Fiction .
MR. SID CHAPLIN'S short novel succeeds almost entirely in its ai
It takes us down a coalmine and- us there for one shift onl making us share not only the pysical sensation l but the feelin of a man sensitive enough to suffer and record them, and toug enough to have gone back to the pit in spite of an opportunity t escape. He will not' stay there—small wonder—but he has go back from a wider, easier life, and brought to the experien perceptions made sharper and more delicate elsewhere.
He goes down reluctantly on a summer's day.
"Look back to the fields. Row iirecious the things soo to be lost. Rows of haycocks and the smell of hay, the heav fragrance of hay, the sweet almost intangible smother. A t on the sky-line and a farm-house cuddling into the hillside f sleep. The soft outlines. The lost."
Once down, Chris and his mate make their laborious and hazardo way to the thin seam. There follows a claustrophobic nightmar with few alleviations, in which the characters of a handful of m stand out naked ; where Chris's drink from another man's wat bottle becomes the act of a Judas, leading up to the final accide and its indictmehtt of the whole system. We share all Chris's fee ings, including his dread of what he will find when be goes to th rescue, and his half-hysterical horror at the proximity of th mutilated man, the kind of panic that makes dogs attack an inju dog in the street. , The story is splendidly told, in sentences that gradually rein from staccato sharpness to real eloquence. If there are weaknes they lie perhaps in the leading up to the accident, which is obviou from th Z start, and in the unexplained use of technical &rms. doubt if most laymen will make more than I can of this so of thing:— "The chains and sylvesters were not where they ought t have beeh. I looked to the sprocket. Stayed. The sylveste were off. There was a suspicious pile in the goaf. It didn take him long 'to uncover the combs."
These are small matters ; but where the reader is encouraged t share so much he is disconcerted not to be able to share everything Mr. Alan much, improves rapidly. His new novel has th suspense and narrative skill of his earlier work, and he has sh certain mannerisms of style that came between reader and story I do not want to give away the plot, but the pen-friend in questio is an unpleasing person who writes to lonely and dissatisfied women in terms of increasing intimacy, encouraging them to pour out on paper the desires they are unable or afraid to gratify in fact. One of his correspondents is the wife of an important characterk in the story, who sets out with his colleagues to sell stockings from door to door In course of time, this young man becomes aware of pen-friend.
Mr. Wykes's story is -vivid and exciting, and, like Mr. Chaplin it shows one how some people are obliged to live. There are %%eat'
nesses in the story, one of them being that:Mr. Wykes cannot always trust us to form our own judgement of his characters, and anxiously adds his own comment in case we do not see the point. Another, more serious, is that, in his anxiety to make a point, he will some- times make characters speak out of their turn. Whether or not the young wife in the story was a slut, she could never by any con- ceivable stretch of thought apply the word to herself. Mr. Wykes is a novelist to watch, and I shall not willingly miss anything he writes.
The blurb on the jacket of Perutygreen Street makes most of the mistakes open to such documents, including an unwise prophecy. "There will be nothing but admiration for the literary craftsman- ship with which Arthur La Bern adorns his wide true-to-life canvas." Still, fatuous as it is, it puts its finger on the book's chief quality. Penn ygreen Street reveals craftsmanship, and nothing else. From a really excellent start it dwindles, or rather bloats, into a rambling chronicle of an extraordinarily stupid young man who slithers into crime and the people round about him. Things keep on happening to the Binneys and the Flints and Oyster Harry and Bandy Logan and Co., but any interest that Mr. La Bern has aroused at the start is dissolved when we realise that, apart maybe from Laura and Tom Jellybrand, the characters are either surface sketches or vivid automata. The end is perfunctory and unconvincing, as if the author had lost interest, too. Readable, sometimes exciting, its pace cunningly maintained by apt devices, the story adds nothing to our experience.
It is a long time—too long—since we have had a book from Mr. Hugh Talbot. His powers have not deteriorated in the long lay-off. The same warmth is there, the same tolerant insight into simple characters, plus a new depth of compassion. I do not think he will ever be a subtle writer or that he will ever grow out of his trick of over-simplifying certain human problems ; but he approaches human beings with good-will and humility, and 1 can think of few writers in our time who with less fuss and ostentation record the feelings of the ordinary man. The old clergyman whose life-story is remembered here has nothing remarkable about him, but at the end of the book we know and like him, and will meet his counterpart in real life with greater sympathy and under-
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