NEW NOVELS

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22081, 1 May 1937, Page 17

NEW NOVELS

MORE OF JUAN

Juan in China. By Eric Linklater. Jonathan Cape. 383 pp. Thr» immense success of "Juan in America"- was an irresistible demand on Mr Linklater to take up the story where he had, with artful carelessness, broken it off. He has done it, and it is impossible to be sorry; there are things so good—rich, diverting episodes, characters and conversations of extravagantly generous fullness—in this shorter sequel. But it is impossible, also, not to recognise that it has not the opulent spread and variety of the first work, and that the imaginative energy which kept that so continuously alive and on the move is here intermittent. Juan goes to China with the Kuo Kuo who graces the last pages of "Juan in America" and for love of her involves himself in war and politics. He is not extricated until, at,the very end, he receives the poor reward of a chance shot in the thigh for a victory he .has just very absurdly enabled the Chinese to win over the Japanese outside Shanghai; and by that time all is over between him and Kuo Kuo, and he may very well go home. In between, we find the excellent entertainment of Juan's adventures with Hikohoki, a Japanese jack-in-the-box, with Masha and Vary a. the lovely Russian Siamese twins—who threaten almost more trouble to Mr Linklater than to Juan—with Harris, the war-corres-pondent, with Rocco, the gunman, now General Wu's military adviser, with the horse-coping, art-dealing. Mr and Mrs Fannay-Brown, and above all with Flanders, a modern Falstaff, like him in prodigious size, in patched sentiment and honour, in magnificent, comic eloquence. Flanders is the best creation, the most abundant and self-impos-ing, in the book. Only one other romantic affair varies the history of the beginning, development, and close of that with Kuo Kuo; and if the reader is not to wolf the book but to seek out its wisdom—of which there is no little—he will find some of it stowed in the brief episode of Harriet. There is no need to say more, except that Mr Lihklater's virtuosity as a writer is tremendous. The invention and verbal skill of Juan's philosoo* 'c exercises and Flanders's prodigious speeches, for example; are brilliant. AWAKENING OF A FATHER Candle Indoors. By Helen Hall. Cob-den-Sanderson. 320 pp. In most family chronicles the psychological scheme shows the fixity .of idea and character that marks the older generation and exhibits the strains and conflicts that develop as the younger generation refuses to stand still and accept. Miss Hall's scheme is different and its interest is well explored. She places Arnold Carlton suddenly in A position where he must fail, even in his own eyes, if he does not take up a responsibility he has always selfishly, indolently, gracefully ignored—the responsibility of knowing his children and caring for them. His wife died: Then earthquake-sudden, the stability was gone, the permanence was gone .... She should have told me, tie shouted to himself, and anger like the November wind rattled through his bewilderment. The children were hers, she wanted them! She wanted the house out here in the country. If she knew she bad to die .... No use. He couldn't get at Candace. He never had been able to. She'd taken only a further step into impregnability. But this

step had destroyed the house, the life in it.

His first approaches are false. He makes blind errors, because he knows himself as little as Frances, Bill, and the young Candace. The progress is slow and difficult, because it is the progress of a rnan learning his own heart and repairing lost years; but it is made. This is not a book for a gallop of reading; but its texture is close and continuously interesting. VALLEY OF RESCUE Perilous Sanctuary. By D. J. Hall. George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd. 292 pp. Hick Bowles, in whose brute hardihood survived, against all experience," a touch of finer spirit, fled from his crime of murder in Texas into the" desert. Don Santiago Ramos found him and in his remote home of San Bartolo brought him back to strength. But much more happened to Bowies than physical rescue. In this lonely place he encountered for the first time two things strange to him: the all-conquering faith of a religious brotherhood, Los Hermanos Penitentes, and especially their faith in the virtue of pain to expiate sin, and, within himself, a transforming love that expelled self and supplanted his only pride. Bowles escaped the.world he had known, the self he had known. These hours with her were a fact, a certainty .... There was in them almost that sense of eternity which is the mind's refuge from the imprisoned, finite body. He had created for himself a world no more impossible than that which surrounded him. Less so, for he believed in it. How it might end was as inconceivable to him as is the idea of death to a small child. i The end came through his being betrayed to the state troopers by the farmer Miguel and through the revelation that "faith is greatest, that to give is all"—the last words he heard Catalina speak. To be more explicit would be unfair to author and reader alike. The "Evening Stan-' dard" has named this its book of the month, and has unquestionably chosen a fine and strong piece of work.

