New Novels
The Death Wish. By Vera Caspary. (Eyre and Spottiswoode. los. 6d.) The Bellringer's Wife. By Maxence van der Meersch.
Kimber. los. 6d.) The Shadowed Hour. By Coral Hope. (Faber. 9s. 6d.)
The Wooden Overcoat. By Pamela Branch. (Robert Hale. 91. 6d.) The Death Wish is so adult, so intelligent that I am not yet prepared to say how good a novel it is. In sudden gratitude for such a book, a reviewer is apt to overpraise it. Even so, I am safe in saying that it is very good indeed, and good in a different way from Laura and Bedelia. Here the emphasis is on character ; character revealed in action certainly, but studied for its own sake, and under no obligation to further a plot ; character which the writer, released from all need to contrive excitement, can allow to expand as it will.
Emmy Arkwright runs a highly successful business as a dress designer, specialising in luxury products at reasonable prices. When we meet her, she is suffering from an overdose of sleeping tablets. Her doctor's new assistant brings her round, somewhat obstructed by her relatives and one or two other people who seem violently interested in her case ; but it is a near thing. The next step is to persuade Emmy to remember what she did, and why it seemed to her the only thing she could do. Carefully and quietly she is brought to face her problems, mainly by the influence of the new doctor and her own interest in him. At one point her egregious brother nearly wrecks everything—this is a brilliantly handled episode—. but the book ends, as all such cases end in fact when they are successful, not with a solution, but with suspense, uncertainty, and risk faced cheerfully. Emmy has learned to accept the hazards of living.
To tell this much will not lessen anyone's enjoyment of a story which is all the more exciting for not making excitement its first concern. (There is a great deal of incident which I have left out.) It is a study, detached, unprejudiced, sympathetic in the rare, live- and-let-live sense, of a group of taut, over-civilised people, all lacking inner compulsion or central belief, as they struggle against an environment which is too much for them ; a life which, like a business which has outgrown its organisation, confronts them with a series of monstrous muddles. They see only one way to meet it, a sort of desperate opportunism and an effort to use the pleasures of life as drugs rather than as recreations. Emmy's relatives. portrayed with an astonishing tolerance and charity, are all but intolerable. Her mother is, I think, the worst of the pack ; but thz competition is severe. The friends are little better. On this self- besotted crew the impact of the young doctor, with his one-track mind—he too has his callow side—is as disturbing as a gale in summer. Does Miss Caspary wish us. I wonder, to draw the sub- sidiary moral that narrow concentration of purpose will always prevail over liberal breadth of view without conviction ? It does not matter, anyway: she has written a first-rate novel, engaging the sympathies and teasing the mind.
Mr. van der Meersch starts with the advantage of an excellent translator, Miss Eithne Wilkins, who makes her version read like an original. A young man kisses a girl and goes away. Obliged later, by his mother's scruples more than his own, to marry another girl, he escapes at last through bankruptcy and returns to his former home. Here he meets the first girl, married now to an ailing bell- ringer. I need not tell you any more, except that the book does not end in the way a reader of contemporary novels would expect.
Here is another adult story, challenging head and heart. Bruges is the main scene, and the author's powers of description, which reach their height in an account of the carillon, have made me put the city down on my list of places to be visited. His characterisation is no less clear. Maria, her husband, the painter, the selfish wife, the children are all surely realised ; no stroke has gone awry. Above all, the book has a glow of compassion, a radiation like that which comes from an old mellow wall in summer, after the sun has gone down.
Miss Hope is even more ambitious. In her anxiety that her story shall be valid on more than one level, she has (to my mind) not wholly succeeded in establishing it on this level, where, after all, we live and have our being. A gallows with three corpses, the surname of the middle corpse Emmanuel: a middle-aged woman mourning at the gallows' foot, whose relationship to the corpse is at once obvious though concealed, and who is associated with a brothel : a donkey, an insurrection, a young girl who, fearing for her cat, takes refuge in the brothel and finds a priest there: we see what Miss Hope is getting at, but, despite the intelligence and clarity with which she sets her scene, I am left with the feeling that she has a little overreached herself.
Mrs. Branch's purpose is frankly to entertain. No less quick- witted than the rest, she lacks only concentration to force her way into the front rank of crime novelists. She has a lively fancy, a pleasant wit, a quick sense of character and a first-class ear for nuances of speech. Her rat-catcher (I beg his pardon, Rodent Officer) is a joy. Three corpses dominate her story, too, but they are put to a very different use, and the characters for whom our sympathy is invited, a Chelsea quartet, spend harrowing days and nights attempting to get rid of them. They are not helped by the presence of a club of sinister Professionals next door. . . . Now you may read on.
This delightfully ghoulish souffle will not bear too much logical probing, but it is written with admirable energy and dash. If Mrs.
Branch can be a little more careful over details, she will hit the headlines. Her printer might be more careful, too. We may pardon " nonchalently," but not "gutteral" (twice); and as for
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