Fiction

By PETER BURRA Windless Sky. By Fritz Faulkner. (Hogarth Press. 7s. 6d.) Old Heart Goes on a Journey. By Hans FaIkeda. Translated by Erie Sutton. (Putnam. 7s. 6d.) Antigua, Penny, Puce. By Robert Graves. (Seizin Press. Constable. 7s. 6c1.) The King Sees Red. By Anthony Bertram. (Chapman and Hall. 7s. 6d.)

Vim a fastidious artist the novel is the least promising of forms—it has such a spreading tendency, its very -nature seems to be. formlessness. Modern writers have found a safe remedy in confining it within a pattern of Time,/flysses and Mrs. hallway offering the` convenient structure of a single day. In Windless Sky this has been reduced to the limit of what appear to be not more-than a few moments.

The scene is the household- and estate of the Redman who dominate a river-settlement somewhere in the backwoods

of America about sixty„ years ago_i _and the moments of time, from which the Story ,depends OCILIIF shortly after supper one autumn..evening. Lewis Hedinan, the father,'-is away at the fairs in Frederickstown. Karl, the first-born—" the Priest,". as he is•known for his religious fanaticism—is waiting for the family to assemble -for the: ceremony of prayers. Upitairs-theuitither malingers in -bed to escape the revolting

performance. A female _cousin, between whom and the Priest a sinister affection is hinted at, is sent to fetch the mother, who will not stir. Upstairs also,. Emma the second daughter, a moral outcast, sits at her window waiting. In despair she sees her loved brother William ride away through the woods, breaking his dangerous pronfise to take her to her lover. William comes to the inn where the lover is waiting, the bastard son of a squatter, a " woods-colt," William's greatest friend. When he sees that William has arrived without Emma he retires with a singing-girl of the inn.

From these intensely charged moments depends in retro- spect the history of the persons who have been linked in them. The whole time-scheme is extraordinarily com- plicated, but the only positive criticism to be made of it is that there are occasions when the drama loses its force through one's uncertainty of the order in which certain events are supposed to have taken place. Mr. Faulkner's object seems to be to weave the story into so close a pattern that in any one moment the whole of the rest may be implicit. The theme may be discovered in the brooding memories of the father, as he reviews the family from which he is tem- porarily absent :

" As if light and shadow were inexplicably one, imbricated one upon the other ; and night and daylight merging, and past and present not separated by a relentless flood of occurrence—he felt these things : they were nameless to him, but he felt their deathless- ness in his unrest, in his nostalgia for the long-ago, the gone."

To stem the " relentless flood of occurrence," transforming it into a deep still pool—that is what Mr. Faulkner has tried to do, the surface of the pool being the moment described above. It would require many more readings of this most remarkable book than a reviewer can give to discover all that is hidden below the surface.

With a severely ironical plainness of address the characters are divided into the " good " and the " bad." The " good " are the fanatical attendants of the Lutheran church, grasping, sadistic, vindictive, the religiousness of each being shown to have a common' source in revenge for their loss of love.

They are all " endlessly alone." The " bad " are the wanton lovers, most of whom for their sins will never know what it is to be alone again. These are the two facets of complete life. The story is told with a kind of Biblical rhythm, and the nomenclature, " the first-born," " the serving-woman," &c., gives it art 'epic universality. It is in fact not so much the story of a special family as a race-myth,a myth in which the rate discloses its common human inheritance. Mr. Faulknei both writes and' thinks as a poet, and there are passages 'in which he seems to me to touch rest-greatness. Such i6,the scene in which the " bad sister Efinna rides- down her brother 'to her lover, and certain of her coining happiness, prays that her brother may one day .know happiness ton., And beta* of its reminder of various landnuirks in fiction'

I cannot 'forbear quoting the elder daughter's apost.roplie of the woods-colt. " There was something terrible about him, something formidable, grand. Ho stood unashamed of his filth and sordid bastardy, ho gloried in his aloneness. Nothing had power to defeat him, ,nething could reach him. - It occurred to her that he was like the river, and the trees of the forest and the reeks : he had been always, be would exist for ever—nothing could kill him, and she thought : ' I like him, he is greater than I.' "

That may come to sound rhetorical with fanfiliarity,—and occasional over-emphasis is the more noticeable for con-

straint in the humour ; but all the same it is surely a note to be heard and marked with uncommon admiration in a first novel.

What a surprise it is to open a translation from the German, and find that the book has been published in Germany. The truth is that there is nothing in Old Heart Goes on a Journey which could possibly distress that most sensitive of creatures, the Uricaldmensch of the modem jungle, and for robuster readers it is just a little thin. " Once upon a time there was a Professor" . . . It is striking that Herr Fallada dates his story

as late as possible before the War, but not a minute later. One could not tell convincingly such a remote fairy-tale about a nearer world. Here is everything that is familiarly charming in German sentiment, warming the heart and forbidding

criticism,—the dear old gentleman and his little children friends, every one of them a detective ex machina. The old heart's journey is for the rescue of his god-daughter from the wiles of the wicked farmer who is wasting her inheritance. This develops into a simple fable in which the powers of good. overcome the powers of evil, and this time the words mean exactly what they were created to mean, without a trace of Mr. Faulkner's irony. It is 'a distinctly_ attractive tale, with one or two first-rate scenes : fat Farmer Tamm is authentic Brueghel. But the rescue-plot excites in too restless a manner, because we are made to fed that the values involved are im- portant ; and it is always a nuisance to get worked up about things that seem to matter, if they don't at all.

Antigua, Penny, Puce is, on the contrary, completely devoid of any pretences to values that matter. Inhuman one would call it, but for its undeniable resemblance to the real behaviour of men. It narrates_the life-long feud of a brother: and sister, Oliver and Jane, over a stamp-collection, and is a humorous entertainment of the very first (Order. 1 The con- structiOn'is perfect, the plotting diabolically ingepious ; the action withal almost.-alivaYs within the bounds of verisimi- litude. ,Every sentence, is barbed with, wit, and the .whole story a comprehensive field for satire. Particularly delightful is the father, who " belonged to a sermon club (just as some people belong to a gramophone record club) run by a retired clergyman. One sent in sermons and got other people's old sermons in exchange " ; and- OliVer'S scientific wife Edith, whose many, inventions included " an amusing way of con- verting.- a woman's voice on the gramophone into a man'a," and who died in the throes ofinventing " a dignified umbrella, that weighs nothing, tucks away in a purse, can't be blown inside out, can't tear and can't get lOst." Life and death are all one joke, and there is plenty of the unemotional bitterness of the Waugh school. But nothing-is at all distu'rbing. It is riotous invective from start to finish, and the finish itself

is the Most unexpected and complete climax imaginable.

In the only political novel of the-week Mr-Anthony Bertram brings us back to things that matter very much ; but by providing his idealistic'kiitg-with so much that is borrosied from Ruritania—his: charin, his mitten, :and: general:gir of romantic fantasy—he kindly persuades us of the probability. of his theme: The rotnantic.frappings are intended to contrast dramatically with the king's= intelligent: sympathy with-'the working7class, but the .reatier; with the author, gets carried

away by them, and Max" iinpossible Prince

Chailning that he is All this .Mr. Bertram foresees •in an interesting note explaining his use of the Heir and Ancestor theme from Mr, Day Lewis's In Me Two Worlds; and it seems

gratuitous in vieW of -his apology to say that his story doeg not

explain. itself "- it), those terms with so much weight as it might. It is like a shadow-play which suggests the outlines of the story without declaiming its meaning dramatically. The best part of it is some excellent parody.