-bearing, home-sickness, and separation from modern conveniences. The fact that Carle had to live in China seems little more than incidental : her life might have followed very much the same

pattern in other countries where people go to convert the heathen.

Miss Norah James has made another addition to her series of plain tales from the streets. This time a policeman has swum into her net. John was a foundling who grew up with the idea of becoming a policeman, and became one. He has

his moments of unreality, as when he says, " You see, for some women one feels only fondness and, and well, respect, and then

there are the others. They raise the devil in you." He en- counters both the respectable and the devil-raisers, but Miss James is just as' interested in trying to. tell us what a young policenian's daily routine is likely' to be like, and she has evi-

dently taken some trouble to find out Otir' policemen are wonderful, not to say imperturbable : 1`, -His mind was still full of the curious discoveric he had made that night. He ;walked back to the barracks quickly. Funny to.fmd a half-sister, not so funny that she should be a prostitute. And there wasn't anything he could do about it."

– It is a pity MiSs.James has seen.flt. to make a startling use of coincidence, for her book, as we should expect of her, is sensible, humane, and unpretentious.

Canon to Right of Them is a hearty fantasy about clergymen and light ladies, which seems to have the moral that " It's the

professing Christians who require converting?' And it appears that "the sins of the flesh are small puny sins. It is the great unkind- nesses against which we must wage war, the great unkindnesses

asticrtlIti little laths' of 'charity: - And I--can mourn n:4, :lord, yoncion't find either of them music- -