STARRED NOVELS

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21086, 10 February 1934, Page 15

STARRED NOVELS

FALL TO EARTH * * * Magnus Merriman. By Eric Linklater. Jonathan Cape. 362 pp. The rich inconsequence of "Juan in America" is gone, but though Mr Linklater now follows a road instead of his nose, he has not lost his zest for adventure, while he has gained in ironic discrimination. Satire and idealism are only the same judgment of the world in different terms; and Mr Linklater is beginning to formulate both kinds with a more lucid significance. His hero, Magnus, moves through a whirling experience to isolation and hard labour on a small farm in Scotland, his literary fame sinking as an abandoned camp-fire sinks behind the traveller and his literary ambition dying. The most explicit comment upon this exchange appears in the symbolic episode of the bull, Jupiter, purchased at great cost and sacrifice, only to perish; but Magnus sees in the black cow's calf the "dainty model of his great father''—and the future's promise. As he walked one day—

Tears sprang to his eyes to see such loveliness, and perception like a bird in his breast sang that this land was iiis and he one with it. As though his tears had flooded it, his mind was filled with knowledge and he knew that his life was kin to all the life around him, even to the beasts that grazed in the fields, and to the very fields themselves. . . Now he knew why, in far parts of the world, he had often felt the unreality of all he saw and descried a foolish artifice in his own business there. The far parts of the world were fine roving for pirates who had a secret island whither they might bring back their booty; but to roam the world without a haven or a home was to be lost as a star that fell to nothingness through the ordered ranks of heaven. 7ine roving. . . . Mr Linklater has given Magnus plenty of it, and bent it to a dozen vantage points of satirical or comic observation, of politics, the new "national" movement in Scotland, "press lord" journalism, and so on. MICHAEL IN SEARCH OF HIMSELF :: Wonder Malady. By Francis Watson. Lovat Dickson. 313 pp. A queer sort of humorousphilosophical story, in which a young man, crossed in love, at odds with himself, and out of sorts with the world, hurls himself moodily about it. He is fortunate enough to meet and keep on meeting again an elderly Anglican clergyman, the very man to spill his soul to, the very man to stanch the flow with ironic counter-confession and administer corrective pills of Platonic and other wisdom. Partly by the lessoning of events, partly by these clerical instillations, partly by sheer luck. Michael is brought to the end of the book a cured and happy man: but the readers who will enjoy it will care less about 'his ma lad v and his fate than about the dialectic, the intellectual and scholastic ornament of the book. That, at its best, is something to gloat over.

Ir-I.ANDEKS * As the Unicorn. By Henry Koriiilly redden. Mactnillan. 281 pp. It is not for nothing that Mr Fedden introduces "As the Umconi" with a seductive, drowsily beautiful description of Martin's inland home near Paris. Here, it anywhere, lime would seem halfasleep and slow its pace, soften and haze the issues of life, and indulge 11.e low-pulsed idlers, the half-be-lievers oi casual creeds, those who neither greatly will nor greatly dare. For Mr Fcdden's character aie of this type. Martin himscli has talent without genius, discrimination without ideal urgency, and when he falls in love is inert and dubious. His lover and wife, soon wearv of him, is his equal in the sort of ineflectuality which Browning made the subject of his,sermon, "The Statue and the Bust"; and Benjamin, towards whom she does not so much turn as avert herself from Martin, differs from them only as one voice in a trio must have more colour than the others. Then? frk-nds, victor:- of the island, are Liandcrs like them —locked in their cwn smallncrs and aimiessness. Ji'he remarkable thing is that out of these incomplete beings Mr Fedden has made an excellent novel; and the bosc part of the explanation is that he writes a prose which lends something of its great attraction to people who have little of thr.r own. LIVE COAI.S • * Uncouth Swain. Ey Roger Dataller. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. 30!) pp. Mr Dataller is a young miner, who went to Oxford with a scholarship and came away having unlearned none of the lessons of hard experience, but having gained some faith ia the power of education to revolutionise mens lot. These two things emerge in his realistic account of the life of Yorkshire miners, a century ago or more, and in his depiction of a hero, Holiday, who picked coal for a living and taught for the faith that was in him. And Mr Dataller's conviction gathers force from the fact that he chooses to look so far back for its origin, and refuses to be discouraged, as many have been, by the small net advance between then and now, and to react in favour of violence. It may be regretted that ho has ;.n::io;;,:;ly thought it necessary 1o enliven his story with cp'sudes more or less irrelevant, though exciting. There was abundant interest in his studv of the village miners ;.p.d of the political ferment after Waterloo.

POIROT EXCELS HIMSELF * Murder on the Orient Express. By Aftatha Christie. \V. Collins Sons and Co. Ltd. 253 pi). ; II would bo quite unfair to dh'-c-U.se how Hereule Foirot c:■;<;■ cJr; j himself—and his creator herr.elf. H I must suffice to say that Poirot, after I ;.:< exceedingly unpleuring Ameri- [ ran has been murdered on tire j Oritur in c.xmr.slann : ] -vliicii make it certain that the murj dt.-rcr carrot have escaped and mu-t be berthed in the Athens-Peri:; '.-■'.ach, propounds two perfect solutions—cue which is false, and is a.-cepted. one which is true, and is by general consent suppressed. And if the construction of the plot which incorporates ar. entirely novel idea hj, in the modern manner, really very abstract, Mrs Christie must be credited with having done wonders in the way of psychological cover and distraction. The travellers in the suspect coach are cleverly dTverFified and drawn, and the voJuble Mrs Hubbard (Mrs Christie must have enjoyed l.sr. . . .) more than makes up fur the absence of Captain Hastings.