Fiction
. • I,
IN Soldier of Waterloo Mr. O'Riordan takes us back to the ancestors of the ingenuous and enchanting Adam and his. friends. Family history has become fashionable in fiction but of these quixotic genealogies; we do not wearY. After the Daiker Ireland of suckici'Liam O'Flaherty, the (lulling' and the Daiineourts. come consolingly to renew an ancient conviction that the rfiee can be witty, whimsical, and tender-even in tiagic passes. This volume is transitional in a way, for )avid and Tony have begun their fortunes in an earlier book, and neither has completed his destined coil in the pattern of life when the last chapter leaves David praying in the icy entrance to the North-West Passage. Neverthelesi, the Battle of Waterloo, as the central episode, Provides a sombre unity, since in a careless, half-comic way it absorbs David in the beauty of his youth and kindness to eject him as a casualty forgotten by the mere of death. The blunders -round Hougocimont are the more bitterly- recorded because they awake more freshly bleeding memories ; this ghastly-and sardonic Waterloo is iarday to IA remembered with the vague battle round whose unrecognized edges blundered Stendhal's charming Fabrizio, and the stricken field where George Osborne expiated his infidelity to Amelia. The chivalric friendship between the shy, half-mystic David -Quinn and his attractive Jonathan, Tony Dazincourt, with his sweet affectations, is written out with jests and tears. The London of the Regency, ;taken for, granted, not heavily reconstructed, assumes a contemporary vivacity ; of the Prince, that " gracious monster," and his spirited hapless daughter, we. =tell fugitive lightning glimpses. This book is grave _David's kali* conflict with sorrowful problems ; and there is a nightmare'scene by the foggy riverside where a morgue keeper speaks like a minor character in an Elizabethan tragedy. Yet there is glancing conversation and movement of alluring ladies in Dublin ; and Mr. O'Riordan's com- passionate gaze at all his people, serious or fantastic, leaves us, as usual, thinking gently of humanity for all its follies.
Gustav Meyrick's Golem seems to drag the mind fearfully away beyond the limits of human nature altogether. There is a beauty in flowering nightshade; this bOok maintains some- where ; and certainly by some spiritual par•adox we can find an aesthetic fascination in horror,most devitalizing of the emotions. If you wish to experience that evil electricity of the nerves, that incommunicable panic that sometimes slides between sleep and waking, by all means read The Golem. An en- counter with the apparition that periodically shook the pulses of the Ghetto in Prague provokes some really extraordinary sensations. The disintegration of the Ego, the central necessary certitude strong as adamant that can yet vanish like a shadow, is an idea invariably attended by a pecaliar spiritual terror:; herd it is the then= for an entire symphony of fear. Kabbalistic magic, Egyptian symbolism enrich the taMtrY of,dreadful vision where figures grotesque, obscene, wise, or beautiful, flicker changeably ._in trap-like rooms- or lost Corridors, and shake to an ominous Music, all " meshed
half,remernbrance, hard to free." Surprise on surprise of mad metamorphosis dazes the attention ; and the final astOnishment is hardly a reassurance. This book is em- phatically and exactly a " thriller." It is also the triumph of an imagination original, fertile, and perhaps essentially pathological.
Ahnost, r4ith-relief do we turn to the very: material of 73ig Matt. Novels about American politics are too often full of sound and fury and language as raw as the flowing " hootch?! It is really a pleasure to find them firinlk subdued to a moving human situation and presented with a remarkable urbanity: The conflict between Governor Blake's sincere desire for reforni in his new administration and his gratitude towards the life. long ally whose power foi " practical politics " has brought him to this high position, is sensitively and quietly described: Matt half-disgraces the governor ; but, infected by his friend'it new dream of state-patriotism, reinstates him in his popu- larity by a grim policy of self-sacrifice. This is a sympathetic book, showing quite ordinary men touched to fine issues of idealism—and always considerably-thwarted by an importunate jress.
„ Mr.. Sinclair Lewis is naturally more deadly in his attitude when he.,. allows Mr. „ Lowell Schmaltz, The Man Who fnew Clooliilge, to report himself. _ This fellow-townsman of Babbitt, in Pullman cars, in hotels, in the houses of his fiends, with an amazing talent for divagation expresses what he calls " the clear, sure, short-Cut mentality of the Nordic.", It is strange that none of the he-men with whom he consorts rises up to choke him ; the reader, safe at a distance, will find his views on all thing's, from faith to psycho-analysis„ exceedingly funny because of his unexpected turns of expression, Perhaps he is at his best in his labyrinthine rendering of the fitory told by Mack Macmack, " the first mortician in Zenith.": Mr. Sinclair Lewis's brief footnotes to the conversations are *valuable. " Gene Tunny. Anothei celebrated athlete much: kafluenced Bernard Shaw." hlr: Sehinaltz is not a- iiihnumeniarportrait like Babbitt or the terrible Elmer- Gantry. But he sketches himself very vividly ; and his
characteristics are not entirely transatlantic. -
RACHEL ANNAND TAYLOR.
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