NEW NOVELS

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21714, 22 February 1936, Page 17

NEW NOVELS

AND NO BIRD SINGS Picture of Nobody. By Philip Owens. Jonathan Cape. 350 pp. A satirical fantasy, this of Mr Owens, in which he switches into contemporary life the great Elizabethan names of Shakespeare and his stage and tavern companyMarlowe, Kyd, Nash, Green, Old-castle-Falstaff, Bardolph, Pistol, Anne, the Sonnet enchantress, Hall, Field, and so on—embodies them, and remoulds Shakespeare's story and theirs to the form and pressure of these alien times. "Venus and Adonis" is issued in a limited edition from Field's press; "Lucrece" never achieves publication, because Field goes bankrupt, his ruin being hastened by the frauds of Oldcastle. This lying braggart emerges anew as Falstaff, head of the great advertising house of Falstaff, Ltd.; and Shakespeare, who has fought off destitution by devices so mean as looking after cars in the city garages (he who in the spacious days held horses outside the theatres), is helped by Falstaff first to a small post on the "Danish Commercial Guide," edited by Dr. Polonius, and then to a modest prosperity as Falstaff's speech-reviser and sloganmaker. Something of this care Shakespeare owes to Mary Sonnet, who has made herself safe, after the fire and folly of Marlowe's love and Shakespeare's, as Lady Fals'Jff. And literary fame comes in sight, also, as Shakespeare bends to the advice of influential, knowing Rosencrantz and turns "Hamlet" into an historical crime story, "Murder in an Orchard."

The poet does not sing; he is not allowed to. There are pages where Mr Owens rather heavily develops this idea of the hostility of the age to poetry, of its ruthless exaction of its own demands and vulgar tribute to those who bow and serve. Shakespeare, Marlowe, these are names chosen only to arrest; their story is adapted only for the sake of analogical pungency. Mr Owens is not mixing his worlds. But his satire would hold a great deal more force if his "picture of nobody" were the picture of a ?oet. Before it is a bitter thing to see the poet choked, we must believe in the poet. Mr Owens does not make it easy.

DAVID Remember David. By Maud Flannery.

Mcthuen. 284 pp.

Miss Flannery's novel, the second which has recently been published on the life of King David of Israel unfortunately gives an unconvincing account of ,the mental processes of a Hebrew king a thousand years before Christ. Nor is the language in which she sets forth her narrative always attractive. "Sending a trickle of Jehovah, through his soul," is, for example, to say the least, an extraordinary expression. Whether David ever went to Bethlehem to buy sheepdip is doubtful, Miss Flannery notwithstanding. It'is to be feared that her attempts to add realism to the story succeed only in making it ludicrous. We are told that when the Hebrews massacred the Philistines the latter had "a scornful pity for the barbarians who slaughtered them." This is an attitude hardly to be considered probable in an ancient Philistine. It is also hard to credit the statement that, when the triumphant Israelites captured beautiful female Philistines, the conquerors ' became sheepish. The story of the death of Ahitophel \s meant to be tragic, but the author quite unintentionally turns it into a comedy. When Joab was dismissed by David he behaved in a "mild and delicate way." There seems to be no evidence that David's murderous com-mander-in-chief ever assumed behaviour of this kind. It requires not only great learning but much intuitive understanding of ancient modes of thought and action to dramatise them so that the reader feels that the old world lives again. Miss Flannery does not yet possess these qualifications for writing an historical novel. CASTAWAYS Captain Viaud and Madame La Couture. A narrative, mainly transcribed from the letters of Captain V'aud. By Thomm Washington Metcalfe. Ivor Nicholson and Ltd. 206 op. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. Perhaps this is, historically,, the "true and surprising adventure, shipwreck, and distresses" of the hero and heroine. Captain Viaud and Madame La Couture; perhaps not. Mr Metcalfe fails to sav where he found and where exist the "letters of Cantain Viaud," from which he has "mainly transcribed" this narrative. It does not matter much; there are doubt-provoking details in the text; there are still more doubt-provoking illustrations, unaccounted for and unlikely as embellishments of the "original documents] seared and yellowed with age" which the editor is said to have "discovered." Again, it does ! iiot matter. Here is a very fine shipWreck; here is the survival of a mixed company, cast up on a desolate shore; here is its reduction, by frightful stages, to three, the captain, madame, and a negro; and here is the cannibal episode—the sort of thing which Gilbert once tried in vain on "Punch"—that reduced the castaways, struggling through the hostile jungle, to two. Wild beasts prowl and yowl around; insects sting and poison, the vegetation snares and lacerates, the rivers bar and almost overwhelm the two wretches whose disaster it is to lose a fire-making flint and whose salvation to find a turtle or a turkey-hen. Copyist or inventor, Mr Metcalfe has provided a very good horrific story; and no reader will sneer at the rescue from death which is added to the rescue of the living.

A HORRIBLE BUNDLE . A Century of Horror Stories. Edited By. Dennis Wheatley. Hutchinson and Co. 1024 pp. (4/6 net.) Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.

Horrible, blood-curdling, bloodfreezing, shudder-stirring, pulsequickening, pulse-halting, these fifty or more than fifty stories that Mr Dennis Wheatley has collected will make any reader forget and forgive the difference between a century and half a century. More than; a thousand pages, and filled with 1 stories (take every fifth) by Algernon Blackwood, Evelyn Waugh, Arthur Machen, E. W. Hornung, Blanche Kudef, F. Marion Crawford, Wilkie Collins, Ambrose Bierce; Louis Golding, and William Hope Hodgson—this is enough. But it must be added that the last of these names that turn up by chance is signed to three stories; and Mr Wheatley is in the right in giving

this neglected genius three, and three to John Russell, where nojaody else gets more than one.