Fiction
Museum Pieces. By William Plomer. (Cape. 12s. 6d.) Tom Tallion. By E. H. W. Meyerstein. (Gollancz. 12s. 6d.) The Deceivers. By John Masters. (Michael Joseph, 12s. 6d.) MR. PLOMER'S new novel, designed as light comedy, is an apologia for manners that are now no more—manners that go with money, it appears, and are quintessentially civilised. The heroic museum pieces of his title are the twice-widowed Susannah Mountfaucon and her son by her first marriage, Toby d'Arfey (a name which Mr. Plomer's readers will recognise), both of whom belonged in heart and mind to an Edwardian order of wealth, independence, gaiety and courage, and both of whom lacked, in the banal 'twenties and 'thirties, the power of adaptation that distinguishes the beastly bourgeois. Toby, in particular, who from Eton, travel, painting, designing hats, writing and the most cheerful extravagance came to poverty, perilous war service and suicide, was always on the side of the creators, as Mr. Plomer puts it, against the destroyers. The thesis that is implied here is susceptible to argument, but on the level of light comedy Museum Pieces has the rationality, the mis- chief and the wit that Mr. Plomer's readers will expect from him. Mr. Plomer's habit of literary allusion, pleasant enough in itself, is perhaps too often distracting for story-telling purposes, and the wit of his dialogue is not always in character, but he has devised shrewd and comic incidents enough and to spare in a story which is always a little less irresponsible than it may seem and which makes no bones about being addressed to the sophisticated intelligence.
Mr. Meyerstein's is a curious and eclectic talent. Fancy rather than imagination jogs his elbow, and is habitually projected in a style of urbane and impersonal gravity that leans by turns towards one or other of half-a-dozen eighteenth-century models, from Defoe to Horace Walpole. In Tom Tallion he assumes an innocence that is truly sinister ; his modulations of fancy, for all their seeming sobriety, spill over into a flood of Gothic idiosyncrasy, which carries the story away on a tide of murder and sudden death. The book is, indeed, an odd mixture of the prosaic and the fantastic. It tells, in the first person, of a youth in his father's second-hand bookshop in Hampstead in the early years of the century who always kept the world at one remove from him and who became a spectacular and precocious artist. The bookshop atmosphere, which is thickened to a rich eccentricity by Tallion senior's moral teaching, his methods of salesmanship and the wanton humours of his customers, is amusingly done, and allows Mr. Meyerstein to show off his biblio- phile's paces. What to make of Tom's absorption of his singular and bloody experiences, however, is another matter. It was very sensible of him, no doubt, to eat the pomegranate after he had experienced difficulty in drawing it and thus, symbolically speaking, to acquire the habit of artistic assimilation ' • but what logic of art or of fantasy is to be attached, for instance, to Mr. Glare, who made vestas and for whom Tom drew a terrific poster of the burning of the Alexandrian Library, or to the incandescent middle-aged passion he woke in the beautiful and aristocratic Mrs. Glare, who was a Pompquine ? An inventive and ingenious book, but it prompts too many questions of the most literal sort.
It is a fluent if not deeply-considered picture of nineteenth-century India's " unique blend of pomp and squalor," that Mr. Masters presents in The Deceivers. The dusty tracks across the great plains, the jungle villages, the bullock carts and palanquins, however, serve only as a backcloth in a rather fearsome melodrama of the last days of Thuggee. Mr. Masters has an imaginative relish for action, especially of a horrific character, and he certainly lets himself go to some effect in describing the Thug technique of strangulation and Thug massacres of the innocents. For all his energy and facility, however, as story-teller he is inclined to be crude and extravagant. This tale of an imaginary William Savage, who in 1825 took advantage of his dark complexion and knowledge of Hindi to pose as a Thug, almost succumbed to theonystical intoxication proper to_a servant of Kali, and, having drtink blood, finally vindicated himself as the arch-destroyer of Thuggee, comes dangerously close now and then to nonsense. Still, ignore probability, psychology and the rest, and the raw excitements of the tale remain. R. D. CHARQUES.
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