Fiction

By SE 4N 0 'FAOLA.IN The Thinking Reed. By Rebecca West. (Hutchinson. "

Let Us Pray.. By Joist Gray; -Marra!). 7s. 6d.) 'Silence in Heaven. By Lance fiieveking. (Cassell. 78.

The Twisted VA9a4gItti (Hies.

4.` IT is a curious little experience to keiciVe a. parcel Of ,IIPNV books, to glance at the cofoUred wrappers; the titlek and the authors' names, and to feel no-reactiorL A week later, 'ts.hen-One has- read those books,- to gkinee at theniLis- to feel a 'personality -emanating from each: The titles, the mantes of the authors, the picture on the jacket—all have taken on meaning. Then they lie around` and gradually the little aura of personality begins. to evaporate from the poorer books, until one =venders not merely if one ever,,_read them but why the authofs ever 'Wrote them ; but with_the others, their perfume has gone into. the brain and there it dilates -with time and grows richer in the memory which refuses to let it go:- After a year of reviewing noveliI could number Oil the fingers of tale hand the books that.. barnacle to the memory, the really good books—a Mrijfield, a Garnett, a Faulkner, perhaps The Green Child, bfili*.x's . Royal. Way, possibly Sparkenbroke (that is too. recent foAliit sure about it) ; books that capture the imagination. i there- are others one -will recall, rather than retain vividly,' and of these I think Miss Rebecca West's new novel The Thinking Reed will be one. It is a book which demands, and gets, admiration. It is clever. It is incisive. It is excellent fan, sharp fun perhaps, because it is satirical. It is full of apt comment aptly phrased. It is a realistic picture of French-American society in such places as Paris and Cap d'Antibes, with an interlude for the entry of English society, lacerated without pity. And the problems of the two main characters, the American, Isabelle, and the Frenchman, Marc, are rationalised throughout so that where the book is not a novel it is a study in the ethic of modern marriage.

" Where the book is not a novel . . I don't think it

really is a .novel,asify often, or ever .fctr very long. It is a comedic de moeurs, with all the stress on the moeurs. It has the artificiality of a writer who is all-the time aware that she is more clever than the people she depicts. They become follies, "humours," pegs for her wit. In the eighteenth- century phrase, she " smokes " • them ; and we, become spectator with her, are flattered by the sense of-,superiority we borrow from her experience. In that sense it -matters -little what the story is about ; but it is about a woman who admires order in life, grace of behaviour; restraint, culture, dill who dreads every tendency in .herself towards lack of control. She flies from her lover Andre becatise he is dramatic and over-emotional. She would like to marry Laurence Vernon, an American of gOOd stock, and she loses him by a display of the kind of behaviour she detests. To save her face she marries Marc Sallafranque, a wealthy industrialist, chubby and childlike and of a disconcertingly distinguished quality of brain, and having married him falls in love with him. The novel follows the progress of these two -very intelligent and civilised lovers through an incredibly stupid, sophisticated, and idle society which threatens to make them conform to its restrictions, much as in a packed _carriage the j travellers :are shaken down" by - the chit of the jahrney into.a mutual adaptation of body and mind. _Whether er not the lovers preserve their individualities and ideals the reader will discover for himself, but it is much more important that on the way, among innumerable dramas— melodramas, indeed—Miss West, as the enfant terrible in the carriage, spills many relevant and irrelevant beans.

" She was not an enthusiast of Swiss landscape, for it seemed to her that if snow mountains were beautiful then vanilla ices and meringues must also be conceded beauty."

" One always finds a woman believes in nothing provided she is the kind of woman who has faith in life. If she has no faith she will tell you she believes in everything."

" Paris is like all masterpieces, which produce in the spectators emotions which have never passed: through their creators' minds."

" . . -his office,- a stupendous 'apartment designed in that modernist style which represents-the last attempts of. bad taste to escape the criticism of geod - Perforce I give the impertinent snippets of the enfant terrible, and they will, I fear,- not do justice to the entire I'll Mourn you Later.. By Catharine Whitcomb. (Chatto _Lid 'in us. 78. 6c14

success of this method of usingAetion as a vehicle for social criticism. They may, however, suggest that a book written with such intelligence tends to reduce the`temperature of life considerably. There is nothing exhilarating or warm about The Thinking Reed and I am glad to be reminded by Mr. E. M.

