Fiction
Day of the Trumpet. By David Comet De Jong. (Gollancz. 9s. 6d.) The Last Inspection. By Alun Lewis. (Allen and Unwin. 75. 6d.) In the Forests of the Night. By Kenneth S. Davis. (Hamish Hamilton. 8s. 6d.) AMONG the many novels dealing with invasion, which have come the way of the present reviewer in a couple of years, quite the most impressive is Day of the Trumpet, by David Cornel De Jong. Messrs. Gollancz, who deserve the gratitude of fiction reviewers for discarding blurbs, might, perhaps, on occasion supply a little judicious information. For instance, on the present occasion one would like to know if the author wrote his book in English or Dutch. One can hardly suppose this to be a first novel, for the technique is so smooth and so suited to the extremely difficult subject. Time alone can push history into its proper place: accepting the lack of perspective De Jong avoids the blunders made by so many contemporaries, and instead of assuming the grand manner for undigested material, he creates for us, through the experiences of three generations of the Haming family, the scene in provincial Holland, both before and after the violation of that country's neutrality. The narrative opens quietly and slowly, but before one has read a single page the note of European pre-war unrest has 'been firmly sounded. Day succeeds day, and the storm gathers with slow but terrible inevitability: De Jong has not ruined his theme by being too wise after the event. Because of this the ingredients of apathy, suspense, uncertainty, fear and indifference all heighten the drama of the whole. From the character of the matriarch to her young grandson Dirkie, the Haming family, their friends and enemies are all lively and various, their provincial vices and virtues give them the qualities common to the bulk of helpless humanity. The book has a sober objectivity, but the author, in Spite of his grim theme, builds up his structure with touches of irony and humour. The landscapes, the towns and the houses are drawn. with imaginative skill, and ;he shattering climax, when it comes, is deeply felt- in terms of tragic confusion and terror. A most moving and memorable- novel.
Readers- who enjoy out-of-the-ordinary books should also make a point of reading Alun Lewis's first collection of short - stories, The Last Inspection. Lewis is a poet, and his themes are lit by tenderness and sensibility. In a brief foreword he explains that eighteen of his twenty-three stories " are concerned with the Army in England during the two years' attente since the disaster of June, 1940." He, too, presents the problems and conflicts of indi- viduals caught up in the struggle of nations. He is a serious writer, using courage, sympathy and humour for his critical interpre- tation of life in the Army, with its sudden isolation of the individual from his familiar community. The full implications of this com- monplace, yet most difficult problem, are sensitively illumined and realised. His characters, ranging from the small child and the simple recruit to the conscious and intellectual adult, are recognisable human beings. Lewis, like Leslie Halward, can explore the province of the inarticulate, and bring back riches, but his range is not confined to the proletariat. Private Jones, Lance-Jack, Interruption, Acting Captain, and They Came, contain a wealth of experience
transformed by imagination into exciting prose. The last-named story reveals the mind of a soldier whose wife was killed in an air-raid on the first night of his leave, as he returns to his unit. In its economy of effect it is botli touching and beautiful. This collection carries a recommendation from the Book Society.
In the Forests of the Night, by Kenneth Davis, which comes from America, is a first novel, serious but somewhat immature in
manner and conception. The author writes with passion, a genuine merit which partly compensates the reader for the many send-
mentalities of characterisation. The background of the story, an enormous area of swamp land in northern Minnesota, which, after the utter failure of a huge drainage scheme, is undergoing an ex- tensive and satisfactory process of reafforestation—is excellently done. One wishes that the author would have given in much more detail the geographical impulse which fosters the decline and fall of his seldom-sober hero, most efficient of all the forestry experts engaged on the job of adjusting nature's balance. Like the hero of so many American novels, classic as well as contemporary, Kendall] a big man physically, is conceived on a scale that is much larger than life. It gives to him an unreality which, since his tragedy was not inevitable, robs him of sympathy he might otherwise have earned. This .huge figure, who could not adjust himself to survival from the last world conflict, waits for the new upheaval of the world in 1939 to murder his wife and her lover, and to leave his seventeen-year-old and sensitive son to the mercy of sympathetic strangers. His vanity is so colossal that he travels doggedly on foot through a blizzard in order to meet his end. What moral does the author intend one to draw? Yet the book has its good passages and
Previous page
