Fiction
" FirrioN of an elevating character "—this haunting phrase from Sundays at Home comes to mind when opening a parcel of new novels. Will they elevate ?—it is unlikely, but, at least, let them not depress ! Here, for once, are four novels full of judicious levity, novels to elevate the spirits if not the mind.
The Wink is a miraculous wink, winked by the statue of an obscure saint in a village church in Normandy, It causes hot dispute between the Roman Catholic priests and an Anglican. clergy- man on his holiday, and this is handled by. Mr. Bennett with such tact and good hUmour that it might have been done by the late George Birmipgham had he been as much at home with French peasants as he was with Irish ones. A Roman Catholic bishop deduces the miracle to be Satan's work. This view is challenged by the Anglican clergymad; his honest, piety strongly -reinforced by insular prejudice ; by a benevolent American widow who calk herself a Deist ; and by the entire village, because miracles bring trade to villages. Controversy rages in cafés, in the Presbytery, in the smart hotel. The Bishop sees visions, the statue disappears, the parson is kidnapped, and the police investigate. The denoue- ment is as delightful as it is unexpected—a fitting climax to a feast of sedate absurdity.
An unexpected legacy from a great-aunt makes a dollar-millionaire of a priggish young Englishman working as a hat-check-girl super- visor in a New York night 'club called the Freudian Follies. Before receiving his Windfall he is irritated, bored, shocked, frozen, and rather hungry. Afterwards, having become involved in the motion picture industry in Hollywood, he is even more irritated, bored and shocked, although now sun-tanned and surfeited with steak and champagne. He has acquired a secretary, an elderly product of Harvard obsessed with his stomach ulcers and cultural standards, and a partner, whose obsession is what he calls " dames." The young Englishman is obsessed by his horror of everything American, especially his unspeakable partner in the making of films, Tiffany Clodd. The uproarious adventures of this trio in Hollywood arc curtailed because the amorous Clodd fears prosecution under the Mann Act. Film production is transferred to England, and Clodd is more outrageous than ever in the Queen Elizabeth,' in a park Lane Hotel, and in the film studio. He wears, outside his trousers, a pink shirt with hula-hula girls stencilled on it. In his horror class, Clodd is an unforgettable creation, and the young Englishman, staunchly priggish to the last page, makes a perfect foil .for his ebullient nastiness.
Mr. P. G. Wodehouse's new novel is called The Old Reliable— a title which the author has surely earned for himself as a source of stylised fun. Here is the same old mixture of the same old ingre- dients, and it is as effective as ever. The potent charm is not diminished in strength through constant use. There is the rich arrogant dowager doomed at the outset to be worsted by her poor relations ; the lovesick young. peer ; the impoverished but deter- mined suitor and the pretty'niece ; and the inevitable manservant, this time a particularly choice specimen of a butler who can blow safes when majestically intoxicated. The setting is Hollywood, and the idiom the familiar. highly. stylised Wodehouse American, with quotations from the Bard slipped in among the mild wise-
cracks and the near-epigrams in the old, authentic manner. •
There are only two kinds of stories about farming—cheerful stories about nice people who like it, and gloomy stories about dour people who seem to hate every minute of it. The Home Place belongs to the first categoiy. It describes life on a 300-acre mixed faim in Texas (very mixed, since it includes arable, grazing, pigs, turkeys and water-meloni) and the farmer's efforts to make it sup- port him and his three children and his grandfather. It is full of fascinating details about soil erosion, and grass seed, and blasting post-holes for fences in rocky hillsides with dynamite, and hunting racoons with trail-hounds by moonlight. The farmhouse family is charming, especially Grandfather, an endearing octogenarian who does .his cooking and poaches deer and wild turkeys for the pot. regularly exclaiming " Hot diggity 1 " and " Dang my ornery soul ! " Life on this farm has its ups and downs as on any other, but the ups are hilarious and the downs cheerfully endured.
BARBARA WORSLEY-Gtlf taw
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