Fiction

By MARTIN COOPER

Skutarevsky. By Leonid Leonov. (Lovat Dickson. 8s. fid.) Pig and Pepper. By David Footinasi. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) Hortensius, Friend of Nero. By Edith Pargeter. (Lovat

Dickson. 7s. tkl.) Dragons at Daybreak. By James Cleugh. (Methuen. 7s. 611.) Tut: novels of today are for the most part like the rivers of Spain, swift and shallow. Those few that are neither tend to be so deep or so sluggish that a casual plunge on a summer day will either drown the 'average reader outright, or bring him to the surface coughing and choking with thick slime. The gentle, clear-flowing stream, with Well- Spaced rapids and occasional waterfalls, is more of a rarity today than it has ever been. We have rivers in spate, artificial garden streams, elegant lakes, sinister- mill-races : only the unspoiled natural river is hard to come by..

Leonid Leonov's Skutarevsky is a large, but rather shallow river, emphatically in spate. Regarded as a novel, it is

formless - and badly planned"; but it is an interesting and vivid document of life in the U.S.S.R. The central figure of the story is a physicist who has made a name for himself in Tsarist Russia and carries on his work after the Revolu- tion, outwardly contented but inwardly maladjusted. He has a son, also a physicist, who is agin the GoveraMent and member of a secret wrecking organisation; • Father and son hardly know each other until one day the elder Skutarevsky gate-crashes on an evening party of his son's— a party which, without being overtly political, gives the loyal Soviet citizen an inkling of the dangerous slough of disillusion and discontent into which his son has sunk.

" You have forgotten where you are living (the young man says to his father). " In Russia, where you have to wear wading boots to pay an ordinary visit if you don't want to get stuck in the mud.. . . They're heavy, those high boots in which our Russia strides through its historic marshes, but they're tough. This job has absolutely ruined my nerves. They ordered me to plan a turf-burning power-station to run on crude oil. They kept me in the air for four months before they could decide whether to order certain parts here or front abroad. I made four sets of plans altogether and up to the very last moment did not know whether they would go through with it or not. When they were deciding on the type of turbine you'd think it was a wife they were choosing . . . and you call that planned economy ? I call it enthusiastic hysterics, father."

NVIien his wrecking plans are discovered. young Skutarevsky shoots himself, but not before he has seen the complete break-up of his home. His father knocks down a girl in his car one night and takes her back to his flat to sleep ; and this casual encounter wakes a new emotional life in this elderly man to whom his work has hitherto meant every- thing. Finally he leaves his wife and settles with the girl in a flat.

The record of events is often obscured throughout the book by a mass of detail and side-issues : but these digressions and the thumbnail portraits of the secondary figures and the vignettes of Soviet life are the best things in the book. The final impression of the book is that of a series of camera-shots, showing a life completely different in some ways, in others quite unchanged from the middle-class Russian life described by Chekhov. There is a certain amount of implicit propaganda : but. as the quotation

shows, there is also explicit criticism. and Skutarevsky could not possibly be called a political novel.

Mr. David Footman's Pig and Pepper has a more danger- ously political setting : but this is the most harmless and amusing garden stream. Mr. Mills, the hero, is the extremely amorous British vice-consul in Tsernigrad. the capital of an imaginary Balkan State, Vuchinia. VS-hen the book opens he is just getting rid of Mausi, a Viennese cabaret girl with a saint-like character, who darns his socks, condones his

infiaClities, and gives him a little Peace when various com- plications of his new love-affairs become too much for him.

There is a lot of shrewd and witty hitting al yuchinian social and political life; a great deal of gaiety and rather risque humour. The denouement is brought about by the

appearance of a Mr. Vickery, who captivates the women of the Tsernigrad foreign colony and manages their husbands' business affairs with rather too much experience. He turns out to have been implicated in a Latvian hank scandal, and Mr. Mills, after loyally smuggling his shady friend across the Rumanian border, finds himself rewarded by the Foreign Office with " promotion " to a vice-consulship in Asia Miner.

