Fiction
HERE are three period novels—Aston Kings (1882-1905), Lord Hornblower (1814-15) and Return to Cottington (1736-68). The
first is a study of life at the turn of the last century, in the family of Canon Wargrave of Aston Kings in Severnshire, with com- panion pictures of the aunts and cousins living at the neighbouring estates of Bolam Verney and Witham Darcy. Mr. Pakington writes well, has a fine gift for miniatures—the book is crowded with small, admirably distinct, creations—and his humour is inexhaustible and rarely misplaced. His is a gift of comedy, strengthened with judicious burlesque—he loves his period too well to be satirical about it—and it has produced a book full of that sort of pleasant laughter which does not lend itself to quotation. The rare faults can be picked out at once—" the pink coat of a blameless hunt " is a lamentable example of humour painfully at strain—but the many pages that warm the heart and please the mind are consistently proof against dissection. They will not submit to particular exhibition as examples of Mr. Pakington's agreeable wit.
The first three-quarters make a comprehensive family survey— and what with the Canon, Lady Gaunt, Aunt Eliza, Aunt Bebe, the Bishop of Asia Minor .and Mrs. Bayley, Miss Magee and Mrs. Chickwood, it is a treasury of humorous observation. The last quarter settles down to tell the love story of Kate Wargrave in detail. Kate is a delightful person, and her affair makes incom- parably better reading than the love stories of most modern novels— but this almost serious section comes as a small disappointment after the high pleasures of the early part of the book. Exactly the same thing happened in Nancy Mitford's amusing book The Pursuit of Love. Love found is somehow never quite so entertaining as Love pursued, especially when the pursuit has been under the experienced direction of ladies like Aunt Eliza and Mrs. Bayley.
There is considerable humour, too, in Francis Bamford's Return to Cottington—but it lies less in the sly observation of character• than in a just observation of conditions. " The unceasing struggle for existence from their earliest years not only endowed these men and women with a spirit of very real determination, but it gave them also a somewhat exaggerated sense of their own importance in the universal scheme of things. They found it difficult to believe that they had overcome so much to perform so little." This kind of observation is shrewd first and amusing afterwards. There is plenty of it in this book, which is indeed a serious attempt at a scholarly reconstruction of eighteenth-century manners.
Mark Amberley, exiled in 1746 for his share in the Jacobite rebellion, returns to England in 1768, and on the day after his arrival at Cottington is found in his park shot through the head.
The question " Who did it ? " makes a historian's detective problem —a fiction similar to the old puzzle, " Who killed Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey ? " In the Cottington mystery Nicholas Quoyers, with the aid of an old box of family papers, is at last able to solve the problem of nearly two hundred years. It is an ingenious idea—but it contains one fundamental defect. In any ordinary detective story the reader marches, along with the detective (or usually a little behind) excitedly discovering the truth as the mystery unfolds itself. But Return to Cottington is a mystery _without clues. The original story admitted no solution. Nor has any fresh evidence been discovered, with the exception of one fact which Mr. Quoyers keeps up his sleeve till the end of the book—and with the certain knowledge that it is there, the reader is obliged to await Mr. Quoyers's pleasure without any chance to exercise his own ingenuity. The concealment of a known fact is bad history-writing and bad detective- writing, and as the story progresses the sense of frustration becomes almost unbearable. There is a limit in the art of suspense, and it is a certain thing that many of the weaker brethren will be maddened into taking a forbidden peep at the last pages. Mr. Bamford makes several references to previous attempted solutions of the problem by such eminent criminologists as Dr. Watson, Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey and others. Amusing at first, this little joke grows into an error of judgement. The merit of Return to Cottington lies in its powerful suggestion of authen- ticity, its skilfully drawn eighteenth-century background. An imposture beautifully built up is too easily destroyed by these playful reminders of fiction. It is as though Mr. Bamford had not realised the excellence of his own work.
C. S. Forester's new book does not itand comparison with this admirable art of period reconstruction, but Hornblower enthusiasts will welcome a new story about their hero containing a sea battle, the suppression of a meeting, the capture of Le Havre, and a narrow escape from death. Purists may be forgiven for thinking that the fictions are rather too large for a supposedly historical novel, but Mr. Forester maintains his fine habit of telling an adventure with the most careful attention to convincing detail and without a shadow of false excitement. The latter part of the story is disappointing, for Hornblower on land is nothing like as good as Hornblower at sea. It is a point of skill in Mr. Forester's work that he should have found a hero in a far from perfect man. But does he begin to overdo it ? Hornblower's posturings in this book are sometimes
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