Fiction
Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. By C. S. Forester. (Michael Joseph. 9s. 6d.)
REVIEWERS do not really enjoy being tepid in praise. They would much rather sing hosannas than anything else. It would have been pleasant to be able to discover in Mr. Forester's new novel the evidence of an almost Defoe-like gift of plain narrative such as he has exhibited in some of his earlier books, to salute in Mr. Marshall an ironist of a subtler and less jocose stamp than in fact he so consistently proves himself to be, to welcome in Miss Barker, the author of a volume of short stories that attracted a good deal of notice, a novelist of original if as yet immature talent. But none of these things is, with any honesty, possible. Although all three are authors of genuine ability and offer pleasure of one sort or another, their books are disappointing in the sense that they are promptly, aisiinilited, have no after-taSfe and provoke_ no serious and high-minded thoughts about the art of the novel, etc.
Mr. Forester's Hornblower has served him ,very well in several novels of adVenture by sea and land-in Napoleonic Europe. Here, to the usual accompaniment of recondite nautical and naval detail, is Hornblower at the very start of his career, a skinny and gawky youth of seventeen, white- and hollow-cheeked, as sick at sea as Nelson himself, cautious yet active of temperament, with all his wits about him and bearing the promise of a formidable personality. The portrait is, perhaps, a shade superficial, buf done with great ease and assurance and, in Mr. Forester's admirable way, without any excess of sympathy. Mi. Midshipman Hornblower is hung on a string of brave exploits, and for that. reason is just a bit school- boyish ; Mr. Forester • does not allow himself the imaginative elbow-room he used to excellent _ advantage in The Gun or The General. Still, the excitement and the peculiarly salt comedy are there. Hornblower endures the tyrannies of a senior midshipman, all but wishes he were•dead, and fights a duel at the distance of a yard with pistols of which one is loaded and the other empty— that, at least, is the arrangement. He is put in charge of a disabled and leaking ship, a French prize, with a cargo of rice that swells and swells with dreadful menace on the way from the Bay of Biscay to an English port. He starts a most injurious fire in a French privateer, an ex-slave ship He is being examined for lieutenant at Gibraltar when the high noon of adventure, the hour of destiny, the catastrophic and triumphant turning-point in his career arrives. With a duchess speaking in the accent of Seven Dials for passenger in a captured French sloop, he is caught in thick fog in the middle of the Spanish -fleet. A rather hurriedly contrived ending barely rounds off a _tale that is accomplished enough in the telling but that lacks ambition. Besides, there is no love interest, and I doubt whether in the ordinary way—there are exceptions, of course—an adult novel can do without it.
There is, very understandably, no central or sustained love interest in Every Man a Penny either, though plenty of references to legs and bosoms. In this life-story of a humble, saintly and yet all too human little priest in Paris from 1914 until the present day, Mr. Marshall once more persists in a curiously sniggering and adolescent humour on the subject of sex, female passion or frailty, women's figures and so on. It is a jarring performance, which, combined with a too-facetious irony all through the book and a pointless trick of verbal repetition, vitiates the imaginative quality of what is in many ways an acute and telling piece of work in its informative Roman Catholic kind. The naive and deliberate goodness of- the AbbeGaston is possibly larger than life, but any disproportion here is balanced by the sly and surprising emphasis of Mr. Marshall's studies of the other clerics of the parish of Saint Clovis and of more exalted ecclesiastical personages. For France itself Mr. Marshall seems to- entertain what is today commonly called a love- hate feeling. The novel is long, conventional in construction, touched with melodrama in its closing stages, but nevertheless both lively and instructive in parts. If only Mr. Marshall could rid himself -of his schoolboy curiosity and dubious humour!
I am afraid I could scarcely believe a word of Apology for a Hero, simple though the tale is in all essential respects. The book is carefully written, often individual and .sometimes felicitous in phrase, but strains too visibly for descriptive and psychological effect. I did not read Miss Barker's much admired volume of short stories, Innocents, which was apparently largely about children, but can only say that the grown-ups of Apology for a Nero are at once wildly improbable and singularly uninteresting creatures. It is not difficult to see what Miss Barker is getting at in confronting a timid, fearful, vaguely yearning Charles Candy with the crackpot impulsiveness of his sister-in-law Perry, but this is a mere generalised idea rather than a specific imaginative conception. Their passages of sophisticated talk, by the way, are entirely out-of keeping with the other and more formal indications of the sort of people they are meant to be. As for the concluding blisiness of the schooner which is to engage in Pacific trade-, this is altogether too far-fetched, Miss Barker clearly has potentialities as a writer, but as a novelist seems to have got oft to a false start. - Mr. Egon Hostovsky is a Czech writer who is in exile for the second time. Hide and Seek consists of two short novels or long short stories; the first written during the war and the other some years before the war. Both find a them6 in the notion of spiritual self-imprisonment and the liberating power of the imagination. They are of somewhat heavy and " Central European " texture,
though in each case a deal of sincere feeling comes through. The first brings a Czech engineer hiding in a cellar in a Normandy village during the German occupatioli to a mood of heroic and illuminated renunciation, the other describes the saving fantasies of childhood. The symbolic overtones here are perhaps a little too whimsical.
The scene of The Iron Hoop is a nameless new city in the land of the conquered after a nameless war. The Captain, nephew of the conquering General, takes up his duties there, makes the home- less Anna his mistress, and is involved in political melodrama born in the minds of crooks and romantics. The novel is a curious amalgam of thriller and satire, which now and then makes a real impression—Mr. Fitz Gibbon displays a savage honesty of mind— but in which the diverse elements are not drawn into a sufficiently
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