NEW NOVELS.

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20920, 29 July 1933, Page 13

NEW NOVELS.

PLEASANT MR MACK.AIL I Having I'un. By Denis Mackail. Hodder and Stoughton. 624 pp. (7/6 net.) From W. S. Smart. I It is sometimes easy to think Mr Mackail the pleasantest writer alive. That is, when one has a book of his in hand. It is true, he is just as easy to forget again—though there are perhaps sections (or should it be sectors?) of "The Square Circle" that protest against this. But there it is. You can't get away from it: how pleasant to read Mr Mackail! This is the second collection of his short stories, and bears that out. Perhaps, though, to spare oneself a stab of distress, one ought to forgo the pleasure of reading his Foreword? For there it appears that his pleasant stories and his pleasant persons and their pleasant doings are not at all pleasant, or easy to invent. He says: After a great deal uf pain and agony which I should prefer not to describe. I perceive the faint glimmerings of an idea. I seize it by the scruff, I wheedle and cajole it, and presently it ceases to glimmer, and develops a distinct outline. I then pat it on the back, give it a good meal, and prepare a careful scenario from it. 1 then sit down and write something which has absolutely no connexion with it whatever, post the result, and collect the cash. To derive one's pleasure irom this indescribable travail! Is it not selfish? Is it not callous? —Yes, it is; but who cares? Not even Mr Mackail, after all. When lie says he gives his idea a good meal, he probably means that he takes himself out to dine, (Hum! Clear soup? A nice pale sherry? Filleted sole? Graves? Cutlets a I'Americainc? Chateau Montrose? And what not). Then Mr Mackail "collects the cash." Let him suffer. At least, so long as he provides his perfect anodyne lor vicarious twinges. DRIFT. Ibe Stream. By Beatrice Mayor, rutnan). 227 pp. ' Miss Mayor's novel is written in the first person—the apologia (though the burden of the charge is not lifted) of an actress who allowed her life, both as a career and as a possession, to dissolve in futility and unhappiness. The form is one in which there is j... - room for supreme success between the extremes of romantic energy and psychological finesse; between, say. Stevenson and Henry James. It may, also, be a little obtuse to say of a novelist that her central chaiacter could have been better developed by some other hand; she so obviously has the right to retoit that the character she develops is hers, and that a different development would produce, not an improved but a different, an alien character. Still, it is impossible not to feel that, could Bennett or James or Tolstoy have held Miss Mayors pen long enough to introduce a sentence here, a paragraph theie. Rachel would have traced more than the lines of her own weak and wandering course; she would have added the compass points, and the significant features of a vital map. In "The Stream" we see only what Rachel saw; what she was blind to, in herself and beyond, no. Her story, in brief, is this. She married, her husband went to South Africa soon afterwards, expecting her to follow; but she delayed and drifted, as chance provided excuse or cause until her purpose was gone. When he returned, she hopefully and remorsefully renewed it; but her failure was the same, emphasised distressingly by the death of the sick man she might have saved. PRISON LOVERS. The Rest Is Silence. By C. and M. Schartcn-Antink. Trans, by J. INlenzies Wilson. Rich and Cowan Ltd 284 pp. This translation from the Dutch successfully assimilates into its total coherence and truth the strangeness of its scene and plot. It is not easy to overcome —or rather, it is difficult not to arouse—an initial and stubborn disbelief in characters who, like Paolin, the rough ex-sol-dier, and Rosa, a peasant girl, fall in love as they see each other in an Italian prison chapel, and, without

one spoken word, build between them an enduring trust; but it is done. Paolin is transferred to Elba to serve the remainder of his sentence for the attempted murder of his wife's wartime lover; but he contrives to send Rosa a note asking her to meet him there on his release. This is accelerated by three months, during which he finds work, and confidently waits. Rosa does not fail him. But their happiness is brief. Her health has been impaired, and gives way; and it is her dying request that Paolin shall return to his wife. All of this makes a really moving story, unspoiled by any attempt to force its emotional quality or to overload the prison scenes in Italy or Elba. Equally admirable is the drawing ot Paolin's wife, in whom the reader discovers with relief such stiength and sanity as provide the hope ot happiness for themselves, their own child, and the children of her liaison and his. LOVE IN THE LAKE COUNTRY. Deborah in Langdale. By E. M. Ward. MHhnen. 304 pp. Many readers will enjoy a novel in which, without psychological pretentiousness or descriptive parade, the author lends her characters as much life as they need, and draws from the landscape of the Lake country so much of its charm. The two sisters who inherit a small property at Thrang End are ihrown into contrast by their reactions to their new surroundings. Deborah learns to love them; Enid is so far from doing so that she is delighted when a young man begins to build a house nearby, as crude as himself. But lie is not a bad fellow, and the success of Enid's matrimonial schemes need cause no misgivings. Deborah's romance has | subtler qualities, imparted by her I own nature and that of the rather ! odd young • archaeologist who delib- ! erately fakes the justification for his i researches, in order to stay near her. But the author smiles indulgently ,on him in the misunderstandings i into which he schemes himself and I signifies that all is to turn out 1 happily.

TIIK PL'ITETS. Discovery by Torchlight. By P. lVhitehousc. Chapman and Hall Ltd. IBS pp. The significance of Mr Whitehouse's novel is rather elusive. Most of the characters would be artists of one sort or another, but their bows are not strung and their quivers seem poorly furnished. Even Russel Braithness, whose constancy to his puppet theatre gives

him some fixity in this irresolute world, from beginning to end, from the moment of his profound care for God's eyelashes in the puppetshow "Creation" to the final, successful production which reveals to Emma "the embodiment of an idea and the reason why she loves him, hardly shows a trace of any talent which is not mere whimsicality and freakishness. Emma Stamp, a young woman of considerable spirit and complexity, follows Russel to the establishment of Emily Weininger, a German ladv faho encourages ana entertains all these aspirants; and it is there that she "discovers" him, and herself, in this way. Unfortunately the value of the discovery remains uncommunicated, though the reader's progress to this conclusion is rendered agreeable by a sorVof bustling dexterity, with'which Mr Whitehouse handles his own puppets, and occasionally by something better.

THE FAITHFUL

Flo. A Novel. By F. C. Boden. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd- 311 pp. If Mr Bodeirs second novel is a little disappointing after "Miner " it is not because he has changed the setting from the pits to a more various scene—the grimier streets of the city, its railway yards, and the sweet country. These, in fact, he has described with distinguished success: has more than described them —has felt and dramatised them. The slackening is rather in the story, which is drab without intensity, and in the characters, who are drawn with more pains than force. The dialogue is a good test of this: it reads very often like a careful transcription of things heard, but wants the accent and spirit, which the characters themselves do not give it. The theme is the faithfulness of a girl—the Flo of the title—to a young man, Raymond Beardall, who deserts her for another man's wife, to be deserted in his turn.