Forster, of Arthur Waley's excellent phrase about books that are 'like - inverted: X-rays—hovering'V-,few. inches above - the surface 'of .thifigSfor it hits. Off.the uppenetrating of. this -type of novel. — I'll Mourn you Later is the first novel of a . yourig'woman of twenty -two, a novel of contrasts belween the sletpineis of a

little town thirty miles-from Boston and the. macabre events that take place in the St. John house when the grandmother dies and the family is reunited.there for the burial. ...131ilasbeth, the sensitive, wayward, Charming mother of Henrietta, im-

preses her placid mood °lithe book, in spite of its tratle over- tones of death, suicide and lunacy, in Spite Of -her brother

Walter's unlovely, pot-be.Bied Clutching at lifeand too-late-love,

or the restless jealousies and - passions of. Henrietta- ai‘riter husband, Bill. _The drowsy, unehanging,duSty atmosphere of the little•country town is personified in het loyalties to all that hotise and town meant to her childhood and •yoUth,' and there conies gradually - from that antiphon between past and

present, . between_ beauty and.'-ugliness, a certain _:quality of emotion -that makes us keenly interested in the -future-of Miss Whitcomb. She will, one hopes, cut out the sex. stuff.. It is

not her tine-line.- -

In Let Us Pray, by John Gray, ire flint ourklVes in 'a very

- different atmosphere.. -It is -a verrgood -exattiple of -the'new proletarian novel which believes that ten bugs spitted on a pin in a low-down lodging-house are more real than ten daisies in a chain in a• spring 'meadow. Though I marked dozens of pages thatatinck me as being guilty of this-falsity of misantrophism, I find when I go back to them that I have nothing either good or bad enough to put my teeth into.

If you want raw life (on the assumption that spring meadows are unbaked life) here it is, perfectly honest as far as it goes. I was disappointed in Mr. Lance Sieveking's Silence in Heaven, for his The Perfect Witch was a much more skilful and delicate bit of light entertainment. Here a hard business- man, through a series of events hastened by busineSs and domestic worry which momentarily send him. -off his chump, writes himself a letter, as from his lawyer, telling himself the truth about himself. How he treats this revelation might have formed the substance of a separate novel ; but Mr. Sieveking causes him to obliterate it. So where's the point unless it be in the revelation of the revelation. Unhappily by the time the revelation comes we know all about the unfortunate man —so there is no revelation for us.

The Twisted Vine, a quick-fire imaginative reconstruction of the life of Jacopone da Todi, the thirteenth-century Umbrian poet, is of interest for its subject, its colourful period, its

procession of names, its sidelong glances at the controversies and characters, brutalities and idealisms of the great century with which it deals. Its somewhat standardised technique, however, may be sufficiently illustrated by the conventional style of almost any page : - •

" ' By the bowels of San Fortunate, if it is not Messer Rolandino ! '

The oath bounded through the thin Paris air and fell on the ears of Roland, rich with memories of sun and red wine and golden grapes.

Fra Angelo ! ' .

Welcome warmed his tone, and forgetfulness of local quarrels and private jealousies . . ."

I cannot leave these five books without remarking on the careless English to lie met in every one of them. Miss West is the worst sinner, and can write such a sentence as :

" Perhaps we are all of us born with one foot on the present, and can grip it with the other only if we swing it far enough back into the past."

She has a sentence on page 11 which contains five mixed meta- phors. In The Twisted Vine there is this piece ..of gaucherie : " He Was accosted in the Cathedral squiri by a man naigniritezitly attired, rlding a black mule, in whom he had no difficulty in recto g- nising Benedetto Gaetani."

Sortie day a reviewer will get se-tired of this kind of writing that he will simply reviewAis. batch of novels by listing proofs of the authors' inn)).lity to write English.