NEW NOVELS

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24820, 9 March 1946, Page 5

NEW NOVELS

SCENES OF WAR (i) Desert Episode. By George Greenfield. Macmillan. 142 pp. Captain Greenfield’s story, the them** ‘h Whl w- E 1 Alam ein, has received Fiction bll J?rt rS , Centenary Award tor I? !f 18 honestl y designed n’„ Hls d esign calls tor the soluB??tUh V™. PF obl ems: to show how-a Eli bat } allon prepared for this dHh!n and foUght “ and what its conations were, and to show how individuals prepared themselves for it and ♦u SUe J« CCC ? rding to their nature. And the difficulty of the dels*t° make the two solutions fulfil SE?n Other ’ saptain5 aptain Greenfield has not mas . te . r ed it: the complexities of laid °P en and its confused course elucidated with steady skill, the men are seen in glimpses, sharp enough but superficial. H!l e a J.?i ere + stS j O / the “episode” and of sub * ctors tend to separate in plane and

Transit Visa. By Anna Seghers. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 260 pp.

If Miss Seghers did not see and share tne sort of experiences out of which this book is built, shje has used a remarkable assimilative and imaginative s 7u l ln working on the evidence of others. The scene is Marseilles, after the collapse of France filled the city with a host of refugees, of a dozen nationalities, scrambling for escape. They wanted a ship; they needed correct papers of identity, passport, ticket, transport visa from some neutral consul . and in Vichy’s Marseilles the normal comedy of official" process and delay was cruelly, ludicrously exaggerated, elaborated, drawn out. New motives and fears, new regulations, new subterfuges and “channels.” new problems of life and death, concentration camp or haven .... Against this background Miss Seghers traces the fantastic, fatalistic story of an antiNazi German, who had escaped from Pans with a dead man's papers. Its irony threads with curious lucidity the grim pattern of circumstances.

Six of Them. By Alfred Neumann. Hutchinson. 246 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. A Swedish critic quoted on the jacket ranks Neumann beside Thomas Mann. If that judgment seems excessive, on the evidence of this novel alone, it may partly be because the translator, Anatol Murad, has not wholly freed his English idiom from the constraints of German construction. Within a few months of the Munich students’ rising against Nazism—a movement which only narrowly failed to produce its planned sequel throughout the ReichHerr Neumann began to write this elaborate fictionary reconstruction of it. [ln factual outline it corresponds very closely with the summary narrative, “Seven Were Hanged,” recently reviewed here.] It is enough to say that the book is deeply impressive and chiefly so because the character of the revolt is traced in the antecedents of the conspirators, whose stories reveal Nazism as their eyes were opened to it and their spirits armed against it. (iv) The Problems of Lieutenant Knap. By Jiri Mucha. Hogarth Press. 158 PP. Mr Mucha, a Czech writer, who seems to have found an excellent translator in E. Osers, for this collection of short stories, is to be recommended to every reader who wants to know more about Czechoslovakia—more than works of reference tell or can tell. All, in one way or another, picture Czech resistance, its character, the sources of its strength: all succeed in this, peculiarly, by devices which carry the i eader, eye, head, and heart, back from the country in travail to the country at peace. They would not do this if they were not, as stories, good stories. (v)

(i) Road to Victory. By A. Beck, etc. Hutchinson. 174 pp. (ii) On the Forward Fringe. By Alexander Beck. H.utchinson. 236 pp. (iii) The People Immortal. By Vaseili Grossman. Hutchinson. 120 pp. All through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.

In this group of books Russian authors very well exemplify the quality of their patriotic service. It has in fact been organised as such. Sometimes, as in a few of the 12 stories in “Road to Victory,” the impress of organisation, even of propaganda, is obvious, and artistically damaging. The best, like Beck’s “On the Forward Fringe” or Golovanevsky’s “Ominous Is the Dnieper,” well as thev served a war-time purpose, are first-class stories by any test. In “Road to Victory” only part one of “On the Forward Fringe” is printed; the complete work, under the -same’ title, is even more to be praised. The stopr concerns the defence of Moscow in 1941. As a piece of dramatised history it has extraordinary force; but it has subtlety and depth as well, as it turns to the character and relations of officers and men in a personal ordeal. Grossman’s “The People Immortal” is the finest achievement of all, because he has clearly found himself “possessed” by the philosopher Bogatev. who, turned soldier. inspires his regiment to prodigies of endurance on retreat and against the Germans’ encirclement. Grossman has a delicate pathos, for instance, which sets him apart from his colleagues. Readers will relish in all, or most of them, the play of a humour which does more to liken the British and the Russian characters than anything else. THE KILLER Bedelia. By Vera Caspary. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 174 pp. Remember those off-the-track stories by Francis Iles, in which the killer was known from the start? Miss Caspary’s method and success are, like his, first-class. The process by which Charlie Horst is convinced against his will that his wife is a multiple murderess. and that he is the next victim in her business-like routine, is one the reader shares in thrilling suspense. What is more, Miss Caspary makes Bedelia and her motive credible without resorting to psychological abracadabra. SAROYAN Dear Baby. By William Saroyan. Faber and Faber. 108 pp. These 20 stories by one of the handful of American masters of the short story exhibit the astonishing versatility and flexibility for which he finds scope within a narrow form and an essentially austere control of it. All the opportunities and effects of the well-machined plot—Saroyan rejects them. Enough for him. a boxer who wins the championship because he fights as if nothing matters, because his wife is dead and he can’t forget; enough for him. an old man pampering a bird back to life, then letting it out into the winter cold again, to live or die. because that is its will; enough for him, three pages to abridge the vast space and variety and past and present of the United States, as a car swoops belittlingly across them.