NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 17815, 14 July 1923, Page 11

NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

SOME NOVELS. Mr Joseph Hergesheimer, in his new novel, converts t 0 admirable use his study of Cuba. "The Bright Shawl" is the story of Charles Abbott, a highminded and very temperamental young American, wh 0 visits Cuba in the bad: days of Spanish oppression. He quickly becomes entangled in the revolutionary movement, and his sojourn- ends in a remarkable tragedy. Mr Hergesheimer is a fine artist and craftsman, and as his admirers know, he is almost incomparable in his skill in drawing women. The three women in this novel are extraordinarily fascinating— La Ciavel, the dancer, whose bright sliawi is the symbol of her flaming spirit; Jsamsa, the flower-like girl whose pale gentleness hides a heart of fire; and the strange spy Pilar de Lima. Polar makes a brief appearance at the very end of the book, but she lives more vividly in one's memory than any 0 f the other people in this moving and tragio story. Mr Hergesheimer's craftsmanship is better than ever in "The Bright Shawl" —his delicate, pensive, and decisive strokes of description are more than ever peculiarly his. The story is presented as the reyerie of an elderly man thinking, after the Great War, of the change in the mental outlook of young men. liut it is told without reference to the mind of the man remembering, and although it is thus unsatisfactory, it is a triumph considered as a story only.—(London: lTeinemann. Through Whitcombe and Tombs.) Whatever else is happening to the novel reading public, it is not losing its capacity to enjoy W. W. Jacobs. "Captains All*' and "Ship's Company" are now out in a cheap edition. Cheap —'but very good, with the essential and wholly admirable illustrations of Will Owen. One is glad to know that Mr Jacobs's really funny longshoremen and sailormen are still appreciated. (London: Hodder and Stougiiton.) Athough there is a tradition, or a belief that the public does not care about short stories, very good short stories continue to appear, and to prosper. Miss I. A. R. Wylie provides half a dozen in "Side-Shows," pleasant, humorous, and lathetie and tragic. Some of them .are not very successful — notatily "The Inheritors" —but there can be nothing but praise for "Elfreda and the Mad Busman," and for "The Wonderful Story." The latter is indeed wonderfully good —a study of three country labourers, two men and a woman, a little tale of primal jealousy, hard tragody t and a beautiful and moving ending in peace and love. (London; Cassell and Co. Through Simpson and Williams, Ltd.) A series" of delightful reprints which those who like good things ought not to miss is being produced >by Foulis, of Edinburgh. We have received three numbers of the series: "Rudder Grange*," "The Lady or the Tiger," and "A Far Away Melody." Everyone who has read'Stockton's charming tales will be careful to read them again, and yet again. Those —to be envied — people who do not know "Rudder Grange'' and the shorter stories will be glad to have them in the new issue. Messrs Foulis have also brought out in a dainty format, in three booklets. Dean Ramsay's admirable collections of good Scots stories. One of the smart radical sayings of the day is that wars arise out of the scramble of nations for oil to pour on the troubled waters; which in this column shall be as it may be. But in "Fetherbee Farm," (Mrs) Marie Van Vorst finds domestic storms and bloodshed in the struggle to possess a fewhundred acres, beneath which lie millions of gallons of petroleum. Mark Shayne, president of the Guaranteed Oil Company, was "rotten rich." He was "putrifying under the layers and layers of guano which money sometimes' becomes.'' He thought, he lived, he breathed dollars. Nick Fetherbee, on the other hand, had been "an unlucky man right through." One fourth of July, when both were "little bits of shavers," he had rescued, Swayne from the school bully, and Swayne had promised to "fix up something nice for him some day." But Nick, with a sick wife and a sensitive daughter, struck trouble, and Swayne forgot—or rather, did not forgot, but saw iru Nick's financial embarrassment an opportunity to secure Fetherbee Farm. The rest can be imagined. The seasoned novel-reader will divine, if not perhaps what actually happened, so much of the kind of thing that was bound to happen that tine reviewer's job is to leave him now to his quest. Mrs Van Vorst kills the character who should have lived, and converts the one who deserved hell-fire, but if that worries some of the novelettish elect, the rest will regard it as wildly original. (Mills and Boon, Ltd., London.) ZION. A book that should be read as carefully by Gentile as by Jew is Mr—or is it not rather Miss? —D. L. Adler's "Zion." As a novel it has no rank at all —neither construction, nor style, nor character-drawing out of the ordinary, but it has distinct value as a racial and social study. It is really a novelised essay on Zionism, and leaves the impression, that Zionism is, and will always remain, a family tragedy. While a Jew is a Jew, everywhere and always, he does not necessarily sigh for the Promised Land. From other sources we know that only a few thousand of the dispersed people have so far taken advantage of the Balfour Declaration, and in the story of" David Brentano and Ethel Breitman we have emphatic disproof of the probability of anything like a world-wide reunion of Judah in a definite kingdom here on earth. ' David is thoroughly Anglicised—educated at Oxford, and made more English still by service in the Army during England's greatest trial; but because he is a dreamer he goes at last to Palestine to work for the restoration of his race. Hia wife is less thoroughly Anglicised, being only a generation away from Germany, but by education and taste she is more definitely severed from the masses (as opposed to the classes) of the people whom it is his religion to serve. And so in the end the crash comes—she sickening in, and of, Palestine, and refusing any longer to live there, he feeling that Palestine is a mission which it is impossible to abandon. The book ends with the wife lying face downwards on the berth of a great liner, "shaken by a tempest of weeping beyond her control," and the husband returning by train from Port Said to Jerusalem, stunned by the muddle of an ideal and an ambition that had separated him fro/m the person who was more to him than anybody or anything. It is worth pointing; out, too, that the author shows genuine insight by associating the spiritual tragedy) with mere petty and earthly things like the absence of ho* water in the Jerusalem flat, the übpleasantness of the Eastern food, the frank coarseness and familiarity of the friends from Whitechapel or Odessa. (Jarrolds, Ltd., London.)