FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN A Handful of Silver. By Doreen Wallace. (Collins. 8s. 6d.)
THE work of Ignazio Silone was unknown to me until I opened The School for Dictators, but I look forward now to
examining his earlier novels, Fontamara and Bread and Wine, because this Italian writer is a refreshing phenomenon, and may be commended with zeal to those who enjoy dialectics, have a palate for cynicism, and believe that the fictional form has other applications besides the pictorial, emotional, or purely personal evocation of experience. This new book is a collec- tion of dialogues on the theme of dictatorship. It is nothing else. There is no story, no emotion, and only such character- establishment as is required to preserve the dialectical personali- ties of Professor Pickup, Mr. W. (" the Man of Tomorrow "), and Thomas the Cynic. These three talk their fill, and amusingly within their own characters, on the theory and prac- tice of being a dictator. That is all that the book is—and therefore it is not every novel reader's eight-and-sixpence- worth. But it most decidedly is mine. I have enjoyed it enormously, and meantime realise that I have learnt a great deal—it is the work of a man both learned and precise—and the sustained contempt of it is, parodoxically, a sweet dew on our arid, ugly time.
To exult in the cold exposure on paper of certain windy asses now braying over Europe from perilously high places may seem, relating the vast actual menace of the latter to the immediate impotence of a mere book, a vain pleasure—but unquestionably it is a pleasure. And gratitude for the general excellence of the author's matter and form must make us lenient on that almost unavoidable defect of protracted satire—its tendency to become too obtuse in places, too schoolboyish ; its intermittent inclination to make much of small effects. But this is understandable. Satire, if it is to warm us, must have something of the chancy movement and eager pace of good talk at a party ; it must take its opportunities on sight, hit or miss. Pace and the general mood being more important than isolated effects, there will be misses unless the executant is perilously pompous—but there will alio be plenty of hits.
As here there are—loud cracks on the hard old skull of human crassness. They do no good at all but, I repeat, it is a positive pleasure to hear them resound.
The theme of all the argument is auctoritas non veritas facit legem. Something we all know but can hardly say enough about in these days. And if we are short of pebbles in our sling, Ignazio Silone can supply a useful type, smooth, hard, and for the most part solid throughout. It is one test of pleasure in a book when you find no stronger impulse of praise in you than the longing to quote from it ; it is another if, sometimes for reasons which you cannot catch up on to define, it reminds you of other books which have excited you.
Everyone, reading The School for Dictators, will recall Machia- velli's Prince, and most of us will agree that we derive far more pleasure from this gay descendant than from its re- nowned exemplar. But I was irrelevantly recalled, as I read, to certain grave passages of argument in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, and also, most curiously, I thought again and again, as I followed this new author, of an Irish novel called Murphy, which was published last year, and which no one appears to have read—a book as coldly idiosyncratic and personal of direction as this Italian book is universal, but having in common with it an imperturbable all-round con- temptuousness and an intellectual insistence which make both novels memorable and blessed among works of fiction.
It is hard to turn from cold brightness to praise the dear, old-fashioned Joyce-cum-Lawrence murk of Happy Valley.
And yet praised this Australian novel must be, for it is very good, though not for all markets. It may seem a pity for anyone to bother to write Marion Bloom again, especially in little, but it must be admitted that in Vic Moriarty Mr. Patrick White has given us a clearly recognisable sister of that broody contralto—in fact, God help us, another authentic female. But that is not all he has done. He has reproduced, with perverse and poignant nostalgia, what must be the most ugly landscape in the world—the Australian rural scene. He has flung all his weight into the old subjective method, and given us a powerfully sad, dusty, sordid group- story—which I believe we will remember when many other " impressive " novels are not even names in our bored heads.
This book begins badly, in my opinion. As Dr. Halliday came down the mountain on his skis, and mused, without attention to predicates, on the winter of his discontent, end- stopping on conjunctions and transitive verbs like the absent- minded ski-er he was, I voaned for the ordeal of arrested development nonsense that I thought I saw ahead. But I was wrong. Dr, Halliday,, aged thirty-six, 1 think, and self- pityingly dwelling on his own sweet sixteen in the first pages, is a far more adult and exact character than he appears at the outset. And his love affair with the music teacher is one of the truest-written romantic episodes in recent literature of sensibility. But that is only one good thing in an exciting, good book. The asthmatic schoolmaster, the murderer, is terrifying in his misery. Vic Moriarty, his doomed and sluttish wife, is horrifying in hers. And the night of her last exigent love-making with the station overseer, the night of her death, is written by someone in full control of all the factors that make up the hells and the escapes of personal life.
Happy Valley it the work of a man somewhat overdone by the fictional influences of the late 'twenties, but a man of particular talent, and fearless in portraying human sorrow,
meanness and sweetness. I was not interested in all his " slices of life "; Sidney Furlow—a rather " period " Tallulah Bankhead character—was a bore, I thought, and the same goes for her improbable parents. Where did those two get Sidney, anyway ? But Dr. Halliday and Alys Browne, and Ernest Moriarty and Vic belong to the serious tradition of subjective fiction, and are creations to respect. And Mr. White has made Australian village life more ugly and terrify- ing than it can be—which is a part of the function of the imaginative writer.
Hawk Among the Sparrows is a clever book about very little—but it is clever. It has devices and unexpected move- ments, and it keeps you bothered until the last page, when it leaves you dissatisfied, not to say out of temper. I didn't hold with the hawk in question. I was much more in sym- pathy with the idiotic inmates of " Uplands " on whom all his bogus attributes made such an unfortunate impression. And I thought his exit from the plot proved him the fool I always knew him to be. But perhaps I am labouring what the author intended to be a skimming joke. Frankly I don't know. I only know that I admired very much the eccentric characterisation of the sweet, silly Ellen, that I developed, in protest against the pompous hawk, a soft corner for the atrocious Mrs. Sparge—here another dash of the classic Marion Bloom recipe ! —and that altogether I was both enter- tained and irritated by a book which certainly has the shining merit of not being mistakeable for any other.
A Handful of Silver is by Miss Doreen Wallace, and is a' sane, kind, true and English as her earlier novels. This writer is entirely admirable in her knowledge of the things she elect, to write about, and the measure she can take of her owir limitations. If frequently she misses opportunities because 01 her distrust of individualism and her refusal to face the difficul• chance that the ultimate job of words, as of colours, is to evok feeling—that is the defect of a quality. And Miss Wallace' quality of good sense will stand against the collapses of sor more stimulating chance-takers. This novel of East Angli country-town life shows her doing precisely what she can do She has here a good and topical theme—a case of conscience and the problem of the starved agricultural labourer and th lure of armament-making.. She has also the theme of the dull conventional wife, the meek, charming, intelligent husbanc and the warm, or vamping women who watch without. She makes a good, conventional and intelligent story of it all an 'as always, her attitude before the problems of master am: man is humane, civilised and honourable.
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