Fiction

BY GRAILLII GREEN-E.

Company K. By Wiliam Marsh. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) • I WAS reminded of Buster Keaton while reading Company the pale long face, the melancholy eyes, the mouth that retains its closed passivity in the midst of slapstick. The world whicl Mr. Marsh describes is a world of tragic farce, where bombs take the place of custard-pies, and the sad even rhythin of his prose, which does not alter for wisecracks or incredible brutalities, is like the buried critic in Buster Keaton silently ipeaking

" I found the stairs at last and commenced climbing them care- fully on my hands and knees until I reached the top step, and felt cold air in my face. I stood upright and raised my hands to show that I was not armed. I could not see, but ,I „had a feeling that many men stood in front of me . . . I'm blind and helpless,' I said ; Please don't hurt me . .' There was silence; while I stood theie Waiting, my hands raised above my head ; and then somebody jabbed a bayonet through my body and somebody clubbed me with the butt of a rifle and I fell down the stairs and into the dug-out again."

Mr. Marsh has divided his novel into a hundred and thirteen sections, each section a short close-up of a member of Com- pany K ; there is no narrative sequence and only a few of the men are individualized. The author's object is explained by one of his characters (hut to speak of characters is misleading ; these are only a chorus of names stamped on identity- discs)

" I wish there were some way to take these stories and pin them to a huge wheel, each story hung on a different peg until the circle was completed. Then I would like to spin the wheel, faster and faster, until the things of which I have written took life and were recreated and became part of the flowing toward each other, and into each other ; blurring and then blending together into 'a composite whole, an unending circle of pain."

He has succeeded ; his book has the force of a mob-protest ; an outcry from anonymous throats. The wheel turns and turns and it does not matter, one hardly notices, that the captain of the company, killed on page 159, is alive again a hundred pages later. It does not matter that every stock situation of war, suicide, the murder of an officer, the slaughter of prisoners, a vision of Christ, is apportioned to Company K, because the book is not written -in any realistic convention. It is the only War-boo-k I have read which has found a new form to fit the novelty of the protest. The prose is bare, lucid, without literary echoes, not an imitation but a development of eighteenth-century prose. Compare Mr. Marsh's cool, descriptive style : -" A Very light went up suddenly, to break in the sky with a faint kiss, and against its flare I saw the intricate intrenchments of rusting barbed wire. I saw, too, the slow rain, gleaming like a crystal against the light, and falling in dead, unslanted lines to the field."

;with Miss du Maurier's• bookish prose.

• Miss du Maurier is a romantic masquerading as a realist.

She has chosen to describe the progress of a French Jew, son (4_ a peasant, from childhood to death, from poverty (in the Siege of Paris at the age of ten he makes a few sous by catching and selling rats for food) to wealth as the millionaire owner of a chain of restaurants in London. Shc has set herself an im- pOssible task, for she must convince the reader of the authen- ticity of her foreign peasant, of her baker's assistant, of her millionaire. Instead, she gives the impression of having read Zola and Bennett. She tries to tag her subject to earth with occasional grossness, but she lacks literary tact and the animal passions of her characters are a little comic. Everyone is more than life-size ; every action is overburdened with significance. When Julius Levy sacked a manager, the man "crept from the room like a beaten cur," and when he pro- mOted another, the man "grovelled at his feet and fawned upon his hand." When a character is killed in the South African War, he is described as " hacked to pieces on a plain in Africa." But Miss du Maurier's novel is not as bad as these cpiotations might make it appear ; it is saved by its energy. This is not life, but.it is sometimes a very good stage adaptor: • _

tion of life. The characters murder, fornicate, kill themselves with admirable vigour. Her description of the night jour from Paris through the German lines, of the child Julius and his father hidden in a goods-wagon, touches the imaginatios with her selection of sounds and movements, the shturted trucks, the whistle of the steam, the foreign voices coming up the rails.

With Mr. James Barke reality breaks in, and shatters the form of his novel in the act. This seems to be Mr. Barke's first novel and he has not yet the skill which even minor German novelists" seem to possess of letting contemporary affairs into their novels without sacrificing a pattern. But the merits of his novel far outweigh the faults. The chief fault he shares with Miss du Maurier, a lack of literearreypelicd tact. A reader opening his book at random might easily b by a reference to " the divinity of George Bernard Shaw." He might be offended by the attempt to " debunk " Rabelais (" So this was the muck that a man like Professor Saintsbury could rhapsodize about ") and Proust (" a sort of duck-billed platypus "). If he came on the thought " Surely in the quiet, lonely places of Heaven there would be room for the lonely whaup," he would almost certainly close the book. This is a pity. The novel has importance ; it expresses the state of mind of a class : " after the Labour &beide at West- minster, politics had become a mockery." It is the equivalent in fiction of Mr. Scanlon's Decline and Fall of the Labour Party. This story of a Scots peasant who is caught up into Glasgow industrialism, who joins the Labour Party only to find himself as he believes, and as thousands more believe, betrayed by the Parliamentary machine, is intensely class-conscious. Hatred gives a fine vitality to the portrait of the coal-owner, Sir John MacGowan-Findlay, with his Highland home for shooting and his absurd kilts, seen first in argument with his gardener storming up and down a path with a lettuce in his hand and seen last as Lord Stevenford engaged in breaking the General Strike. Mr.. Barke has littered this book with all his interests and reactions (many of them sentimental) ; towards the end he seems to have realized that a novel should have shape and by an arbitrary and inexcusable trick has brought his Highlander back to his native village.

Mis Upton Sinclair's Manassas was published in America in 1904 and describes the causes and opening stages of the American Civil War, but it has something in common with Mr. Barke's dissatisfaction with the contemporary scene. There have been more novels written about the Civil War than one cares to remember, but never has the cause of the North been so eloquently pleaded. Slavery is lent the interest of a con- temporary evil. Behind these speeches on dead problems and martyrdoms for dead causes can be heard the unsatisfied demand for social justice. Mr. Sinclair is not a stylist. A critic has divided writers into three classes : Prophets, Priests and Purveyors. Mr. Sinclair belongs to the first class and his style is good enough for his purpose ; it is florid, but it has conviction ; it is full of clichés and poeticisms, but it has speed. Mr. Sinclair's publishers compare him with Stephen Crane. Crane was an artist and Mr. Sinclair is not. He owes something to Crane in his battle scene, but for the rest he is attempting something quite different. It seems to me impossible to read his book without sharing for the moment his excitement, indignation and hatred.

All these books, even Miss du Maurier's, are for adult

readers. Mr. Archibald Marshall is writing for " children of all ages," for dream-uncles, for the public which finds 2 weekly Punch intellectually satisfying. Humour in this book takes the form of practical jokes ; one long story is devoted entirely to a series of jokes by a child nicknamed Angel-face. Mr. Marshall (again resembling Punch, not to speak of the dream-uncles) tries hard to keep up with the ideas of what he calls les jeunes. This is how he imagines they speak : " There appeared a young man in white flannels, who thus ad- dressed Pamela in the language of the day : ' Hullo, old funny- face ! '

Hullo; old garg6y14:3,' she suitably replied."

The more intellectual sit in box-rooms discussing Galsworthy.