Two Thousand Million Man-Power. By G. E. Trevelyan.
FICTION
By FORREST REID (Gollancz. 7s. 6(L) -
The Marsh. By Ernest Raymond. (Cassell. 8s 6&)"-
Star Maker. By Olaf Stapledon. (Methuen. 8s. 6d.) - Anna Becker. By Max .White. (Seeker. 75. 6d.)- The Sound of Running Feet. By Josephine Lawrence. (Harrap.
. 7s. 6d.) , Cwmardy. By Lewis Jones. (Lawrence and Wishart. 7s. 6d.)
Miss TREVELYAN is an artist. Apart from their interest as stories, her novels, for those who care for such things, have always the fascination-of a brilliant technique. Two Thousand Million Man-power,is a satire on modern civilisation, opening in 1920 and coming down to the present dal. In the fore- ground we have the history of Robert and Katherine; both • highbrows; Katherine apparently the more serious, but in reality merely the less 'intelligent.. Accompanying this private drama, and throwing it into pitiful relief by accentuating its unimportance to all save the individuals concerned, is a running chronicle of world news, ticked out as if by a tape • machine, without comment, and with a devastatingly ironic effect. Yet Katherine is in the van of progress ; when she and Robert first meet she is a school teacher, a Communist, and an ardent believer in all things Russian ; Robert is a promising young chemist, who in his spare hours is working on a theory in connexion with the problem of Time. Robert wishes to get married ; Katherine, with Russia in her mind's eye, insists on the discomforts of free love. "She had a vague, only partly conscious notion that after the revolution all hearts would immediately discern the essential purity of her wanting to sleep with Robert." In the meantime, unfor- tunately, their intimacy has to be concealed, because Robert's landlady is old-fashioned. So there are clandestine meetings, and somewhat frayed nerves. Both Katherine and Robert are well-meaning apostles of the higher life, but in both there is a weakness of character that brings about a slow and steady deterioration. Robert turns soft, Katherine hard. They get married—a modern, childless marriage—then Robert loses his job. It is only a temporary setback, however ; prosperity returns ; but now they are no longer in love, and Katherine spends her time in running after intellectuals, while Robert, always more human, becomes increasingly unhappy. The noise and restlessness of their life get on his nerves ; Katherine's clever friends irritate him ; Katherine herself irritates him ; they quarrel about the wireless, which she turns on at all hours and in full blast. To Katherine the wireless represents progress, speed represents progress, revolutions represent progress. And the news items continue their deadly refrain : "High speed rail experiment between Cherbourg and Paris.
Bishop blesses new submarine for Chile. Man and wife electrocuted by wireless aerial entangled in high-power trans- mission line. Five fatal railway accidents in a month. Mussolini advocates 'warlike education.'" Katherine's social engagements are multiplied ; Robert succumbs. He takes to drink : he reads Dunne's Experiment with Time, and remembers that he had once thought of writing something on that subject. But he has forgotten what, and he cannot find his notes—they have been lost probably in one of their many removals.
This is not a comforting book ; it is not intended to be comforting ; and, if one seeks below the surface, Mr. Raymond's The Marsh is not too reassuring either, in spite of its more benevolent tone based on a more Optiniisidc view of human nature. The hero of The Marsh is an average East London boy of the poorer class. Danny, at the age of fourteen, has just left school when the novel begins, and Mr. Raymond gives a full account of his career from the days when he is a light-hearted van boy till the last tragic stage; when he is a criminal living with a prostitute. We never lose sympathy with him : that is where the book succeeds. Mr: Raymond has drawn Danny without idealisation, but with an under- standing that never falters. He is the victim of social con- ditions. In his childhood he was not innocent—could not have been ; as a gaol-bird and thief he is not really very different from the pleasant and quite normal boy who had every intention of keeping straight-. The Marsh is a long book and not free from digressions ; nevertheless it held me, because, while I was reading, the life of the streets seemed to be there before my eyes. An unlovely life, it is true, upon which the police keep Constant watch-; Yet Mr. Rayniond shows it as something warm and human, its good and evil strangely mixed. "
Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker has no emotional appeal whatever, nor is it an easy book to read. -The author himself calls it "an irnaginari. exploration of the cosmos," and in form it is a fantastic vision or dream. "One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill." There the narrator falls into a trance in which he visits countless worlds remote in space and time, watches the birth and decay of stars and planets, of races of intelligent beings, non-human, and partially human, seeking the purpose, if there is a purpose, behind it all—the purpose of the Star Maker, if there is a Star Maker. As he gains experience the revelations become increasingly subtle and difficult to grasp, while the final revelation is too brief and ecstatic to be put into words ; it is an....emotion beyond intelligence, and our time-traveller falls back upon ,a kind of Socratic myth. The novel has neither the dramatic nor imaginative power of James Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus, that enthralling and so strangely unappre- ciated romance, but it Comes more or less into the same category._ Much of Mr. Stapledon's book is fanciful rather than imaginative. His pictures of dry planets with their insect-like inhabitants, of wet planets with fish-like inhabitants, his plant men, his men with one arm, one leg, one ear, and three eyes, are easy inventions. But he goes farther than this when he enters telepathically into the consciousness of the stars themselves, and finds their sense experiences "after all fairly intelligible." "In some manner each star is aware of its fellow stars as conscious beings." It is not the first time that the view that celestial bodies must possess a soul, an inward life, has been advanced.-' The half-forgotten German philo- sopher Fechner set forth this doctrine in Zend-Avesta, published in 1851, supporting it by a wealth' of eloquent and ingenious argument. Mr. Stapled.on, however, though his aim is speculative, is writing a novel, not a philosophical treatise. He has not, to my mind, quite brought it off, but he has at least given his readers something to think about.
Anna Becker is a first novel by an American writer. In its simplicity and power it is a quite remarkable book, of excep- tional promise, though the drama is a sordid one, beginning with physical assault and ending with abortion. Yet the real theme lies beneath this, and is simply the awakening of a woman to a new sense of life through a violent emotional shock. The scene is a small New England town, where there is a marble quarry and a college. Anna has been educated at the college ; her brutal lover comes from the quarry. The story is told with a convincing realism, and it is only Mr. White's conclusion that seems to me to strike a dubious note. Anna, as he sees her, is a better woman after her experience than she was before. Here I cannot follow him. She is certainly a transformed. woman ; but ,I cannot believe that, except in a nature of the coarsest fibre, so ugly an initiation could have failed to leave a scar behind it. Mr. White thinks otherwise, and when she is on the eve of accepting a more worthy lover actually makes her thank the initiator. - The Sound of Running Feet also hails from America, and raises a linguistic question: Why should Mr. White write in English, and Miss Lawrence, who is his contemporary, in an American approximation to Fpglish that mikes one long for the day when the two languages will be completely different ? Yet Miss Lawrence's is a distinctly clever book. It is concerned with the staff of a real estate office, all of whom, employers and employees alike, are haunted by a sense of insecurity.-hence the title. Miss Lawrence shows these people collectively-7woiking together at the (Ace, and holding meetings to discuss the situationand also individu- ally, in their private lives. They are pleasant people, and the book is well-Constructed and well-observed. That it should have jarred upon me at every turn is entirely a matter of ear.
The best thing about Cwmardy is the wrapper. In spite of strikes, accidents and fighting, it remains a dull story of a Welsh mining village. Mr. Jones, we are assured, writes out of direct experience, but his characters, though carefully drawn, never come to life, leaving the whole tbin.g laborious and conscientious propaganda.
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