Fiction
Growing Up and Other Stories. By Edward Gaitens. (Jonathan 4.
I Am the World. By Peter Vansittart. (Chatto and Windus. 98. 6d.) 8.
Ficriort continues to drowse along. One can in honesty offer no more than the most tepid acknowledgment to the collection of fa. to silly that is listed above.
Mr. Gaitens' stories do show some promise, however. The character round which they are built, Eddy McDonnel, is a credllg presentment of adolescence in working-class Glasgow. He is tough and sensitive, observant and innoce-n. Through his eyes see his father and mother, his auntie Kate and a collection of th friends and foes. Life in their circle is hard-boiled, with plen of drinking, cursing, love-making, and some violent outbreaks --good humour. The writer knows his background and his GI wegians but these ten episodes in Eddy's adolescence are sketch rather than stories, and show promise rather than achievement.
Mr. Buckby, one gathers, is not making his first appearan in print in this cheerfully improbable chronicle of a middle-ag gentleman who is continually finding himself at the centre of d reputable imbroglios. He has, in fact, been here before. This n adventure of his may be welcomed by such readers as can light entertainment in a tale of adventures untrammelled by an slightest adherence to the laws of everyday life, in or out of war time.
Miss England is a magazine novelette, stretched consider beyond the natural limits of its slender plot. The fact that th action takes place justbefore the present war in no way moderni 1/3
the story of the pretty and innocent typist who becomes involved with a young German—a Nazi in very thin disguise. Need we say that the Nazi is foiled and that Molly marries into "a titled family "?
I Am the World is a wordy first novel which might be ignored were it not that its sentiments leave a bad taste in the mouth, and one is forced to wonder why on earth it is published just now. It is a tale of a little country called The Land, which has some kind of " salvation " forced upon it by a thoroughly objectionable young peasant-dictator, who climbs to his curious power-vision on the back of a criminal Jew. The author is devoted to such words as lust and hatred, and is very free with his own loose conception of the deity. It is difficult to see where Mr. Vansittart is going in this over-lush study of a bad, crude megalomania.
KATE O'BRIEN.
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