THE DRUGGIST'S DAUGHTERS The Sisters. By Myron Brinig. Cob-den-Sanderson. 608 pp. (8/6 net.) The name of Myron Brinig is almost unknown in New "Zealand, surely; and as surely it ought not to be. The jacket quotes Arnold Bennett as having said of Brinig's first novel, "Singermann," that it was "about a thousand miles ahead of the average novel." He has written several since. This one is superb. Mr Brinig is an American; his scene is American; and within the compass of a story which follows the marriages of the three daughters of a Montana druggist he spreads it between New York and San Francisco. But the truth of Mr Brinig's art admits no limitation from such a description. Louise, Grace, Helen, and their husbands—these are living creatures, through whom we see life making sense, even if it is the 'sense of a piercing doubt or question. Louise plunged, when she ran away with a journalist; and the earthquake and fire of San Francisco are only the external symbols of a personal ordeal which tested her spirit. The strength of Grace is the subtler sort, which expresses itself in balance and understanding and action which seems to have the humorous Tightness of instinct rather than of cold calculation. . So that her success in dealing with the situation produced by her husband's childish infidelity is delightful to watch. The third sister, Helen, the only trivial one of the three, is equally well drawn in her shallowness and instability—a woman who cannot guide herself and evades guidance. Mr Brinig s book is long but never languishes.

CHANTAL Child of Light. By Mrs J. L. Garvin. Jonathan Cape. 288 pp. The history which Mrs Garvin relates is essentially one of spiritual movement, though it has to be traced and measured, of course, in the actions and reactions of the material world. There, indeed, is its defect; for the vital connexion between the inner story and the outer is not ali ways clear. More than that, the ! want of connexion, the contradiction even, is sometimes perplexing. Mrs Garvin probably means us to apply the title phrase to' two characters, centrally, though it is one which ought to be borne in mind in the interpretation of even the minor figures. Of these two central characters one, Pamela Cook, called Chantal, never lets go her faith and its vision and so both are enlarged and her peace, after the storms and tribulations of a great part of her life, is secure. The other, Manella, who begins in the faith to which she leads Chantal, is disturbed in it and finally lets go her hold. The events which strengthen Chantal and shatter Mariella are interconnected, largely: marital and family distresses which. Mrs Garvin describes with a detached insight but without the coldness of detachment. Yet it is. here that the reader—perhaps because unconsciously he struggles against detachment—is mclmed J:o doubt Mrs Garvin's word and think that he knows .Chantal better than she does. The writing is good but a trifle limp. , YOUNG QUIXOTE The Porch. By Richard Church. J. C. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. 414 pp. It is not too much to fancy that Mr Church has half-carelessly, halfthoughtiully caught in his hero's name, John Quickshott, an echo of an immortal one. A solitary, imaginative, dreaming, unworldly youth, with the strange inner arrogance of his age and type, breaks into life as a cadet in the Customs and Excise Department and his immediate environment is that of Billingsgate. Here he is sure of the daily rubs and knocks which fret a dreamer into discontented wakefulness or rouse him to the effort which achieves a harmony between the truth of dream and the truth of reality. But- Mr Church does not engineer cruel and pointless collisions. He is gentle with his young Quixote as.he deserves and deals him no unfair blows. John's associates are a company drawn with touches of fantasy as well as realistic humour and with a serious penetration that discloses not only the sadness, the ugliness, of cramped, starved lives but the fierce courage and the kindness that survive in them. John's principal exercise in Quixotry is his championship of one Mouncer, whom he will nurse and sustain through difficulties which have turned Mouncer into an ineffectual rebel but have left him still a poet; and it is the irony of his mingled success and failure that teaches John most and develops in him the underlying strength and wisdom of the innocent dreamer. It may bo* that Mr Church designs to take John beyond the porch of new life. If so, one more long history is well begun. The recommendation of the Book Society is justly given. _ .