Fiction
Village in August. By T'ien Chian. (Collins. 85. 6d.)
Thankless Child. By Frank Swinnerton. (Hutchinson. 9s. 6d.) Lonely Parade. By Fannie Hurst. (Cape. 9s. 6d.) Men As Trees. By Barbara Goolden. (Heinemann. 8s. 6d.)
A HUNDRED years ago China was news, and today China is as sin news. For more than three decades her internal struggles have b,en watched with varying degrees of sympathy by the peoples of the West, and now more than ever before is her importance reali,,A. The announcement of the British and American determination to abolish extra-territorial privileges coincided with the thirty-1 r,t anniversary of the Chinese Republic. A more apt moment for no publication of Mr. T'ien Chiin's Village in August could hardly have been chosen, for his novel deals with the struggles which unified the whole of China against the aggression of Japan. In the spr:::g of this year another young Chinese writer, Mr. Hsiao Chi'en, in a
P.E.N. essay, Etching of a Tormented Age, gave us a concentrated but elegant introduction to the contemporary literature of his country, which should be read and pondered upon by everyone interested in the relationship between East and West. If space allowed, one would gladly quote frdm each of his six chapters, but since that is not practicable here, the concluding passage must serve to indicate the stimulating and pertinent nature of his outline. " War has made a mockery of everything. But it has also made us realise that we need better understanding among nations to appreciate mutually the agonies, the problems and the aspirations of each nation. The Chinese can no more understand England through Robinson Crusoe or King Lear than the English can hope to know dynamic China if they persist in poring over our Tang poets, who died long before Alfred the Great burned his cakes. Here I close this short account with a faint protest and a fervid hope."
Village in August was first published in 1935, and was banned by the Chinese Government in an attempt to appease the Japanese. In spite of this the novel proved a huge success, and was eagerly read and discussed by thousands of young students. The author selects a small band of guerilla fighters, and tells us in simple direct language of what happened to them and those they encountered while harassing the Japanese in Manchuria. Out-numbered, inade- quately armed, they fought gallantly and with determined persistence against monstrous odds in a struggle that is still unfinished. The book is most convincing when the author is writing objectively. He has come under the influence of certain Soviet writers, and at times he labours under the too rigid yoke of over-simplification. His characterisations are unequal, his peasants for the most part have a naivety which makes them touching and credible, while his intellectuals often appear more pretentious than plausible. Mr. Edgar Snow, the American editor of Living China, contributes an interesting introduction. He tells us that the translator must remain for the time being anonymous, for he is interned in a city occupied by the Japanese.
By way of contrast the other novels listed are all of the milky variety ; though Mr. Swinnerton pops in a dash of soda water and Miss Hurst a dash of something stronger, which turns out, alas! to be eau-de-Cologne instead of eau-de-vie. The possessive parent is still one of the most popular preoccupations of the English novelists. Mr. Swinnerton gives us his version in Thankless Child. The scene is London of the early 'thirties, and, apart from a trip to Paris Plage, Kentish Town and its purlieus provide sackcloth and ashes for the bulk of the action. Mordred Snape is a mounte- bank, a failure as a son, brother and husband, a failure as a play- wright and man of affairs. He is intolerant, opinionated and self- indulgent, permanently in need of an uncritical audience. For years his daughter Frankie has been his most satisfactory victim. But she is growing up, becoming attracted by, and attractive to, men of an age nearer her own She is Mordred's daughter, a bit of a minx, greedy and not very scrupulous. A young and increasingly successful commercial artist from Scotland falls in love with her and wins her after a long tussle, leaving the deserted jobless Mr. Snape to drown his sorrows in drink. Mr. Swinnerton trots us on a brisk round of pubs, parties and publishers. His use of sustained irony robs his characters of the sympathy they would have legitimately earned in a less frigid atmosphere.
On the other hand, the zone of Miss Hurst's Lonely Parade is too humid. It is a very sad tale she has to tell of three talented bachelor women, who took an apartment in New York round about 19oo and lived there unhappily together for the next thirty years ; all of them wanted husbands and nothing else would do. Towards the end of this long, lavish, too highly coloured chronicle Kitty Mullane, gutter-bred, the most veracious and least credible of the trio, gets her man. It has been a long long trail, and her husband is now an elderly gentleman, suffering from a tiresome digestion and (one would have thought) more in need of a well-trained nurse than a third wife. His daughter Sierra, by his first wife who died insane, incidentally is another of the women and spends her life among working-class girls, while the well-connected Charlotte, completing the trio, appears to be a female counterpart of C. B. Cochran.
Miss Goolden in Men as Trees tells with gentle irony of an attempt to create a modem Utopia in a pleasant corner of England. Her hero, a rather priggish but happily married young man, has plenty of theories and ideals, but little experience of human nature. He gathers round him an odd collection of helpers, including a brilliant but embittered Jewish doctor, who has little faith in the project. A catastrophe for which the reader is insufficiently prepared rocks the scheme to its foundations and the threat of war closes over the remains. Miss Goolden's characters all talk a great deal, but none of them succeed in convincing us that they are really
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