NEW NOVELS

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25246, 26 July 1947, Page 7

NEW NOVELS

IN ARMS

English Family. By J. L. Hodson. Gollancz. 520 pp. Mr Hodson’s long but never tedious novel is ambitious and very resourcefully addressed to its ambitiop—to depict and animate an English family as it shouldered the war and carried it through to the bitter and glorious end. An English family and, symbolically, the English family, the English people. Because he chose to widen his scope thus, Mr Hodson made his family large enough to distribute over the wide arc of national service—the convoy routes to the north and the Mediterranean, the home front, the air defence of Britain and the air attack on Germany, the Libyan desert, the Normandy landing. There are two excellent reasons why. Mr Hodson is equal to these various and heavy demands. The first is that he saw so much and so many sides of the war himself, and saw as a first-class, trained observer sees. The man who wrote those six war diaries helped to write this novel. And the second reason is that Mr Hodson is not only a good novelist but a good dramatist: the entrances and exits, the change and procession of scenes in this story, are managed by a writer who has practised dramatic construction. Besides. Mr Hodson has taken care to use plenty of the character and the idiom of the north, the smack of which, better than any other writer alive, Mr Priestley not excepted, he knows how to impart to the page. “You’d ha’ thought th’ Owd Chap would ha’ known better nor this.” Sergeant Wilkinson, standing in his waterproof cape on the sodden ground [of the desert] with its pools of water, nodded towards the lightening sky and towards where he imagined God was controlling things. . . . “We ’ad luvly weather for Dunkirk, Ser’n’t,” said Private Moss, as though anxious to be fair. “Dunkirk? That were just a bit o’ boatin’, like.” Better novels of comparable design may yet be written. They will have to be supremely, good. DEATH AT LEYS Miss Pym Disposes. By Josephine Tey. Peter Davies. 220 pp. Suddenly and surprisingly elevated to the status of an expert in psychology, Miss Pym accepted an invitation to lecture at the Leys Physical Training College for young women. Her stay was lengthened by the fatal accident that followed the masterful Henrietta Hodge’s decision to recommend the unsuitable Miss Rouse, passing over the pre-eminent Miss Innes, for the plum appointment at Arlinghurst. Was it an accident? . . This is very nearly a detective story, but Miss Tey has rightly rejected the temptation to make it one. The truth comes out, sad and startling, but exactly predetermined in Miss Tey’s characterisation. What is unusual in this book is its mixture of wit used graciously and wit used for unsparing revelation; and it is an intelligently balanced mixture.

THE HAPPY ISLE Lean with the Wind. By Earl Schenck. T. Werner Laurie Ltd. 339 pp. It may be that Papeete cannot show, and never could show, anything so brave, inconsequent, and uproariously funny as the Durand family, headed by the fat, magnificent Dodo. The happiest reveller of a reader will tell himself, anyhow, that if the Durands are possible, the progress of their adventures is dizzily up the scale from the implausible to the miraculous. They lose their huge racing bet with that financial octopus. Major Duroc, and mortgage the Durand business to pay. . . . and to buy and fit out a schooner for a tressure-hunt to restore their fortunes. They lose the schooner; they find the treasure —irrecoverable; before them is nothing but ruin, embittered by Duroc’s mockery. But Tahiti is the happy isle where the last laugh, with the reader’s blessing, belongs to such as the Durands.

FERNBRAE Second Crop. By Alan Fraser. Angus and Robertson, Sydney; Lothian Publishing Co. Pty. Ltd., Melbourne. The significance of this novel is made explicit on the last page, when Annie stands with her grandson Jimmy, watching the funeral of old John Thomson of Raebyres, the oldest and richest man in this Aberdeenshire farming district, never a day ill till he died in his sleep. . . . “But what’s at the end of it all, Jimmy? He left no bairns. . . . Aye, Jimmy, Raebyres is a bigger farm and a better farm than this . . . but here at Fernbrae we grow stock as good—aye, and better men.” Annie, the farmer’s daughter who married the young shepherd, Jimmy Strachan, and lost him in the first world war, then planned a medical career for her son Robert and lost him twice over—as a London wife drew him away and a desert grave claimed him —is the most carefully studied and impressive character in a very good story. More is seen of Robert; but the constancy of this indomitable but tender Scotswoman shines clearer as she ages.

