Stepfather to Madeleine
An Exile in Soho. By Mrs. Robert Henrey. (Dent. 16s.) To read Mrs. Henrey is to look into the heart and mind of a woman; not a woman of supreme genius or of impeccable taste, or one of extensive and invigorating ideas, but a woman deeply skilled in revealing the intricacies, pretences and anxieties of the-female soul. Beyond any doubt she is at her best when she writes about the people who belong to her own world; the cooks, the dress-makers, the people of Montmartre or Soho. She is less happy—or at least her readers are—when she flits into the extravagant vulgarities of a luxury hotel, or when she unreels the silly chatter of convalescents in a pension. All this might be very well if Mrs. Henrey possessed the calm analytical malice of Turgenev or of Chekhov, or even the petrifying realism of Zola; but she has none of these things, and that is why her return, in this book, to the simple though intense lives of the people with whom she is really familiar can hardly fail to please those who appreciated The Little Madeleine.
An Exile in Soho tells the weirdly touching story of a chef (no ordinary cook, and a Frenchman of course) who eventually, and unfortunately, married Mrs. Henrey's mother. Much of the book is fiction, and very good fiction too; the filling-out and elaboration, by a highly skilled writer, of the chef's history as narrated at various times by the chef himself. No woman can possibly understand and reveal the secret workings of a male mind—a providential, and indeed a very necessary, handicap; for any such knowledge would immediately crack the whole structure of human society from top to bottom, But if the description of Etienne Leblanc is quaintly ingenuous, the colour and movement of his environment are most admirably delin- eated. The transition from imaginative biography, the story of Leblanc, to the actual experiences of Mrs. Henrey (once more the little Madeleine) is carried out with extraordinary skill and a complete absence of any jolt or tension at the confluence. Mrs. Henrey has no need to be ashamed of belonging to what she calls "the more humble classes"; it is her experience among those classes, among her own people, which has given her the power of describing with a poignant, authentic and whimsical energy of style the lives and thoughts of those for whom the daily round is perilous and uncertain, those for whom a leg of lamb is an adventure and a bottle of Chanel a veritable whiff of Paradise. -a The story of Leblanc's marriage to Madeleine's mother is told with many sly ironical touches; as, for example, when the chef declares that he is "frying the potatoes of a happy man" and again when he is employed so precariously in the making of his "famous wafers." Madeleine's excursion to France breaks the construction of the book rather awkwardly. But the climax which followed her return to London is a first-rate piece of narrative—the tragic humours of the mushroom-cellar and the humorous tragedy of the broken marriage. Finally we hear of Leblanc's almost imperceptible death at Alba.
A very good book, though not so good as The Little Madeleine.
C. E. VULLIAMY.
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