The book contains one extremely successful scene—the occasion of an international dinner in Tsernigrad, which lasted from 8.15 to 1.30. These five hours were taken up largely in the boasting and baiting of the French delegate :

" One of the young francophils asked the Professor if he did not find the Vgchinian language very difficult. The Professor answered that while interested in foreign languages he had no need to learn. them 'because he spoke his own beautiful French. The liberality of the French 'in the matter of language was most marked, they were only too willing that foreigners should have the privilege of learning French. That was one of the many benefits the friendship of France would confer upon Vuchinia . . ." The whole book is written in this light bantering style and is excellent of its kind. Mr. Footman should give us his hero's experiences in Asia Minor without delay.

From 1936 Tsernigrad to the Rome of Nero is _a large jump : but not so great as the gulf which separates Mr.

Footman from Miss Pargeter, the authoress of Hortensins, Friend of Nero. Here the garden rill has broadened out into an elegant, all toe elegant, lake. Marcus Hortensius' diary is concerned chiefly with his relationships with three

women—Licinia, Ononis, and Zobeid. His feelings towards Licinia are half avuncular : and he is not seriously put out when she marries Arminius. Ononis is a Christian, married to Antony, and Marcus Hortensius admires her more as a saint than as a woman. Antony is " promoted " to a con-

venient post in Gallia Narbonensis and Ononis only rescued from the lions by her suicide in prison—a denouement which spoils the heroic tenor of the story and takes the rather thick gilt off some rather stale gingerbread. Hortensius is suspected of having been privy to Ononis' suicide and escapes to a convenient villa in Transylvania, where he is joined by Zobeid, his Persian slave who. acts throughout- the book as the one stable element in her master's 'rather muddled

emotional life. Stylistically the book might be described as by Cardinal Wiseman out of Walter Pater, a child of Marius and Fabiola. Historically it is open to doubt. Was Nero in the way of allowing the very open criticism levelled. at him by Hortensius ? And was Christianity so widespread and

understood in rich and educated society in the reign of Nero ? Mr; James- ('laugh s' Drag-Otis at Daybreak begins unam-

bitiously and changes its character in mid course—a garden stream diverted into the mill-race. Stephen Mortimer is the son of Randall Mortimer, the great mathematician, whom he worships. Stephen is rich, handsoMe, young, gay, and amusing until one day in the South of France he hears of his father's suicide. He rushes home and finds that his father had secretly married again a few months before his death a girl half his own age : that his suicide was the only alternative to a bankruptcy' due to wild speculation in the City : and that his step-mother is about to marry the stock- broker who ruined his father. Stephen Mortimer becomes obsessed with the idea that he must avenge his father's `:,` murder " ; but his efforts are even more ineffective than those of his prototype. This Hamlet cannot even find his step-mother and her husband : and he is reduced to work in a translation bureau to earn his living, and for society to a garage mechanic and his girl. Later he gets work as decretary to a popular novelist, but discovers that he owes it to the kindness of his step-mother. Stephen's loathing of humanity reaches its height at a party given by his

employer for his daughter : and after -behaving. very oddly he goes home and leaves on the gas in his bedroom. The two following chapters recount his nightmare : but in such a way that the reader does not realise that it is the narrative Of a dream. Beginning misleadingly He woke in pitch

darkness," these two chapters are more coherent and sensible titan any dream, and the reader loses the thread of the story and his patience. The novelist's daughter, just back from a Belgian convent, who first psycho-analyses and then marries Stephen, is a most unconvincing—and unattractive— young lady.

" These words represent the exaggerations of artists whose excitability is supernormal. You're not an artist, my dear Stephen. But you made yourself abnormal by fixing too hard on your father. as you had no mother to fix on in your most impressionable age of eight to eighteen. Do you think all this sounds very learned ? We were taught plenty of psychology at Blankenberghet you know." Shine convent, what ?