FICTION
By_ FTORREST REID
Decline and Full of a British Matron. By Mary Mitchell. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) The Revenge for Love. By Wyndham Lewis. (Cassell. 8s. 6d.) They Lived in County Down. By Kathleen Fitzpatrick. (Chatto and Windus. 6s.) The Wind from the Mountain. By Trygve Gulbranssen. (Thornton Butterworth. 7s. 6d.)
Brief Flower of Youth. By Graham Heath. (Longmans. 7s. 6d.) OF this group of novels Decline and Fall of a British Matron pleased me most. It is a very clever modern comedy staged in an English cathedral town, and it contains at least one
portrait that is in its way a triumph: This is not the British matron of the tide, Mrs. Bascombe, sister of the Bishop of Podbury, but her daughter Venetia. Nobody with the least experience in the writing of fiction can fail to realise that a person so convincingly lovely, so utterly brainless and devoid of will and character as Venetia, must have been extraordinarily difficult to do. There is nothing to help, her mind is a blank, she has no virtues, no vices, no peculiarities, no distinguishing qualities whatever. Yet Venetia lives ; we can see her and hear her—guileless, gentle, fond of chocolate pudding and maddeningly stupid—as she innocently stirs young Tom Carruthers to a frenzy of disgusted and baffled infatuation.
From a mundane poirft of view Tom is Venetia's great chance ; the mother, though secretly disliking and distrusting him, is quite alive to that, and Venetia herself, if too indolent to be ambitious, is not blind to Tom's eligibility : besides, she is under her mother's thumb. She is at the same time her mother's darling, and all would be delightfully plain sailing if only she were Tom's darling too. But she isn't. Tom cannot idealise her. He knows she is a fool ; her incom- petence, her helplessness, her conventionality, the sheep-like vacuity of her mind, exasperate him at every turn. He knows he will get sick of her even before the honeymoon is over, he knows she brings out the worst elements in his nature, and that he will treat her badly : her very placidity irritates him, and he is furious because this makes no difference at all in his desire and determination to possess her. But possession means marriage ; Venetia is eminently respectable ; so are her people ; so is the society in which she and Tom move. The engagement is now on, now off, now on again. Between Mrs. Bascombe and Tom poor Venetia hardly knows where she is. And Tom behaves atrociously ; he insults her, ridicules her, sets traps into which 'she invariably blunders with the most humiliating results. When not doing this he is making love of a kind so violent as to be both alarming and incomprehensible. Venetia begins to dread being alone with him ; the uncertainty of his moods more than counter- balances the .pleasantness of being engaged, and engaged to the most socially desirable young man in the county. Scared at the thought of the rapidly approaching marriage, she sud- denly backs out, to the 'surprise and rage of Tom, who had never expected revolt from that quarter. For the second time the engagement is broken off, and there is an amazing scene in which Tom loses his head and strikes her. This outrageous incident takes place in the drawing-room of the Palace, the servants hear the row, the mother rushes to the rescue, a glass bowl of goldfish is broken upon Tom's head.
Of course the scandal is prodigious. Tom has to clear out, and matters are made worse when Venetia, in terror of her mother, herself bolts to the Continent and is lost. The odd thing is that through it all, for the reader, Tom remains a distinctly likeable young man. Also Venetia gains one'f sympathy, and so does the courageous and determined British matron. A natural chorus is supplied by Cathedral society gossip. The comedy develops, for it is comedy not farce, and the first news of Venetia arrives in the shape of a brilliant poster for Somebody's' milk, upOn' which she appears nude amidst a background of flowers'. The clue points to Zurich,
but the neceisity for keeping things- as quiet as pbssible makes open and decisive action difficult. Finally Tom and Mrs.
Bascombe set out together in secret pursuit of the runaway.
The ending is both unexpected and quite convincing. Venetia certainly had luck, but there is no reason why she shouldn't have had, and Miss Mitchell was right to keep She continental chaPters-
Cithedral town scenes. This is a novel which remains con- sistently gay, lively and amusing, without any departure from truth.
• Mr. Wyndham Lewis's Revenge for Love, on the odic' hand, disappointed me—perhaps because its fascinating opening seemed to promise a hovel in which romantic adven- ture would occupy a considerable place. The scene is a Spanish gaol, where the Communist Percy Hardcaster is imprisoned and plotting an escape. Hardcaster does not in the least resemble a Conrad hero—there is nothing heroic about him or about anybody in the book—nevertheless these opening chapters, in their vivid impressionism, their exotic colour and ironic detachment, did to some extent remind me of the author of Victory. But with Part Two all that disappears and romance is shelved. So also, temporarily, is Hardcaster, and we are in London among a group of artists and intellectuals, the sham " brains of the revolution." Novels about Communism, novels about intellectuals, do not, I confess, particularly appeal to me, especially when the latter are chosen for their unattractiveness and for the purpose of satire. Their talk and their futile amorous activities quickly pall. True, the young Australian artist Victor Stamp and Margaret his mistress freshen to some extent the fuggy atmosphere, tut, though Margaret is a kindly, simple soul, and Victor has sufficient sense of honour and decency to revolt from faking Van Gogh pictures, neither somehow arouses a very lively sympathy. Perhaps it is that they lack charm : certainly it was only with Part Seven, the final section of the book, where the scene once more shifts to Spain, that I found my interest reviving. The novel, I dare say, gives a faithful picture of a certain section of humanity : what it lacks is sufficient contrast, anything, that is to say, to suggest that this is only a section and not humanity at large. Everything that is there may be true (though the disgusting scene in which the crippled Hardcaster is knocked down and kicked on the stump from which his leg has recently been amputated, to me at least seems questionable), yet the general effect is of a distortion of truth. In so long a book, too, the absence of a main dramatic theme tends to monotony. There is nothing really to hold the several parts together ; the story is nobody's story in particular, and nothing is accomplished. In the first section and the last the movement is clear, but the rest is an interlude more or less static, and further sections might have been added introducing further characters without making much difference.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick's They Lived in County Down—an old book revived—is quite frankly a series of detached episodes, with, however, the same children figuring in each. That was the method of The Golden Age, to which this book is compared by the publishers, though not by Mr. Walter de la Mare, who contributes a judicious Introduction. As for Jane and her small brothers and sisters, they are presented with considerable humour, and if there is a hint of sentimentality lurking in the background, every effort has been made to repress it. The adventures, which vary considerably both in interest and credibility, have to my mind been rather too much worked up with an eye to their effect upon the adult reader. The child world certainly is there, but not, I think, entirely for its own sake, not viewed in its natural simplicity. In The Golden Age the private life of at least one child was there, and this makes all the difference. Still, readers who are fond of children will find much to please them.
This book has the charm of a rural setting, and so has Trygve Gulbranssen's The Wind from the Mountain, a novel of Nor- wegian life in the early half of the last century. It is the history of a marriage, and its most striking feature is the portrait of the bride's father-in-law, Old Dag of Bjorndal, the head of an ancient family. An earlier tale by the same author seems to have been a best-seller both in America and on the Continent, so this tale to6 will very likely be popular. But forecasts are dangerous. All one can say is that it is a painstaking, quite readable, and somewhat stodgy work.
Mr. Graham Heath's Brief Flower of Youth won first prize in Longmans' Oxford and Cambridge Novel Competition. It • gives a pleasantly-written account of a schoolboy's and under- '--Itacluatels-itnpressikirts- crt-posc-Wareermany.
Previous page
