FICTION

By FORREST REID

THE price of fiction seems to be going up. The change is being effected very. quietly, -but i should think today almost as many novels are published at 8s. 6d. as at 7s. 6d., and though this is no doubt a good thing from the publisher's point of view, I wonder if it is equally -good from that of the writer—particularly the young and unknown writer. Miss Hare's English Rue, for instance, is published at los. 6d. It contains 517 pages very closely printed in small type. But here, surely, considering the high price, we might have been given an extra hundred pages and a larger type, which would both have looked better and been more comfortable

to read.

-English Rue is a chronicle novel and a thoroughly sound one. By " sound " I mean that it is carefully written and

extremely competent without possessing any striking originality. This is not such faint praise as it may seem. I should call Trollope, for example, a sound writer ; Emily Brontë an original one. Miss Hare follows her characters from the cradle to the grave, and at the end of the book we feel that we know all about them. The history opens with some nursery scenes, but it is a comprehensive nursery, for three families of children are grouped there under the guidance of Miss Fairchild, the governess, and Miss Fairchild, though only a subsidiary figure, is one of the best things in the book.

I regretted when she passed out of it, but her passing was inevitable. Gradually the interest is narrowed down from the general to the particular. Upon certain of the children the light is focussed, the others drift more or less into space, and in the end the story becomes almost wholly that of Nan and Roger.

These two are friends ; they seem destined for each other ; as they grow up it is taken for granted that they will marry, and they themselves take it for granted. Then Linda inter- _ venes. Earlier in the tale Roger had met her casually without anything remarkable happening, but on this particular night, at a party, he suddenly feels that she is the loveliest creature he has ever seen. "Before she had spoken to him he was violently in lbw."

I suppose such things happen. The misfortune in this case is that Roger is well off and able to marry her. They have nothing in common, all his interests are serious, all Linda's superficial. For a few months the passion survives ; then follow years of regret. Roger plunges into his work ; he is a doctor with advanced views, an experimentalist, a scientist. Linda gives him grounds for divorcing her, but it is too late.

He has let Nan down, and Nan, to patch up her life, has made an unromantic marriage of convenience.. Yet eventually, in middle age, they come together, and the scene now shifts to the Tyrol.

Meanwhile nephews and nieces are growing up, and Jean- Jacques, the son of Roger and Linda, is brought into the foreground. He is an actor, an actor of genius : at least Miss Hare says so, though I myself think that genius is not thd right wbrd. An actor has talent and temperament, as a singer -has a voice and temperament ; but it is Shakespeare

or Verdi who has the genius. Moreover, if one is writing

of a genius, it is better perhaps to allow the reader to divine this for himself. Jean-Jacques struck me as a clever and amiable young man, and that was all. I should even be more inclined to suspect a spark of genius in the eccentric Uncle Charles who, like the artist in Henry James's Madonna of the Future, spent all his life in preparing for and dreaming

over the masterpiece he was never to paint. Miss Hare, in fact, is really more at home when dealing with ordinary people. But the book is an excellent example of quiet realism that never passes beyond the bounds of good taste.

I cannot say this of Miss Warner Hooke's Own Wilderness, for I have an impression that the author rather likes to administer shocks. The book is the third volume of a trilogy, dealing

with the adventures of a half-brother and sister, Bill and-

Netta. I have not read the earlier instalments, but imagine that they deal with the childhood and adolescence of this very sophisticated pair : indeed they are still only adolescents when the present story comes to a close. It is an uneVen performance. As a study of lower class life the greater part of it is admirable —closely observed, written with humour and vivacity—but what Miss Hooke apparently lacks is a critical faculty. I am not thinking now of the improprieties—some of which are funny and some not—but of certain passages of cheap facetious-- ness. These are the more deplorable because so much of the book is really good. The greengrocer Joe Tumbell and his genteel wife, their little boy, the sister-in-law, Mrs. Plank—all these persons live. Bill and Netta belong to a different class : they have come into the Tumbell's world because they have no money and must earn a living. So Biff drives the delivery van, and Netta is governess to the little boy. But behind the gay and animated scene there is another and less pleasant motif, the first note of which must have been struck in an earlier volume.- Not to mince matter's, The drama is one of incest. The first step, apparently, was taken by Bill, and almost in the days of childhood : in its later development it is Netta who plays the chief part. Back in the old ruined mansion of their child- hood, to which they return together, the -story reaches its tragic culmination. The theme is certainly unusual. But, among modern writers, it, has.- been treated - more than once by d'Annunzio, and I see no reason why it should not be treated, nor anything in Miss Hooke's perfectly frank treatment of it to which exception can be made. The passages in her book that jarred upon me were of a very different and quite external nature. Evidently they were introduced deliberately, so that it would be useless to point them out. I cannot, however, accept Miss Hooke's valuation of her hero and heroine. Netta, I admit, has a certain charm, though she is at times a little ." catty," but Bill seems to me to have all the callousness and brutality of the potential criminal. Neither possesses an even rudimentary moral sense.

Can one write a novel in which all the characters are dogs ? I have pondered the idea more than once, and reluctantly decided in the negative. In The Ugly Dachshund Miss Stem makes the attempt, and it is a praiseworthy attempt. But though I am sure dog-lovers will rejoice in the book, nave a feeling that dogs themselves might dislike it. Are they quite as Miss Stern paints them ? The 'love-making, it seems to me, strikes a dubious note, and the blasé little griffon, Voltaire, did not convince me. He is a dog in shape, but surely his psychology is human. The idea of the book probably was suggested by Hans Andersen's The Ugly Duckling. A Great Dane pup is brought up with a litter of dachshunds, and imagines himself to be one of them. That is to say, he tries to get on knees, to be a pet, and of course Miss Stern makes the most of all this comedy element. Nevertheless, the spaniel Maria in The Irish -R.M., and. M. Bergerees Riquet seem to me closer to the real thing than Miss Stern's dogs. Maria and Riquet, it is true, are shown only in relation to humans, while Miss Stern chooses the much more- difficult plan of going behind the dogs themselves. But actually she compromises, as Kenneth Grahame did in The Wind in the Willows, so that we have neither animals nor humans. I d not think The Wind in the Willows a very good book ; I do not think The Ugly Dachshund a very good book. They are enjoyable, but in both cases the standards are human, there is an implied human superiority, while in the book of my imagination the standards would be entirely animal "I have been taken to task," Matthew Arnold once com- plained, "coupled by .a strange perversity .of fate, with just that very one of the Hebrew ProPhets whine style I admire the least, and called sometimes - an elegant Jeremiah, sometimes a Spurious Jeremiah, a Jeremiah about the reality of whose mission the writer in the Daily Telegraph has his doubts." No reader of Hearken Unto the Voice will-doubt the reality of the Mission. of Franz Werfel's Jeremiah. I preferred this vivid Biblical novel to Thomas Mann's Joseph lit Egypt, because of its_ superior qualities of imagination and vision. It is a good - book.