FICTION

- By GORONWY REES Two Leaves and a Bud. By Mulk Raj Anand. (Lawrence and Wishart. 7s. 6d.) The Gardener Who saw God. By Edward James. (Duckworth. 7s. 6d.)

The Wind Changes. By -Olivia Manning. (Jonathan Cape. 7s. 6d.)

Phineas Kahn. By Simon Blumenfeld. (Jonathan Cape. 7s. 6d.) Despair. By Vladimir Nabokoff-Sirin. (John Long. 7s. 6d.)

ALL novels about foreign countries have, at least for me, a prejudice in their favour. It is in itself a pleasure to leave

the English scene. To this must be added the pleasure, or at least the possibility, of learning about countries where familiarity has not yet led us to its traditional result. Such fictional voyages necessarily imply some suspension of the

critical faculty ; even literary critics hesitate to assert that novels are not true to reality' when they concern forms of life

of which they have no knowledge whatever. Hardly anything is allowed to the novelist of England ; to the novelist of France, a little more ; in Tibet anything is possible.

Of these five books three are wholly, and a fourth largely, concerned with foreign countries. The scene of the fifth,

The Gardener who saw God, is said to be laid in England and its characters claim to be human, though they bear, to my

mind, only the slightest resemblance to human beings.

Little discrimination is necessary to say that Mulk Raj Anand's Two Leaves and a Bud is by far the best of the five.

It is a tale of Gangu, a dispossessed Rajput peasant, who engages himself and his family as tea-pickers on a plantation in Assam, and of the Anglo-Indians who manage the estate. Dr. Anand's previous books, The Coolie and Untouchable, have been praised by competent critics ; Two Leaves and a Bud should maintain his high reputation. It would be useless for one who knows little of India except from books to com-

ment on Dr. Anand's analyses of the Indian character, or to praise his profound portrayal of the Indian soul. I can say only that the Indian characters in his book are, though as different as possible from what we are used to in Europe, still vivid and real ; their lives have not merely possibility, but that probability which many novelists aim at but few achieve, and Dr. Anand's account of them is inspired by a genuine sense of poetry. A quotation may perhaps convey a little of this quality. Gangu, Sajani, his wife, Leila, his daughter, and Buddhu, his little son, arc walking from the plantation to the bazaar-two miles away to buy, out of Gangu's few annas, household stores, a necklace for Leila, a coloured woollen ball for Buddhu ; on the road " Where is the place we live in, Father ' ? asked Buddhu. ' I mean what is the name of this place ? '

Assam, my son,' said Gangu. They say there is Tibet to our north. China to the east, Burma on the south, and Bengal to our west.'

" Why did we come here ? ' asked Buddhu, with the inquisitive- ness of a child who is growing up to mischief. " To earn our living, son,' said Gangu."

It is a pleasure, and a revelation, to make the acquaintance of Gangu and his family, though they are poor, suffering and oppressed. With great skill, and without insistence, Dr. Anand shows the Indian coolies, exploited; starving; cheated, dirty, diseased, as the true heirs of one of the world's great civilisa- tions ; in their acts, thoughts, conversations, they reveal that civilisation as directly and naively as the daily life of a British workman reveals the history of England.

But Dr. Anand does not wish only to describe the Indian character ; he wants to show it at work, in conflict with the European oppressors, he wants to show something of the economic working of the tea estates, of the system of indentured labour, beside which the slave system- which Lincoln fOught a civil war to abolish was perhaps a paradise, of the contrast between the Indian peasant and the English invader. I have

no doubt that Dr. Anand's account of the -tea;planteri is true. In England also we know their kind ; me-kb:AV-the busineis-like yet intellectually torpid Craft-Cooke,-manager of the estate ; the

