NEW NOVELS

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25935, 15 October 1949, Page 3

NEW NOVELS

Reviewed by H.L.G.

DISILLUSIONMENT Lost Illusion. By Freda Utley. With an Introduction by Bertrand Russell. Allen and Unwin. 237 pp. Most people have by now lost all their illusions about Stalin’s Russia. for those who still cherish any scraps of faith that there is anything in the U.S.S.R. remotely resembling freedom, justice or equality, or for those who gloomily shake their heads and say, “We do not know; we cannot find out the truth about Russia,’ this sincere and moving book, full of factual information and great personal tragedy, should finally clinch the question once and for all. An English Communist, former scholarship-holder at the London School of Economics, Freda Utley married a Russian and went to live behind the Iron Curtain, believing that the hope of the world lay in Moscow. She worked for many years in responsible positions and lived with the Russians the life they lived. Disillusionment quickly grew upon her, but. though she still had her British passport, she did not leave Russia, because of her husband. He was finally arrested by the NKVD for no ascertainable “crime,” and disappeared among the millions who inhabit the slave-camps of the U.S.S.R. No appeal, either official or unofficial, launched from within Russia or from England after her return, had any effect.

Documenting her every assertion from personal experience, she emphasises the gigantic inhumanity of the Soviet regime, the starvation, misery and terror in which the ordinary people live (in glaring contrast to the luxury enjoyed by the higher Party members). During the best years of Stalin’s regime, she says, “the standard of life of the mass of the Russian people was lower than under the Tsars.”

For the Western world, the only hopeful fact which emerges from her whole picture of Soviet Russia is the colossal inefficiency of the Communist system, with its rigged production figures: the pervading atmosphere of fear, mutual distrust, and cynicism brought about by the constant purging of key personalities in industry and administration; and, of course, the inability of the workers to produce at a high rate because of their low standard of life. GUILTY AND INNOCENT Charade. By Edita Morris. Gollancz. 176 pp. This novel is a passionate outcry against war and the types of human blindness which lead - to war. The charming and gay are guilty because they are irresponsible, the intellectuals who live only in the past are guilty, the “mothers” who feel a narrow passion only for their nearest and dearest. and. above all, the “Nazis” with their twisted emotions and aggressive hatred for their fellow-men. Against these types. Edita Morris sets a piti ful and magnificent picture of the victims of war who are not blind, but see clearly; the children, the maimed and the “lunatics.” The novel is set in Poland on a ruined baronial estate with groups of homeless refugees drifting through it, a fitting symbol of our times. •

AMERICAN TRAGEDY Miss Lonelyhearts. By Nathanael West. With an introduction by Alan Ross. Allen and Unwin. 116 pp. Here is an American classic of the ’thirties which is receiving wide recognition at present. It is a very short novel, told with a poetic economy and intensity. “Miss Lonelyhearts” is a journalist who conducts a column oi advice to the readers of a newspaper. Gradually he sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, that they are inarticulate expressions

of genuine suffering. He is filled with despair at his own helplessness, and disgust at the various palliatives he can offer, and is forced to examine the values by which he lives and to grapple in earnest with the problem of human suffering. He finds no answer and no escape except in a sort of pessimistic Messianism, but this, too, culminates in a tragedy of misunderstanding.