Fiction
Women in Exile. By Jean Ross. (Eyre and Spottiswoode. 9s.) The Shadow and the Web. By Mary Merton. (Rpbert Hale. 9s. 6d.) The Children. By Nina Fedorova. (Collins. 9s. 6d.) Leopards and Spots. By Naomi Jacob. (Hutchinson. 9s. 6d.)
MISS JEAN ROSS in her third novel, Women in Exile, deals with the plight of individuals whose lives have been disturbed or shattered
by the conflagration of war. With highly commendable skill the author has gained perspective of the conflict and its impact on the lives of her characters. She can deal with air-raids, sudden death
and the various other implications by which we are menaced in times of tribulation and unrest ; but she does not lose her head and so remembers a novelist's job is to depict character first and foremost. This she does excellently, her women being presented in terms we can recognise, their private as well as their public lives being made visible so that we come to know them intimately. Here is Mak Hoolan, the too possessive mother of the heroine: "Me working
at the hospital, and Dancy . . . Dancy . . I thought of him with every breath I drew ; I died when he died, but Lord bless you, here I am, and if I have thought of that man in the last ten years till now I don't remember it. If she wants life she will have to take the suffering with it. If she is like me she will choose life, and to hell with the suffering, As for me it is not all the suffering, the terror and the danger I mind ; it is the dread of being alone with a grey lonely boredom at the end of my days, and having nothing to do but think."
The story is simple and for the most part plausible: it is observed with the eye of detachment as it unfolds against the contrasted backgrounds of London and country districts of Essex and Antrim. Miss Ross is to be congratulated ; she has written a novel which does not attempt to govern the war, nor is governed by it, and this is a very considerable achievement.
From America comes The Shadow and the Web, a study in the horrific. The three Morphew sisters are all strong-minded; Harriet, the eldest, is headmistress of a flourishing girls' school, with the aid of her widowed sister Virginia, possessive mother of three sons. With them lives a "niece," styled daughter of the younger sister Bessie, also widowed, and a religious maniac. The story opens on a note of tension and an atmosphere of excitement is quickly created. The youngest son runs away to make a life of his own. His example stimulates his brothers, but they are too enslaved by long years of habit to make a genuine break with their mother. Bessie comes to live at the school and blackmails Harriet over a period until funds are no longer available to meet her greedy demands. Bessie then proceeds to systematic murder, having first insured her victims. The first is her eldest nephew' the next is the niece (fruit of an episode between her husband and Harriet). Before suspicion is even aroused, she successfully kills both Virginia and her second nephew. Her insane state then becomes apparent. The book has a genuinely grue- some effect, but the author does not succeed in making the charac- terisation completely convincing. The story has its parallel in the annals of American crime, and the Snead-Wardlaw case suggested, we are told, the point of departure for this novel.
" Mother Abess,' Lida said almost gaily, 'you know, in my
heart . . . all this time I never doubted we should be happy . . not a moment,' and she smiled 'I rather posed with my sorrow, it seems. I feel we shall be happy. If I did not believe, well, I should die that very moment. Why, I think I cried just because I was afraid of my assurance, of my invincible belief in happiness. . . . Just paying something to that accident. . . "
Nina Fedorova, as the above passage indicates, adores the personal pronoun, the dot and the italic. Her novel The Children is a sequel to one called The Family: it concerns the same group of people with a few newcomers, and is long, lush and sentimental. The characters are numerous, most of them White Russians, living in Manchuria during the 'thirties, they axe mostly of the sticky two- pence-coloured variety of bore. Lida, the heroine, having become a concert platform singer, is able to air her vocal opinions on this, that and the other against back-cloths of Harbin, Tientsin and Shanghai. Then there is Dasha, a dear little Communist girl orphan, Alla, a consumptive ballet dancer, and Glafira, prepared to marry a Japanese for the sake of her family. The men include a general, professors and Mr. Rine, a very unlikely American, all of whom employ the dot-and-dash method of communicating their thoughts.
Glamour, local colour and gusto are not enough. If they were, Miss Jacob's equally unconvincing gallery in Leopards and Spots might have won our applause. Her heroine, Josephina (known also as Nina and Pepina), is like Lida, a fatal female with whom every man falls in love. What bores these queens of glamour are to be sure! Local colour and high spirits can never take the place of solid characterisation in any novel. Josephina is a beautiful novelist. Before the last war she married a very unpleasant German (he was naturalised and fought on our side then) because she was irresponsible and silly. A young careerist, who could have married her, married for advancement and then tried to start an affair. It was to save her family from such a possible scandal that Nina wed the odious Mr. Eitel Bower. After the war, owing to her husband's nasty ways, Pepina refuses to be his wife in anything but name. Furious, he revenges himself by divorcing her in a scandalous manner, she, of course, being innocent. Then he goes back to Germany and becomes an important Nazi. Our heroine weds a title and drives round London taking tea to the blitzed during air-raids, which brings us
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