NEW NOVELS

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22319, 5 February 1938, Page 18

NEW NOVELS

TRAGEDY OF GREED

For L's in the Dark. By Naomi Roy tie Smith. Macmillan and Co. 640 pp. (8/6 net.)

The unusual note prefixed to this novel declares that it is “based on the published reports of a famous trial, and all the characters in it are drawn from life.” Readers able to identify trial and characters have this advantage over the reviewer; they may have the contingent advantage of greater pleasure in the reading. If so, they will be hard put to it to find fit words of praise; for the reviewer's difficulty is not small. Miss Royde Smith’s book is crowded with interest, abundantly alive; there is in it something of that peculiar intensity, dramatic and indeed melodramatic, which was Victor Hugo's; and this is to be felt, particularly, in the force of her presentation of evil. It is a book in which the evil characters—and they are not few—assume that dreadful reality which (it seems) the printed page cannot confine but which threatens to break out from the cage of illusory words into a more dreadful, actual presence. The story originates in a stagey deception - a woman whose weaknesses and virtues are commonplace enough siezes a war-time opportunity to bring forward as her own the illegitimate child of another, in order to make sure of a rich inheritance. From this greedy fraud events develop with horrible logic. Violet Comper is driven to a worse crime by the same motive; she gives in marriage to Lord Trehick the gu 1 who is brought up as her daughtci. and in Trehick's castle in Cornwall the play runs to its tragic close. Not only the unfortunate, charming Francie but her supposed mother and father and a faithful friend arc murdered. Through Trehick his brother. Canon Returner, and their crazv old mother, a hideously wicked trio, Violet's greed works out its extreme consequences in self-punishment and unmerited disaster to the innocent. Summai isC'.i thus, the story sounds like one of old-fashioned, bloody crudity. P c: j haps. It has in fact the depth and fineness of a work of art. STORY OF A RUSSIAN HORSE Tasrllonl’s Grandson. By Peter Shiraeff. Putnam. 291 pp. This novel, which has been translated very fluently from the Russian by Alfred Fremantle, is a thoroughly enjoyable affair. Few New Zealanders, even among students of the turf, are likely to be aware that the sport of trotting was cager.-y followed in Imperial Russia, thougn rather more, perhaps, may at lead have hoard of the famous Oilou breed. The chief centre of the sport was the Moscow Hippodrome; and here Shiraeff opens his story wim a lively picture of stables and tracks and their company of trainers, grooms, dealers, and so on. Chief among them is one Loutoshkin, whose dreams of training and driving a champion of champions promise to come true when the mare Flattery, an Orloff. falls into his hands. But much intervenes before he achieves this triumph, not through Flattery, indeed, but through her colt, by Favourite, the son of Tagiioni. What the Great War did not do the revolution did; it broke up the great stud of the breeder, Bourmin, admirably drawn as a fanatical enthusiast for the Orloff breed, and Loutoshkin lost all trace of Flattery, who became b\ chance the property of the peasant Nikita. How Nikita, with the help of the village veterinarian, saved Flattery from a rascally officials hands; how the veterinarian and the People's Commissary for Agriculture no less, persuaded Nikita to mate Flattery as her own breed deserved; how he and young Syomku brought her colt, Tagiioni s Giandson, from the village up to Moscow to be entered “for the coop’ ; how they were beset by the jackals and tigeVs of the course and were saved; how they found Loutoshkin to train and drive his darling mare’s son. and how Loutoshkin drove to the brilliant victory of his recovered dream this and much more is told in vivid detail, con amore. Vigour, humour, charm: all are here. Shiraeff —he died two years ago—has left behind him a minor masterpiece. TWO NEW ZEALAND NOVELS The Hedge-Sparrow. By C- K. Allen. A 11. and A, W. Reed. 2a6 pp. (75.) A Divorce Has Been Arranged. By Joan Hewett, Duckworth. 290 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. Many readers of Mr C. R. Allens poems and of his novel, “A Poor Scholar,” will be glad to know that he has finished a new novel with a Dunedin setting. The careful and quiet style Mr Allen has led us to expect of him is here again; and again there are the very sensitive, very faithful, casual pictures of New Zealand life.. This time, in “The Hedge-Sparrow,” the life is that o£ several Dunedin families, two in particular, during the late years of last century. To provide a background for the action he wanted in his book Mr Allen explains in a foreword that he has had to do violence to the political history of the Dominion by providing the Dunedin North seat for Dr. Mainwaring, then for John Mainwaring, and then for his opponent, Nicholas Broadbent. But his aim was and the effect has been “to catch a phase of political life in New Zealand.” It certainly also catches something of the nature of the young men and women of the years just before the turn of the century; and as it is a love story, sympathetically told, as well as a tale of politics, it should find many appreciative readers in this country. Miss Joan Hewett’s book is simply a romance of the months that followed the demand for grounds for divorce made by a discontented and selfish wife of her unappreciated husband. Black is black and white is white here; and there is not much to choose between them. AUSTRALIAN YOUTH The Young Desire It. By Scaforlh Mackenzie. Jonathan Cape. 300 pp. Through Angus and Robertson Ltd. The figures that take on the; warmest colours of life in Mr Mackenzie’s novel are the youthful ones, j of whom the chief is the boy Charles | Fox. The significance of the book is to be found in its sympathetic study of Charles’s developing emotional life; and the relationships through which this is traced are those of his friendships at school, with other boys and with the master, Penworth, a character of some abnormality, of his reaction from Penworth into a desperate passion for a girl, and of his guarded, self-suppressed feeling for his mother. In a sense this is a school story: much of its incident is drawn from the routine of Charles's Australian public school. But the sense in. which that is true 1

