Fiction
The Grand Design. By David Pilgrim. (Macmillan. tos. 6d.) Sydney Duck. By Eric Baume. (Hutchinson. 9s. 6d.) On the Edge of the Sea. By F. L. Green. (Michael Joseph. 95. 6d.)
FOR years now there has been widespread among the intelligent a taste for detective and " mystery-thriller " fiction, as recreational reading. Pure escape, its addicts call it—but I have never been able to catch the taste ; give me rather The Times crossword puzzle, or any old movie-show, when I am tired. But lately I am beginning to suspect that if a fiction-reviewer could seek relaxation in average standard fiction—an unlikely hypothesis—my zone of refuge might be among historical novels. This surprises me, because the sword- and-cloak has always been the thinnest and most wearisome of literary conventions, yet it is in some measure inescapable, however disguised or inverted, by those Who write imaginatively about real personages of the past. But I have been haunted off and on through the years by memory of a novel I read when I was twenty— Madame de in Fayette's La Princesse de Cleves; and perhaps I have grown to hope that what was once done perfectly might be done perfectly again. And oddly enough, a few days ago I found a copy of La Princesse in Charing Cross Road, and took it home, and began to read with some trepidation. And / have been so happy as to have escaped disillusionment with it ; naturally, I am not enchanted now, enthralled or wrung as I was then ; I do not believe now in the fabulous cxquisites of that imagined 'court of Henri H, nor do I believe that the actual love-story of Mademoiselle de Chartres, or of any other, can be realistically recaptured from time by Madame de la Fayette or any novelist ; but I do believe in the exquisite artifice of the book, and in its delicate initiation of sensi- bility, which makes it so much more important than the forgotten facts and gallantries which are its raw material ; and I find in its carefully composed beauty and its measured exploitation of the author's own sensitiveness and elegance of mind a justification of the assault which lesser novelists continue to make on historical themes.
This is a somewhat long-winded way of saying that I have enjoyed The Grand Design, by David Pilgrim. David Pilgrim is a collabora- tion-name used by Mr. John Palmer and Mr. St. George Saunders, who also together wrote No Common Glory. This second book continues and completes the adventures—between Whitehall, Rome and Versailles in the reign of Charles H—of James de la Cloche, whom some historians accept as being the eldest natural son of that monarch. Certainly these chroniclers show him as an extraordinarily devoted son to a trying and slippery parent. They pursue, in some- what too close detail, his manoeuvrings, with Madame of France, with the Pope and with Louis XIV, to bring about Charles's Grand Design of restoring the English .monarchy and people to the old religion ; and the hardworking hero is left sadly disillusioned at the close, with the signing of the Treaties of Dover in 167o—disillusioned, but free to retire to private life and happy marriage. Perhaps the authors lay on the worldly wiliness of Jesuits and Cardinals a shade too thickly ; perhaps their idea of the almost naive cynicism of Pope Clement IX seems too much to be true ; and perhaps we have all had as much as we can take by now about the shattering charm of Charles II—but still, the book is serious and civilised as well as decorative, and, if we surrender to its deliberativeness, it carries the attention all the way.
Sydney Duck is a lively, crowded, tough story of the Pacific in the eighteen-forties and fifties, of Sydney and San Francisco, and of life under sail and in Sailor Town. It is packed with realistic-seeming detail, and with very racy dialogue and adventures, and one of these days it is sure to be made into a big, hard-blowing film, with smashing parts for all the toughest guys in Hollywood. But just to read I found the going too hard and monotonous—especi- ally during air-raids. On the Edge of the Sea has greater tension ; it is set in the North of England just before the outbreak of this war, and is about a plot to kill Hitler. It is well worked out as a
story, and the writing is deft and easy. KATE O'BRIEN.
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