THE GILMOURS Gltenoon. By Kathleen Balbernie. Staples Press Ltd. 171 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. Descended of the ancient family which had founded and at last lost the dark Highland house of their name, Jean Glenoon was fated to fall in love with Sir Charles Gilmour, now Gilmour of Glenoon, as soon as they met in his Harley Street consulting room. But the shadow of a secret as idark as the house and of its tragedy was to lie between them. This is the story of it, told in a rather high-pitched manner.

SUFFERING DISSECTED Genevieve. By Jacques Lemarchand. John Lehmann Ltd. 128 pp. This novel, translated into limpid English by Rosamond Lehmann, is welcome as an example of the work of a young French writer who has risen high in public and critical esteem; and in France, it may not be too sententious to add, they judge novelists exactingly. The design of the story—a long short story, rather than a novel—is experimental: one of two men in love with the same woman describes the course of their shared but differentiated experience—methodically, comprehensively analysing, “dissecting,” as he says, “a piece of human suffering,” not the sharpest, not the deepest known to him but different from all other suffering in, “touching a man at so many points.” It is part of Mr Lemarchand’s experiment that the woman herself is excluded from the narrative except as she is projected into it through one or the other of her lovers. It is another part of it that, as the method or symbol of dissection lequires. the treatment is studiously intellectual. The reader who wants to sharpen his sense of the contrast between this mode of attack on an essentially emotional problem and traditional modes of actualisation will do well to reread, say, Balzac’s “Honorine” or 150 pages of Stendhal.

ISLAND POET Leviathan’s Inch. By Brian Elliott. Angus and Robertson. 194 pp. Not many novelists have succeeded in representing with conviction the figure and force of a genius, and Mr Elliott is not among the few. His Julian Timbrel—the very name is ♦-rtinous —the poet-recluse of Leviathan’s Inch, an island off the Australian coast, is a philosophical poet, as deeply preoccupied with moral ideas as his master Dante. His influence fulfils his belief, which Browning expressed before him, that the sin which is death is “the unlit lamp, the ungirt loin,” and fulfils it in his awakening of his own disciple, Richard West, from dream to life. The story is readable and often ponderable, without being ponderous; but Timbrel is words, woi*ds, words.

SHORT STORIES I Cannot Go Hunting To-morrow. By Henry Treece. Grey Walls Press. 202 pp. Over To You. By Roald Dahl. Hamish Hamilton. 180 pp. There are those —librarians among them—who like to say that, though readers wolf short stories in magazines, they turn up their noses at them in books. This can’t be true, or publishers would not go on collecting short stories in books. As they do; and it is well that they do. There is not often better value between two covers than there was, for example, in Mr Rhys Davies’s recent collection; and Mr Treece’s and Mr Dahl’s collections also deserve such praise. Their manners and aims are interestingly different. Mr Dahl is a straightforward teller of tales—not by any means to imply that he is ingenuous or crude. But he finds his subjects, for the most part, in the field of action and the character and conduct of unremarkable men—whom he makes remarkable. Some of these are stories of the air war; others, of airmen out of battle instead of in it. And Mr Dahl has humour. Mr Treece, on the other hand, favours the exceptional character and the exceptional situation. (One group of stories is called “Situations.”) The danger into which his predilection leads him is that of over-writing; but he can, and does, write impressively well, best of all in his most sinister vein.

WRITING ON THE WALL The Headmaster. By D. H. Landels. Hurst and Blackett. 160 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.

Mr Landels carries off with spirit and resource his comedy-mystery of school life, in which that eminent philosopher of flagellation, Mr Reginald Smithson, finds his rule and even his post endangered by an undiscoverable scribbler. This satirical genius—boy? master? governor?—adorns the school walls with unseemly and at last scandalous commentaries on the person, character, and private life of the headmaster. The tension and the temperature rise . . . till “Smutty is Going to Propose to Zena”—the new tennis coach—turns from scurrility to promise.

HOSPITAL IN IRAQ Dust of Nineveh. By Mary Kent Hughes. Heinemann. 282 pp. Through the Oxford University Press, Melbourne. Though there is nothing either profound or subtle about this story of the war, which carries a group of nurses to serve in Iraq, Miss Hughes justifies her choice of the setting by making her study of it unobtrusively serve the dramatic interest. That arises chiefly from the love-affair which ends in Marian’s devoting herself, when her lover died in action, to the care of his orphaned children in England.