NEW NOVELS

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 25046, 30 November 1946, Page 6

NEW NOVELS

FANTASY A Voyage to Arcturus. By David Lindsay. Gollancz. 248 pp. When it was first published 25 years ago, Mr Lindsay’s novel sold about 600 copies, and the rest of a small issue was unloaded at remainder prices; but ever since it has been remembered, praised, discussed by some of those who read it, it has been sought and bought until the market is bare of secondhand copies, and here it is, launched again. . . . And, with the faults of a writer who used words with a kind of dogged heaviness and never deviated into humour, except unconsciously, it vindicates its loyal admirers. Strangest of all, Mr Lindsay’s stiff and awkward style, which might have been expected to jolt fantasy into the road, carries it with increasing sureness straight forward to conviction. This story of incredible adventures in another world takes a firm hold of the reader—if it does not alienate him at once—and. it does so, of course, because, whatever else Mr Lindsay fails in, he never fails in inventive resource and in the power to connect and develop, which is eyen more than invention. It is misleading, however, to refer to “incredible adventures” without going on to say that they are encountered in what is a philosophical quest before it is a physical one. Mr Lindsay’s interest m the universal problem of good and evil generated this story and its now clear, now puzzling, purpose. BEYOND THE BATTLE The Dreamers. By J. Bigelow Clark. Harrap. 304 pp. Midway through the war, on a Mediterranean islet, an Englishman, a German (no Nazi), two Americans, and two Italian girls still lived their lonely, peaceful life, beyond the battle, and, counting it no concern of theirs, were not divided by it. But the Germans landed a small garrison and made a submarine base of the little haven; and a British intelligence officer followed. So harsh realism broke in on the dreamers —Mr Clark makes it harsh enough, too —and turned them into men and women who must choose and act. This excellent story has a good deal more in it than the components of a thriller.

SUGAR PLANTATION The River Road. By Frances Parkinson Keyes. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 339 pp.

Between Baton Rouge and New Orleans the road of Mrs Keyes’s title runs for 150 miles along the Mississippi and through an immense area of sugar plantations. Her story concerns one such estate, the heir to it, his family, and the bride he married when he returned from the First World War. Merry Randall was “only a typist”: Gervais d’Alvey, a man of breeding and property. The family was dismayed; but how right Gervais was Merry thoroughly well proved—especially when the sugar slump threatened pride and property alike. Mrs Keyes’s story glitters rather less than some she has written, but is more substantial than almost any other, and as a social-economic picture of the south is rich in colour and precise detail. The promise of a sequel beams on the last page.

NANTUCKET DRAMA The Manatee. By Nancy Bruff. Golden Bough Publishing Co.. Melbourne. 256 pp. Through Oswald-Sealy (N.Z.). Ltd. This novel, which sold 100,000 copies in the United States in six weeks, has all the makings of a tense and terrific film, and they are not being wasted. James Mason, it seems, has gone to Hollywood to star as Jabez Folger, the Nantucket whaler —“harsh to all, impatient with anything that hinders my wants, lonely, cruel,” whose veins fill with sweet agony when he indulges his cruelty, whose God is in the black heart of the storm, the jaw of a shark, the rip of lightning, and in other places defined by his own windy rhetoric and singular experiences. Folger’s marriage to the tender Piety, his ruin, and his liberation, at last, from the devil that had possessed him from boyhood will make the celluloid sizzle. CASSANDRA

Palladian. By Elizabeth Taylor. Peter Davies. 192 pp.

Miss Taylor’s second novel, good as “At Mrs Lippincote’s” was, marks a long advance upon that, notably as she shows a firmer grasp of theme and a more economical control of its evolution. And such advances are not common, as most novel-readers will agree, remembering the promise of many a first novel and the comparative flatness of the successor Miss Taylor sends her heroine, Cassandra, to take a post’ as governess with a country family, living in an atmosphere of suspense and anxiety which the decline of materia) fortune only begins to explain. Miss Taylor admirably conveys this, as much by innocent and charming contrast—for example, in the episodes of Cassandra’s teaching her pupil Latin and learning Greek from her pupil’s widower father—as in direct suggestion of the sense of evil impending and in the process of its revelation and fulfilment. This is a novel to be strongly recommended, and Miss Taylor a novelist to be remembered. FRAGONARD’S ASSISTANT Madame Benoit’s Secret. By Charles Lascelles. Faber and Faber. 222 PP. Feminine readers will trace with special interest the progress of JeanLouis Renaudot from a bedraggled French farmyard to the world of fashion as the associate of Fragonard, the best man-dressmaker in London. He married Fragonard’s daughter, prospering in love as in business; but mystery flung its sinister shadow across this prosperity, and it lies there long enough to give a ight novel the turn it needs before it ends as it should.