New Novels
The Adventurer. By Anne Meredith. (Faber. 8s. 6d.) Too Dear for My Possessing. By Pamela Hansford Johnson (Collins. 8s. 6d.) The Sig Wheel. _ By Mark Benney. (Peter Davies. 8s. 6d.)
ONE reason for the rather unsatisfactory impression left by Miss Anne Meredith's novel is that she does not make it clear to the reader what the focus of interest is to be. The story begins with the daughter of most respectable Victorian country-house parents answering a matrimonial advertisement in a newspaper—the best way, she calculates, of escaping from her parents and her parents' choice of husbands. She finds that the advertiser is a retired sea-captain with a flamboyant past ; and before they have been married a year she sees him burying an old shipmate by moon- light in the shrubbery. So far, so good—we prepare to settle down to a juicy gaslit thriller. But this is only page 150—and in the remaining 25o pages, we slowly discover, the main theme is the character of Flora herself. It is important that we should be interested in her character, if we are to be interested in the long tale of her struggle to make a living for herself and her child in London—her start in a Bayswater milliner's, her venture into a shop of her own, her success in Bond Street. Yet Miss Meredith has weighed the scales against our being interested by treating Flora, for the first third .of the book, as a conventional, formal figure, seen entirely from the outside. One example: when Flora settled in Bath with her sea-captain she has an admirer, a handsome young man whose attentions are the gossip of the town. But Miss Meredith is so perfunctory about the whole episode—we have little more than her bare word that there was any depth in this relation, there is no scene to stamp it on our consciousness—that we can whip up no answering emotion when she stages a chance meeting, obviously intended to be moving, between the lovers thirty years later.
Miss Pamela Hansford Johnson indicates clearly enough where the focus of interest of her novel lies. We know on the first page that we are bidden to feast on the sensibility of Claud Pickering, who tells the story, and we can't complain on the last that the author has faltered in her purpose. Whether Claud's sensibility can carry a whole novel is another matter. He is a young man of the period between two wars, and Miss Hansford Johnson gives him the kind of background and experience supposed to be typical of the time. There is the unstable family life—Claud is brought up in Bruges by his father and his father's mistress— which is recapitulated in Claud's own marriage. There is the aestheticism of the nineteen-twenties—Claud becomes an art critic, and the political awakening of the nineteen-thirties—Claud signs manifestoes about the Spanish War. Finally, of course, there is the present war ; the book ends with Claud back in Bruges, looking at the calendar which shows September 2nd, 1939, thinking that " there dies tonight the last epoch in which men can set their home and heart affairs foremost, can find their personal troubles of primary importance." This would be a more moving conclusion if Miss Hansford Johnson had in any way persuaded us that Claud's personal life was based on some- thing stronger than the satisfaction of impulses, and if his failures in his relations with other people weren't so obviously bound up with his failure to develop his political and social responsibilities.
After Too Dear for My Possessing, it is salutary to be reminded by Mr. Benney that to wallow in sensibility, in Claud's style, is a privilege of those who don't have to worry over the cruder problems of maintaining life. " Destitution ate so deeply into one's hours and energies that other appetites than for food and shelter had no scope," says Harry, one of Mr. Benney's highbrow crooks, who quote Villiers de l'Isle Adam, read Tovey's Essays in Musical Analysis, and talk about the pleasure-pain principle. Harry's aim, when he comes out of gaol, is quite simple: to live in decent material comfort, if possible like a gentleman (" having a good deal• of property, the entry to a St. James's Street club, and an account at Fortnum and Mason's "). As a first step, he attaches himself to Eric, a journalist whom he meets when he sends a crime article to a_Sunday paper. Eric has a flat with gadgets, a murky past, and complicated. relations with a gang of racing and betting toughs headed by an appalling woman, Phoebe Summers. Harry finds himself at war with Phoebe for Eric— there is a good deal of talk about " in fighting Phoebe I was fighting my past "—but pure self-preservation seems enough to account for the . struggle. Mr. Benney's heroes are a bit of a bore when they delve into their own motives, and are at their liveliest when they get on with the job of making a living by their wits, with no time left for introspection. The Big Wheel has something of the amcffality of a Fielding or Smollett novel (" I was new to honesty, in so far as that principle affects the industrial classes ") ; and Mr. Benney is certainly at his best as an objective and passionless reporter of bizarre and flamboyant character and incident.
Sailor off the Bremen is a bunch of gloomy little tough stories, cut according to New Yorker pattern and sentiment. The gloom doesn't just come from the actual disasters chronicled—the Pro' fessional football team that gets its pay halved just before the big match, the young couple whose Sunday outing is ruined by bickering, the gangster who is let down by his pals. The drab- ness and dreariness is in the people themselves, and probably their successes would be even more depressing than their failures. " If they take that radio, my wife is going to raise hell," sgs one of the hard-luck cases. Mr. Shaw dredges most of his Path° from situations of that order, and only occasionally is there a hint of more important values than the American middle-class idea of a good time.
Broken Glass is a study of the relations between Ma2:rars; Germans and Rumanians in Transylvania, and is obviously based on intimate and accurate knowledge of the country and its h:4011.. We follow the varying and intertwined fortunes of three :cPre, sentative families- from the seventeenth century to the resell' day ; the situations are all carefully contrived to illustrate some aspect of the political or social problem, and the characters have
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