NEW FICTION

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26117, 20 May 1950, Page 3

NEW FICTION

A Voice Through a Cloud. By Denton Welch. John Lehmann. 258 pp. Here is a novel that stands head and shoulders above the ordinary run of novels. The circumstances in which it was written add poignancy to the remarkable quality of the writing; for Denton Welch died at the age of 31. alter enduring 13 years of chronic and painful illness caused by a road accident in which he suffered a serious fracture of the spine. In a brief foreword, his friend. Eric Oliver, described how Welch wrote this novel in the increasingly short interval between the crises of his illness, long after most people in his condition would have given up the struggle and abandoned themselves to the life of the permanent invalid. His novel remains unfinished, just as it lay by his bedside when he died in December, 1948. But this matters little, since the novel does not depend upon the rounding-off of a plot to achieve its effect. Denton Welch had the gift of concentrated intensity of feeling, the natural instinct to see things in terms of images, and the sensitive perception of the finer shades of personality• and mood which mark off the artist from the ordinary man. He was a student of art wHen he had his accident, and the eye of the painter is as evident in the novel as the feeling for language of the born writer. The subject of the novel is autobiographical; it describes. under the thin veil of fiction, his accident and his subsequent life in the closed world of hospitals and nursing* homes. Seldom has such fruitful use been made of bitter misfortune, ’or the devoted passion of the artist triumphed so emphatically over pain and its miserable accompaniments. Faster! By Patrick Bair. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 227 pp. This is a book which probably has a meaning that will remain obscure to most of its readers. It is a fantasy about a nightmare train running endlessly, faster and faster, in circles through a dying countryside. Near the engine are the first-class carriages, occupied by elite passengers, who are served by third-class passengers, living in a ghastly misery of inescapable noise at the back of the train. All of this is probably allegorical—a mad world, perhaps, speeding with no sense of direction, to its own destruction. That Mr Bair writes with masterly power is lhe book’s salvation. The impression of suspense and speed remains with the reader, driving him to look for the next development in a mysterious drama, which ends as it it has begun—in fantasy. The Hounds of Tindalos. By Frank Belknan Long. Museum Press Ltd. 352 pp. Though mystery and horror are not everyone’s cup of tea, those who find pleasure in that sort of thing will not go short if they read this collection of weird stories. The most likeable one in the book for the ordinary person with no taste for the macabre is “The Refugees,” a story of “little people” from Ireland, who pass over to the United States and do queer, mischievous things to the staid lover of an Irish girl. Foortunately he has inherited a spot of Irish blood from a great grandmother, which teaches him how to deal with the situation. None of the other stories is as pleasant as this. Farewell Innocence. By William Glynne-Jones. Werner Laurie. 286 pp. The story of leuan Morgan in this Welsh novel is depressingly familiar in Welsh novels. Although he shows promise at school, leuan is forced by his parents to leave at the age of 14 and enter a steel-foundry, where he is. as usual, cruelly bullied by the older boys, embarrassed by the lewd talk of his companions, revolted by the hard and dirty work, the injustice and inhumanity of it all. Humiliation and hatred threaten to overwhelm him. but a friend encourages him to fight back, to be strong, and to read. He plans to enter the University. Tragedy multiplies when his friend is killed in an accident at the foundry, and the girl he loves becomes a victim of chronic consumption, as a result of the conditions in which she has lived. Nevertheless, in the end he goes forward filled with the faith that the world can be changed if he and others like him use the weapons they have in their own hearts and brains. A novel with such a theme is bound to find a wide public in these times. Scenes From Provincial Life. By William Cooper. Jonathan Cape. 270 PPThis novel is the work of a shallow writer. He tells us—Or, the* “I” of the story tells us—that he is an introvert, but there is certainly nc evidence to prove this claim. Perhaps it is that there is nothing much to look into. We are also told that the heroine has “profundity of soul.” but her soul, too, reaches no further than the shallows in which Mr Cooper himself plays about. As well as being shallow, the novel is slily suggestive, and its subplot dealing with homosexuality will add nothing to the reader’s knowledge of that side of life; one feels that it was only added because the subject is fashionable in contemporary fiction. The main plot deals with a young man who doesn’t want to marry, although he wants his love-affair to continue without the necessity of marriage entering into the matter. Such a subject, in the hands of an author without moral depth, is merely unpleasant. My Time, My Life. By George Camden. J. M. Dent. 254 pp. According to the dust-jacket, this is the “story of the ordinary poor man’s war.” In style it carefully imitates the unexpressive and hackneyed simplicity of speech of the ordinary poor man. Here is a typical example: “Fellows crowd round me and pat my shoulder till I feel choked inside. Fellows I’ve never spoken a word to. Now I wish I had the gift of the gab. If it can make you friends it can’t be a bad thing. Only if it’s used for bad ends.” A whole book of this is a bit tedious arid the sentiments, it‘will be seen, are as homely as the style. Moreover, the sentimentality ’is rank; the characters are always rrfaking “little choking noises” to indicate emotion. There is plenty of class-consciousness (“Pat understands. That’s the beauty of a working-class girl. She’s with you at every hurdle.”), and of class-hatred (“So long as they’ve got their money, a little matter of a war means nothing in their selfish lives.’). In fact, this account of the war as seen from East End London, remarkable though it is as the work of an entirely self-educated working-man. and authentic as a journalistic account of the horrors of war, is neither artistic nor detached enough to be a successful novel. _ .