brutal Reggie Hunt, his assistant, who eventually; in panic, shoota Garigu while attempting to rape his daughter and is acquitted of Murder' by a fury with a majcifAy of European members"; the intellectual, slightly muddled, socialistic doctor, De la Havre, who willy Hilly_-_becernes_the leader -of - a coolie riot. But, of such people, Dr. Anand adds nothing to our knowledge. They are true merely to their type and to their class, synthetic, composed out of a mass of intelligent observations of typical and class symptoms. With them, by his own best standards, Dr. Anand does not succeed, and it is not hard to see the reason why. It is because they are created out of hate, which is an abstract and generalising passion, while the Indian characters are created out of love. The point is interesting because these characters may merit hate, yet cannot be repre- sented truly while hate is the dominating passion. What, then, is one to do who, like Dr. Anand, is both an artist and an Indian ?

There can be no doubt of the scene of Two Leaves and a Bud ; its smells, sounds, colours, landscapes are all of India. Equally there can be no doubt of the scene of the remaining four on this list. One claims to be about Ireland, one about Germany, one about Russia and the East End of London, one about England. In fact, they are all about another country, impossible to mistake, ravaged, exploited and colonised by a million writers, that vast and desolate Depressed Area, the Land of Fiction.

Mr. Edward James has written a novel which should, I think, please all admirers of The Fountain. That is, it pretends to bestow all the benefits of philosophy without requiring any of its intellectual efforts, to create a world, beyond the mediocrity of an industrial age, in which some profounder intelligence, creative and all pervading, is at work ; in such a world, whose only content derives from a contrast with a superficial picture of a superficial " Society," Mr. James' cultivated gardener meets God. It is inevitable that such books call to their aid the great thinkers of the past. Mr. Charles Morgan's friend in need is Plato, Mr. James' helpers are Michelangelo and Beethoven. It is not for me to decry an author who depends upon such reputable authorities. But I cannot honestly advise anyone in search of pleasure or amusement to read this book ; if edification is wanted, Emerson is much better. Mr. James should learn that suspension of disbelief is not willing unless the author gives us a little help ; and that even the " magic of

words " cannot persuade us to accept every absurdity. •

The Wind Changes is a novel of revolutionary Ireland, and of an attempt by three friends, two male, one female, to bring back to Dublin a famous revolutionary leader who will found the One and Indivisible Republic. Their efforts are thwarted by the death of one, and the obsession of all three with their own emotions. A first novel, it is distinguished by the author's grim determination, only equalled by her characters', to make the most of personal relations. It would be idle to give details of the plot, the variations of bed and sofa, because they have little importance to Miss Manning herself. And, though there are many descriptions of scenery, natural and urban, the novel has no landscape ; ten minutes after reading any one of them, I remember nothing of it. Ten years after reading two lines of description by Stendhal, it is as if the landscape were still before my • eyes. Physical life, landscape, events are important to Miss Manning only as a reflection of emotional crises. The trouble is that in her book the crises are not personal ; it is not persons who conflict but, carefully nailed down, egotism that responds to lack of self-sufficiency, pride that rejects lasciviousness, ambition that quarrels with desire ; the relations, which are many and complicated, are between, not persons, but, almost literally, the parts of persons.

Mr. Blumenfeld, on the other hand, accepts all the conven- tions of fiction. His prose is not distinguished, and his emotional values mechanical ; death breeds grief ; age, wisdom ; physical beauty, love. But all this may be willingly accepted as a mere means to unrolling the story of a Russian Jew who, through wars and revolutions, poverty and hardship, passes across the face of Europe to the East End of London ; it is an efficient mechanism for presenting a picture of Yiddish life, in itself a subject of great beauty and interest. Mi. Blumenfeld is at his best in describing the specific Jewishness of his characters.

Despair is a joke, reflecting Dostoevsky rather farcically, in which a Russian in Germany attempts unsuccessfully to cheat an insurance company by murdering a tramp whom he takes for his double and leaving his wife to collect on his life policy. The joke could impose on no one except reviewers or those who read novels for some ulterior motive, and once you have seen through it the shoddiness of its materials can ro longer be concealed.