] is a verv narrow one. Clearly a story I intended to explore an emotional 1 growth cannot avoid an emotional I emphasis. But it is not the excessive 'emphasis either of sentimentality or j of melodrama. ' THE SAINT WINS AGAIN , Thieves’ Picnic. By Leslie Charteris. i Hoddcr and Stoughton. 316 pp. From \V. S. Smart. The scene of this latest adventure - of “The Saint.” Simon Templar bap- | tismally, is in the Canary Islands, where he journeys, on quick sight Sand snatch of opportunity, to plunder i a very pretty villain of a plunderer ! called Graner: and his first exploit jis to rescue from a trio of thugs | a charming girl and her aged uncle. | Old Joris. it turns out, has long been ' Graner’s prisoner and victim, forced | to use his skill in recutting the gems i which are Graner’s favourite form ! of loot; and although “The Saint” has enabled him and his niece to j succeed in an attempt to escape, jJoris’s winning ticket in the SpanI ish Government’s Christmas lottery, worth 2.000,000 dollars, has been ! taken from him by one of the gang. 1 “The Saint,” therefore, has two | prizes to pursue instead of one; and (the pursuit is one of his characterisj tic cx-ploits of daring, nerve, and 1 resource. There is a little more 1 strain in the writing than Mr | Charteris generally shows; but what j of that? ! NOBLE GRANDSON Give Me To-morrow. By Shirley Darby- | shire. Ivor Nicholson and Watson j Ltd. 336 pp. j Miss Derbyshire writes with point j and a sort of scornful affection for j her grand, tireless snob the story of a woman whose whole life was one long contrivance to rise above the status of her tradesman father to noble rank and who could hardly be said to have failed when at last she was able to send to "The Times'' the birth notice of her grandson, heir of the Marquis of Roxton. Alice Jordan could manage nothing better for herself than the modest rise of 'marrying the younger son of a “county” family. For her daughter, however, she planned and fought like a Marlborough, saved like Harpagon. and gambled like Charles Fox; and it is an agreeable irony ' that the success she deserved to win : fell to her by chance. This is an (amusing book, well and closely knit. THE CARBONARI | The Divine Folly. By Baroness Orczy, ' Hoddcr and Stoughton. 313 pp. From W. S. Smart. In a foreword which readers will regard as a liicrary dc- ; vice or an historical note, as ! they choose. Baroness Orczy ‘ explains the process by which ■ she penetrated the mystery of !an old pamphlet about a "Lord Anglais” who joined Orsini in the plot of 1350 against Napoleon 111. This, then, is the story of the two brothers, Matthew and Mark Moreys, and their connexion with Orsini and his attempt to assassinate the Emperor and Eugenic. The portrait of Orsini is vigorous and impressive. | The complications of this strange ad- ; venture, which include the love of ] both brothers for the beautiful I Carole, daughter of another of the ; Carbonari, are intricate and full of | exciting change. The close comes i with Matthew’s return to England. ! bearing the body of the unfortunate 1 Mark, murdered as an informer.