NOTES ON NOVELS

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21656, 14 December 1935, Page 19

NOTES ON NOVELS

FRENCH FAMILY In Sight of the Promised Land. By Georges Duhamel. Translated by Beatrice de Holthoir. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. 319 pp. This third volume of the Pasquier Chronicles is much more exciting than its predecessors. Even without exciting happenings and revelations it is more vivid. The place is Paris; the year, 1900. Father Pasquier is now a qualified doctor, he has transported his family, most of whom are now grown up, to a better quarter, he has less anxiety about their daily bread, but he is as nasty as ever. An expert in the arts of sordid seduction and secrecy, he leaves to his children the care of concealing the results of his amorous ways. He is selfish with a monstrous, imperturbable selfishness, and he has a sodden effrontery that the most unseemly reproach cannot penetrate. An unpleasant man, remarkable but not incredible, he can turn to his own use impending discomfiture and the sufferings of a wife who suffers only on his account. This creation is M. Duhamel’s triumph. Whether he is driving to ruin a horseless carriage, for which he has not paid and never could pay, whether he is blandly baffling a deputation of his indignant children, whether he is applying his detestable attentions to his son’s fiancee, whether he is oiling his hair or bragging of his inferior talents, he is all of a piece, nasty but real. His sensible, material son, Joseph, admirable for his industry and propriety, execrable in his insensitive coarseness, is also all of a piece, a realised character. The whole family are growing older; devoted mother, brilliant Cecile, and young Laurent, now 20 years of age and nearly wrecked in body and soul by the revelations of his kinsfolk’s differences. M. Duhamel is composing a splendid domestic novel; brilliant in characterisation, it has, in former volumes, seemed too slow-moving and unvaried in emotions. Now the strain is tighter and the mood is sharper. The family quarrels and discussions might be reported by an eavesdropper, the solitary characters might be attended by a mindreader. Description of events and scenes is good; for evidence, Pasquier’s crack-brained motor drive is ample. Contemporary circumstances are clear: echoes of the Dreyfus case still upset the family, and Joseph at his business and Laurent at his student’s bench are living in Paris, 1900. The translation is good; there are more slips than usual, generally in rendering technical matters. “In Sight of the Promised Land” will be remembered for the picture of father and son. The son says, “Everything is hideous, everything is ridiculous, everything is base, disgusting, and I am not yet 20. I had dreamt of a lovely life of noble purpose, and here I am wilting under these constant quarrels, pining away midst petty stupidities.” For this disgust the father is to blame. “Were he to read these lines he would be astonished, for he brings forth misfortune and tragedy just as a tree brings forth blossom and fruit. He doesn’t even notice them he is oblivious. It is we who suffer.” BEGINNING A CHRONICLE Introducing the Arnisons. By Edward Thompson. Macmillan. 2GB pp. “Introducing the Arnisons”—the title strongly hints at Mr Thompson’s plan of adding another to the already long list of family chronicles; and the hint is confirmed in a note which announces this as the “first part of a study of middle-class Nonconformist life during the last 40 years.” The book recommends the project to readers’ welcome by every promise of its brilliant development. It is remarkable for the incisive realism and imaginative, spiritual subtlety with which it represents intellectual and religious narrowness and material struggle and poverty, intertwined. It is remarkable because it nevertheless so easily and fully overcomes its own power to repel and alienate sympathy, and instead engages it. Partly this is the achievement of Mr Thompson’s humour; partly, of a poetic breadth and closeness of view which enables him to see and reveal, even in its ugly subsidence, gleams of Puritan nobility; partly, again, of a more general faculty to discover human commonalty, disguised and distorted as it may appear to be by differences of thought and estate. PAISLEY SHAWL The Peacock Pattern. By Allan Govan. John Murray. 335 pp. Although Mr Govan’s is the story of a Scottish boy’s career, which carries him from the lowliness of a young loom-worker to the dignity of a great manufacturer, and this theme is strong in itself and well elaborated, “The Peacock Pattern” is most interesting and admirable as a novel of social and industrial history, limited in scope but intimate in treatment. The history is that of the Paisley shawl, of a weaving industry which, in its rise and fall a century ago, has the charm and pathos and tragic qualities given by the connexion between folk-life, with its simple vicissitudes, and the life of an art. Mr Govan must have been at great pains to assemble the material, the major facts and the minutiae, of this beautifully intricated novel; but there is no sign, in its smoothness, of the effort.

MODERN ECONOMICS Woman of Glenshicls. By Lennox Kerr, W. Collins Sons and Co, Ltd. 300 pp.

The “Woman of Glenshiels,” whose fortunes Mr Kerr follows, is a working girl who moves through tribulation and war-time loss to marriage and apparent security, the sort of security which blind economic forces destroy as they throw skilled labour out of employment. Independence vanishes, and Mary and her husband are reduced to living on the dole; and when Mary tries to raise their level of life with the scrubbing-brush, the ironic result is prosecution. The lines of this story are grimly drawn, but they produce no exaggerated picture. PIONEERS’ DAUGHTERS Black Valleys. By M. W. Peacock. Angus and Robertson Ltd. 328 pp. (6/-.) Two historical epochs are called on to find the scenes against which the characters in this Australian novel move. The struggles and difficulties of a pioneer Englishman and his Bohemian wife open the story; but its main theme has to do with the lives of the two daughters of the couple, who are left at a comparatively early age to manage

their own affairs. Management, unfortunately, is complicated by tragic circumstance. Anna, homeloving, a true daughter of the soil, plans to marry a neighbouring farmer; Berta, the younger sister, has more ambitious ideas; she wants to become a singer. But an accident to Anna, which makes her a mentally deranged and bedridden cripple, forces Berta into the unhappy position of having to marry her sister’s lover in order to find a home for the invalid. When Anna is cured by an operation and is able to understand what has happened, Berta takes her baby son and sets out across the world to find her mother’s people in Prague. There her aunt finds her a home and she falls in love with the aunt’s adopted son. Here the plot becomes complicated and the war adds to the confusion. Miss Peacock makes admirable use of the history of the heroic fight of the Czechs for freedom and independence to paint the scene against which her hero and heroine are thrown, and the tale of their tribulations before happiness comes to them is admirably told.

COLETTE The Married Lover. By “Colette.” T. Werner Laurie Ltd. 254 pp.

It is to be hoped that the publication of Marjorie Laurie’s translation of “Duo,” and the announcement of “The Cat” mean that the works of “Colette,” the clever and more than clever French novelist, whose death has been reported within the year, are to be made available in English. It was “Colette’s” great gift and skill to be able to summarise romantic situations and work out romantic problems with a brevity that had all the precision of wit and none of the fallaciousness of crude psychology. “Duo,” or “The Married Lover,” is a good example of her work, and the translation is competent and easy. ANOTHER SABATINI STORY Chivalry. By Rafael Sabatini. Hutchinson and Co. Ltd. 287 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. This new historical novel by Rafael Sabatini carries the tale of the fortunes of Colombo du Siena, an Italian condottiero of the fifteenth century, Colombo is a likeable fellow from the moment one is first introduced to him, allying the cynical outlook of the business-like soldier of fortune with incongruous notions of chivalry and fair dealing. The author has endeavoured to recapture the glowing and active scene of the Italian peninsula of the times and whether success follows him there or not he has at least created a romantic and lively narrative full of the colour of strenuous and dangerous endeavour. Through it his hero moves surely, strongly and triumphantly. It is a story in the best Sabatini tradition.