FICTION

By ADR,1AN BELL Anna By Boris Zaitsev. Translated by Natalie Duddingten.

RATIV literature tends to be restricted two form; -

obediently fills it. Some ideas naturally fit themselves into

Overboard, exactly fits its_ theme... The other, Anna, seems th

to want more room, which, considering the vast numbers of full-length novels that could do with less, is rather a pity. ti

The first merit of Gentleman Overboard is the literalness of it may be judged a success.

wrist watch stops ; the mind, a more reliable instrument, feeling it would be interesting to get to know them, they goes on. The lungs, waterlogged, give up, the mind goes on. are gone. Arkady hardly begins to live for us before he is dead. The heart cracks fierily, the mind calmly watches that final Anna herself has all too brief a lease of life: And the Nemeshaevs brilliant pyrotechnical display. Henry Standish, we feel, in their drawing room, they are like a burst of music when a

Act of God brings us back to a world in which there are of M. Zaitsev's Anna. .

men who have begun to live before they begin to die ; if, by One has grown to expect stories of Irish life to be all back-

inadequate, simplification to represent that there are two are mostly of back alleys, is refreshingly human—or humane. sides to every question. It used to be the angels and the That is not to say that Mr. .Stuart's story of the.poteen-distillery monkeys ; now the monkeys have become further rationalised in an old ship in the river lacks the full range of the emotions. to electrons, the angels to intuitions. The earth as the centre The elements of love, pathos and the rest of it are none the less of the universe and the earth as " that pin-prick " are the there for being mixed in the proportions of ordinary life. extremes set up against each other in the persons of Cabadeus, And life, in the decayed fishing-town of Fert, is devastatingly the priest of Fraxinet, and Colonel Erskine. Erskine is an ordinary. The troubles that, accumulate round Larry ,Byrne, atheistic student of Mediterranean religions, and like all the town engineer married to a bit of a feather-head, are due unbelievers at continual inner strain. The early death of his partly to his falling in love with Joanna, the wife of the garage wife, in a terrible way, is the blinding fact in his life, at which proprietor, and partly to the schemes he gets involved in with he cannot look. How far it has determined his general Johnny Pidgeon, the poteen-disiiller, to prevent the ship on outlook is not clear. To him, shattered by the perishing of which he lives, with its valuable secret cargo, being sold over the greatest beauty in his life, beauty is yet the only immortality. his head. This he does by Pretending that the swing bridge Cabadeus, the priest, dwells under the wing of the Roman will not open to let the ship through. The bridge connects Catholic Church ; that discipline is his freedom. .There is the town with the island, which was once the home of a thriving a great friendship between the two men. As the result of a fishing folk, but since the advent of steam trawlers sunk into miracle that is no miracle, but the prank of a poseur, and the a slum. Its people, even in decay, retain a moral code in many equivocal attitude of his superiors, Cabadeus is likely to lose ways superior to the respectable mainland part of Fert. The his faith, which is his life. For him Erskine makes his two are at loggerheads and Larry Byrne has a foot in both camps; supreme sacrifice, which is to uncover that moment of his to his increasing embarrassment. This is resolved finally past at which he dare not look. The other's need saves at a price which is neither belittled nor sentimentalised, tie Cabadeus from his own. There is a good deal of theological sacrifice of the passionate side of him to security. In " getting discussion while events are shaping, the story to its climax ; on " he ' leaves behind Fert, Casey's riverside house which but this does not do much more than define the rather cut was a sanctuary, and Joanna, the love of his life. This is not a and dried antithesis already referred to. coldly calculated choice, but bound up with the fact that at What Erskine's " beauty " is, the truth for which he lives, heart Larry is an islander, and shares something.' of their is not quite dear in view of his belief that " not all the passion, traditional moral integrity, As a story, As a study in human_ not all the pain, can carry these echoes beyond the grave." nature, The Bridge is completely satisfying. .

Act of God. By F. Tennyson Jesse. (Heinemann. e7s.' 6d.) had passed over; all the trumpets sounded for him on the (Allen and Upwin. 5s,) other side.", Erskine thought that line "the most beautiful

The Bridge. By Francis Stuart. (Collins. 7s. 6d.) in all the rich treasury of English prose." Does he not thereby detach beauty from its context ? Can that be beautifulNAR E a s" w you do not think (essentially) true ? There, perhaps, the short story of say a dozen pages, and the novel of three which

is the weak point in the realisation of the colonel as a character. hundred. Factors quite irrelevant to its content cut off the In fact, despite his stoic realism he is a bit of a contradiction. writer's output into these very different lengths : the publishing

This might be legitimately the warp imposed by .the tragic world and the world of the circulating library have got possession

experience in his past. But the author does not sufficiently of the foot-rule and measured out the frame ; the author disengage herself from him (at times we are in doubt whether

a dozen pages, some 'into three hundred ; but for the rest he is thinking aloud or she is), and her irony, which verges it means they get squeezed, which is not so bad, or spun out, on caricature towards the Oxford Groupers and the floating which is worse. It is a change to find two books which are cosmopolitan elements of Fraxinet, is never turned on Erskine. neither short stories nor long novels. One, Gentleman To do so would have been to admit that truth is not necessarily

a choice betWeen the extremes of Roman Catholic dogma and "

chance groupings of suns- dashing wildly about in different

directions," which would have transcended the limits she

considered practicable for her story. Within those limits when he shall tell of his adventure—the ' Arabella ' growing Nemeshaevs, formerly wealthy, are _gay,:andr: fatalistic with smaller and smaller meanwhile on the horizon. It will turn banishment or worse impending daily. The various .blows of course, at any moment ; his absence will be noticed. It fall, and the end is a break-up of the old local life, the gentry does not turn ; it disappears. Only then does something to earn their bread in Moscow, the farmer back to his „native of his position begin to dawn upon him ; then our modern Latvia. The effect is of having stayed, say, a week, in. the „: civilised gentleman appears out of context. His expensive place. We have touched the lives of people, and just as we are -

has at lait come thoroughly alive. door opens and shuts. Certainly we could have done with more