"ALL MEN ARE ENEMIES."

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 88, 15 April 1933, Page 2 (Supplement)

"ALL MEN ARE ENEMIES."

RICHARD ALDINGTON'S NOVEL.

It may he that the dead hand of that regrettable Victorian age still has weight, but the serious reader to-day looks for something more in a novel than fine writing, considerable culture and a credible story. He expects still that the principal figure in a substantial novel shall possess character. The days are gone when a novel's hero wa3 a paragon of virtue; we have been accustomed by the psychological school to characters otherwise estimable who are guilty of astonishing lapses into dishonesty, selfdeception or immorality. But, except in ephemeral stories, such Characters have usually been positive; they have "stood for something." It would be difficult to say what Tony Clarendon, whose fortunes Richard Aldington describes for us in "All Men Are Enemies" (Chatto and Windus), stands for, unless it be eroticism. Tony as a youth goes to Italy, where his artistic sensitiveness finds deeper satisfaction than it had known in England. After an idyllic love affair with a young Austrian girl, who is minus the conventional inhibitions, he is separated from her by the war, and loses all trace of her. His war service scars him, physically and mentally, and after it he cannot "settle down." Probably he would not, even without the intervention of the war, have settled down. Despairing of finding his Austrian, he marfies a normal English girl (normal, except for a somewhat incredible episode, but then Mr. Aldington has his own confident theory about English women), and lives with her for six years. Then, determined not to be permanently caught up in the machine of London business life, he burns his boats, deserts Jiis wife, and hies himself to the Continent. There he finds his first love, whose experiences in the maelstrom of post-war Austria have been horrible. .There, after 495 pages, the reader leaves them, believing themselves ideally happy, promising themselves a pleasant vagrant existence, tasting the sweets of Europe (needless to say, the gentleman has a private income), and vowing that, should another war come, they will "rush at once to the neutralest country there is, provided there's still standing room." This tale, handsomely embellished throughout, and flavoured by occasional diatribes against Mr. Aldington's pet aversions, is simply not worth the highlyskilled work that has been put into it. Mr. Aldington's detestation of machinemade living is sincere, but it seems he has no solution to offer; he merely 1 escapes from it into unreality, j