Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER

Co West, Young Man. By Bernard J. Farmer. (Nelson. 7s. 6d.) See How They Run. By Jerrard Tickell. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) Friday was Fourpence. By Kenneth Richards. (Wishart. 7s. Gd.) Men are so Ardent. By Gerald Korsh. (Wishart. 7s. 6d.) Silas Crockett. By Mary Ellen Chase. (Collins. 7s. 6(1.)

Wise Generations. By Barbara Coo (Chapman and Hall. 7s. 6d.)

Storm and Dream. By Ruth Holland. (Cape. 7s. Gd.) THE first four of these books arc first novels, and the best of them is Go West, Young Man. This is a plain, straight-

forward account of the adventures of a young Englishman named Peter Cochrane, who goes out to Canada with no money and the intention, of making a living. Very much the greenhorn, a little priggish, and in many ways absurdly backward and inexperienced for his age, as young Englishmen often are in comparison with young men in other countries (" Englishmen knew less at twenty-five," he found, " than the average Canadian did at sixteen "), he " carried health like a banner," and had that toughness of fibre which does so much to justify the mania for keeping fit, and which enabled him to " make good," as they say. Like so many first novels, this one is well furnished with facts and reads 'ike an lautobiography. It might profitably be ?read ' by every penniless young man about to go to Canada. It would show him what it is like to be friendless, jobless, hungry and cold, to sell silk stockings from door to door, work for a

pulp mill or a railway, or as an electrician, or as a sampler on a gold mine : it will tell him of raw contacts with

unprivileged men and women, and with the celebrated Canadian mosquitoes : " Buzz, buzz—a moment's silence, then suddenly the maddening sting of a bite.... Men have gone mad in the bush and run screaming through the everlasting green. . . . till at last they ended their torture by plunging in some lake."

Let it not be thought that the book is nothing but a harsh warning to emigrants, for in the end :

" Peter did not regret his experiences. They might have been unpleasant—some of them distinctly were—but they had enabled him to find his niche. . . . When ho and Aileen were returning from their honeymoon they had passed under the Quebec Bridge, that wonder of the World; the tremendous spans arching up to moot the sky : vast, aloof, magnificent. Peter's heart swelled. . . . And lie knew he had achieved his destiny."

Mr. Tickell is a more sophisticated and conscious writer, and his Wandering young hero, another Peter; is able to

describe himself as " able-bodied, handsome, intelligent, charming,' travelled, ex-public school and 'Varsity man, can drive car, sahib "—one of those go-anywhere-and-do-

anythings, in fact, who advertise their services in agony columns. Perhaps narcissism may be detected as well as autobiography in novels of this kind. At all events, this Peter is presented to us as a hearty, happy-go-lucky partner in a romance with the daughter of an impoverished Austrian

colonel. (She is one of several Paulas in the books under review ; Junes and Jennifers, it seems, are already dated.) Peter aspires to become a member of Parliament, Paula to detach herself from an Austrian count whom she has married in order to oblige her poor but proud tubercular father.

Clean limbs prove to be more than coronets, and old school ties than noble blood, and a happy ending is clearly predes- tined. Mr. Tickell is lively; and it is a pity he is so sentimental.

He certainly seems .to have adapted his talent precisely to

the demands of the average circulating library mem-sahib. Friday was Fourpenie takes us on to less pukka ground. Too quiet to catch the attention of readers'who like to'escape into worlds of wish-fulfilment, it is a study of the life of a

lower middle-class household in a suburb not of the newest.

Whether the situation with which it deals was worth expansion beyond the limits of a long short story seems uncertain, for the general effect is rather' monoehroinatic for a full-length

novel. The daughter and idol of an old shopkeeper named Penrose marries and leaves home, and he finds a substitute object for his affections in the lodger who replaces her : " These are nice people " (writes Marion the lodger), " just the sort you would like, homely -but very refined, and try -bard to make you comfortable. Mrs. Penrose is a very nice lady. . . ."

And Mr. Richards has written a very nice book, homely but very refined, and absolutely unsensational. He- .makes us recognise "in the Penroses • the virtue that so often ennobles the obscuip, and the unworthiness of Marion does nothing to dim thefmeness of -old Penrose's 'feeling towards' her.

Mr. Kersh had a promising idea, but has not made the most of it. His idea was to Conduct a calculating young woman through seamy circles to her goal, and then dig the ground away beneath her feet. His heroine (another Paula) believed that only fools work and that " the thing to do is to keep men at arm's length, make them keep running after you without ever catching you ; , you can get 'much more that way." Unfortunately Mr. Kersh's pen races away with his powers of discrimination, and he plunge's_ Paula into a diffusely satirical world of unsatisfactory grotesques. With discipline, lie should be able to employ his gift for describing squalid but colourful people and places to much better effect.

And now fOr a brace of sa. gas. Silas Crockett is a'-" story of four generations of a Maine seafaring family." in which Miss Chase has " attempted to picture the maritime life of the coast for one hundred years." Her writing is imbued with a characteristic New England " graciousness," rather self- conscious and sentimental, equally fulLof a refined apprecia- tion of material things, food, clothes, and houses, and for a respect for less tangible things like tradition and family feeling, but her Reubens and Deborahs and Silases and Solaces and Abigails only hover like A:agile abstractions in the mind. This is partly because the author, in, taking the trouble to docuMent her story, has fallen in' loire' with her local colour rather than her characters. In Mint words, the book's strongest point is its accumulation of authentic detail, and I cannot resist a reference to a transaction of the Saturday Cove Social Library in 1821, whereby certain books were exchanged for others deemed to be of better influence, sdthat instead of Fielding and Sterne the locals were tegaled with Dr. Wood's- Letters to Unitarians and The Miseries,of Human Life. The decline of the village of Saturday Cove is traced from ." the great days of sail," when the .coast of Maine was the scene of a shipbuilding boom, to the presen0 time, when it is " dependent entirely upon summer residents" for its livelihood. Miss Goolden has undertaken :to trace the fortunes of an English family during a much shorter time, but she has not the advantage of setting them to picturesque occupations in attractive surroundings. The period under her notice is from the War until last year, and she begins her story with an air raid and ends it -with the Silver Jubilee. The family are middle-class, class-con- scious, and Kensingtonian, the kind of people who never criticise themselves and believe that artists don't wash and that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, people with no imagination whatever and very limited intelligence. The sad thing is that almost everything that happens to them has an air of emphatic triviality, and the book leaves one feeling like an unwilling eavesdropper who has been listening to an endless flow of telephonic small-talk, a cataract of futility.

A sense of futility is also communicated by Storm and Dream, a novel more skilfully written and one that seems to show an equal respect for what is believed to be a soundness

at heart. Miss Holland writes of two families, the Grannings, who tend towards harmony, and the Venners, who have a newly-made fortune and several spoilt daughters and are seldom contented, with .their lot. The restless and frequent changing of the scene effectively mirrors the restlessness of the characteri, but what is appalling about both Miss GoOlden and Miss Holland is that they seem quite satisfied to describe all these useless lives in a perfectly conventional way : it does not seem to have occurred to either of them that it is no good writing about the commonplace unless one is either going to illuminate it, or raise it to a poetical level, or satirise it. They simply accept it, and fail entirely to make us care whether their people succeed or not in attaining what seems

to be their only ambition,, a successful love-affair. . Both books describe aspects of contemporary life -so passionless

and devoid. of ideas that .one- begins to wonder whether it might not be better after all to go and " catch the wild goat by the hair.". '