Fiction
ON the principle that one should set a thief to catch a thief, there might perhaps be more promising candidates for the portrayal of Napoleon Buonaparte than Sir Alan Herbert. A preference for power and grandiloquence, a trust in force and a genius for its use are characteristics which would seem to tend towards Elba, Waterloo and St. Helena rather than Hammersmith and The Trials of Topsy. The fact seems to be that one day Sir Alan Herbert was sailing, as happily as one would imagine, along the north coast of Elba when he was stung by his ignorance of what precisely had happened there. It was not long before he found himself standing in bewilderment on Napoleon's terrace, "where the great man walked and brooded and swept the blue sea with his telescope." The question why any man in his senses could have given up such a charming and peaceful view in order to challenge a world in arms seems to have forced itself on Sir Alan thereafter with growing force. Why on earth Waterloo? became abbreviated to the sufficiently obvious Why Waterloo?
There are, of course, great gains to the reader in having as his guide an investigator with eyes quite unclouded by the traditional prejudice of historians. Sir Alan Herbert looks at the problem freshly, imaginatively and with a sympathetic insight into ordinary human nature. Where he has specialist knowledge, as in charting the adventures which his hero met on the return voyage from Elba to France, he almost certainly has a good deal to teach the historians of the future. Where he is without special knowledge, he still has a cheerful and charming fund of common sense which makes Why Waterloo? always a pleasure to read and justifies its status as a historical novel. As to the major question, it is already somewhat prejudiced by limiting the span of his story to the period between Napoleon's abdication under the Treaty of Fontainebleau and his return to France within a year. If we are ready to forget a lifetime of struggle and ambition on a continental scale, it is not difficult to accept Sir Alan Herbert's plea that Napoleon had no other wish than to settle peaceably on Elba with his family around him and supported by the income of two million francs agreed in the Treaty of Fontainebleau. What turned the great man's steps back on to the war-path, according to Sir Alan Herbert, was the failure of the Allies to observe these provisions, and the provocative suggestion that he would be further from temptation on the island of St. Helena. A little more good faith and hrioanity all round could thus "have altered history and let one of the world's great men die peacefully and happy.'
If Sir Alan Herbert's appraisal of one of the world's great conquerors is a little simpliste in overlooking the depth and strength of his prodigious appetite for conquest, it is-correspondingly (and necessarily) severe in castigating the British commissioner on Elba, Colonel Campbell, who believed from the start that Napoleon would break out. The Colonel emerges from these pages as a singularly dislikeable person, but we can scarcely conclude from this that he was lacking in insight into certain aspects of Napoleon. Although the Colonel failed in his mission, I suspect he may have been better qualified to catch a thief than Sir Alan -Herbert.
Mr. Henry Williamson's massive historical novel, which began with The Dark Lantern in mid-Victorian England, reaches its secQnd stage in Donkey Boy, and leaves us after the turn of the century without reaching 1914. There is a sense in which we feel ourselves taken up by Mr. Williamson and dropped by him in just this time-table manner. With extraordinary skill and precision he rebuilds the scenery of the past—its attitude to domestic servants, straw hats and tennis- racquets—and in front of it he brings on his minor figures of the middle and lower middle class. We follow them with an almost morbid interest, as if we were rummaging in a trunk filled with old family letters and photographs which belong authentically to another world. And yet we have only to look away for the figures to stop moving and the scenery to vanish as if the lid of the trunk had fallen. Without Mr. Williamson's continuous intervention it is as if his characters and their world expired. The effect is not necessarily damaging for readers who are used tO an interval of a week or longer while the hero is suspended on the edge of a precipice. In this sense Mr. Williamson seems to be engaged in a thriller whose instal- ments can be relied on to animate a whole section of social history. In their admirable task of introducing Galdos, the greatest Spanish novelist after Cervantes, to the English-speaking public, Messrs.
Weidenfeld and Nicolson have followed up The Spendthrifts with its predecessor, Torment. Various points of doubt in the sequel are now cleared up, and the books jointly and in their right order appear unmistakably as one of the masterpieces of European fiction.
Throughout Galdbs writes with a noble objectivity which is not without warmth, and this first part of the story, describing a love affair with penetrating psychological insight, is considerably more dramatic than its sequel, The Spendthrifts. There is also a marked improvement in translation. We must hope for another half-dozen volumes of Galdbs.
Anyone who is looking for a Christmas card for a friend who can afford to take the economic facts of life for granted could do much worse than send him a copy ofeMadame de by Louise de Vilmorin. A brilliantly ingenious trifle, smoothly translated by Lord Norwich, its embroideries on the theme of disloyalty in love can be guaranteed to dispel tedium vitae for an hour.
In many ways Ma-rai-ee should rank as one of the most dramatic and absorbing stories of the last war. Attractive in its integrity, con- vincing and horrible in its detail, this cleanly-built story of the Japanese occupation of Malaya has less the quality of fiction than of a dramatised report. Lacking in individual characterisation, it nevertheless portrays the character of an epoch—and one which lies immediately at the root of the Malayan problem today.
TANGYE LEAN.
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