Holidays in France •
French Life and Landscape. Volume Two : Southern France. By Alfred Firth. (Elek. 18s.) Normandy and Britanny. By Ralph Dutton. (Batsford. 18s.) The man who undertakes to write a guide-book that will not bore takes on a difficult task. To begin with, he is bound to be repetitive, and nothing stuns the imagination like repetition. Then there is the dire trap of stilted and deadly guide-book language, so hard to avoid ; and a host of other trials. If he succeeds, his readers will be all on fire to follow in his footsteps, but for this he must be a man of singular virtues. The three books here reviewed are three diverse examples of how to write a guide-book. Mr. Whelpton will not, I hope, be offended by having Springtime at St. Hilaire taken under such a heading, for although it is the description of a single village just south of Paris, it could also be the picture of almost any other village in France where the mild pleasures of fishing take precedence over other business, and rough humour and red wine abound together. His style is chatty and rambling ; he is full of little bits of historical and architectural information thrown out at random here and there, mixed with inconsequential stories to do with the lives, past and present, of his newly-made friends and the several months he and his wife spent apparently so happily amongst them.
French Life and Landscape—Volume Ii : Southern France is a guide-book a priori. It is for the serious traveller, the determined finder-out of information, who wants to know as he goes what geographical strata he stands on and how they got there, how many tons of coal are dug at la Mure (the answer is 400,000), what is the chief trade as well as the chief building and beauty spot the town he is about to reach, and so on. One feels that if Mr. Firth had been given more elbow-room, had been enabled to write an enormous book instead of quite a small one, the result would be fascinating to read, and fun as well. But, as it is, the facts are so compressed, so crammed together, the paragraphs follow so close and blackly one upon another, that this reviewer got tired 'out half-way through and didn't want to go there any more. The photographs, however, are splendid and evocative.
Standing mid-way between these two extremes is Mr. Dutton's Normandy and Brittany. He says in his introduction that he has tried to give a leisurely air to the text, and to strike a nice balance between leaving out and putting in too much. In this he has succeeded admirably. Without doubt Mr. Dutton does possess those virtues peculiarly necessary to a writer of guide-books. Beneath his light but dexterous touch the two north-westerly provinces of France open out and blossom invitingly, and his pleasant prose is made yet pleasanter by the clear type in which it is set. 1 would quarrel only with the reproductions of paintings which mix unhappily with so many excellent and factual photographs. In every other respect this seems to me the pattern of what a guide-book should be.
EMMA SMITH.
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