NEW FICTION

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27047, 23 May 1953, Page 3

NEW FICTION

Who Goes Home. By Maurice Edelman. Allan Wingate. 256 pp. Mr Edelman’s second novel gains much and suffers a little from its background, the House of Commons, which the author knows intimately as a member of Parliament. The advantage is that the scene is fresh and in itself interesting. It will be a ' disadvantage if the reader allows this to distract interest from a first rate story. Some may be disappointed that the characters are not actual politicians—so little so, in fact, that Mr Edelman, although a socialist, has made conservatives his most sympathetic figures. This is not a story, then, about real people or real events, but about people who might easily have lived and about events that might easily have happened in an authentic setting, and as such it should be read. Michael Erskine, a promising young Conservative Cabinet Minister, completes a successful deal with the United States and afterwards relaxes unwisely. All goes well until Hendryk Curtis, an American lobbyist, seeks some advantage from the incident. Curtis is an unpleasant fellow, but less unpleasant in his disappointment that Tony Spencer, an English journalist, in his hatred of Erskine. Erskine’s subsequent ordeal and the unexpected tragedy with which it ends are told with compassion and understanding. Mi- Edelman is an economical writer, and a good one. The Human Kind. A Sequence. By Alexander Baron. Jonathan Cape. 187 pp. Alexander Baron is a very talented writer. Since the war he has produced four novels, two war books (“From the City, From the Plough” and “There’s No Home”) and two with a London background (“Rosie Hogarth and “With Hope Farewell”). His new book returns to the theme of war. It is a series of sketches given unity by the recurrence of a group of about six characters and by their chronological order; they follow the war, from the point of view of the ordinary London-born fighting man, from the “Sitzkrieg” to the occupation of Berlin. His observation and the handling of the narrative is excellent in this whole series of varied and vivid tales. There is a Prologue—“ Strangers to Death”—suggesting the carefree quality of London’s youth before the war, and an Epilogue which takes the reader to Korea and another war. The effects of the war, and the dislocations it brought in the lives of both individuals and groups, are movingly and faithfully recorded. The Hills Were Joyful Together. By Roger Mais. Jonathan Cape. 288 pp. This is a stark and highly dramatic first novel about the seamy side of life in Kingston, Jamaica. The characters —a group of negroes, introduced in a list of the “dramatis personae” at the beginning of the story—live in a row of shacks round a common yard. The author knows their life and their quaint language well, and he records their violence as well as their more endearing sides. If his story often verges on the sentimental, it is nonetheless vivid and colourful. The author is a painter as well as a writer. Casino Royale. By lan Fleming. Jonathan Cape. 215 pp. lan Fleming is a brother of Peter Fleming, the well-known author. In this competent first novel he utilises experience gained during the war when he served in Naval Intelligence. It is a Secret Service thriller which opens really brilliantly; in fact, the first 150 pages are as tense, exciting and plausible as one could wish. The scene itself—a Casino on the Riviera —is immediately engrossing. And the situation, which involves a British Agent gambling against a Communist Agent (who has squandered the funds provided for him from Moscow in a disreputable venture and is now desperately trying to win them back at the gambling tables) holds the reader in rapt attention. The girl who enters the story is intriguing, the mysterious and sinister qualities of the Russian organistation called SMERSB which tracks down disloyal agents are suitably suggested, ana the atmosphere ana fascination of the gambling-tables are powerfully con veyed. But the author cannot sustair the remarkable pace and high stan dards he sets for himself. Interes flags when a love-affair is describee with too much prosaic detail, anc then -the narrative takes a common place turn and never regains the “elan” of its opening. But the nove can be recommended for its atmosphere and many remarkable passage: which place it well above the ordinary run of political thrillers.

Jemima. By Oriel Maiet. Hodder and Stoughton. 192 pp. Oriel Maiet is a novelist of considerable charm, sympathy and gaiety. Her new novel tells the story of the 17-year-old daughter of parents who become involved in a scandalous divorce-case. Removed from an academy for young ladies as a possible corrupting influence, and unwanted by either of her parents, the girl is sent off to Paris under the care of a “chaperon” (who turns out to be highly unsuitable) to learn French. All the characters, both English and French, are delightfully sketched in with an irresistible blend of understanding and irony. The situations are by turns comic and near-tragic. And the author shows a delicate insight into the heart of her young heroine who learns, in the course of her summer in Paris, how to love. MRS LORIMER’S QUIET SUMMER (Hodder and Stoughton. 190 pp.) by Molly Clavering is a pleasant and unpretentious novel of family life. Mrs Lorimer, living in a small town on the Scottish borders, is visited by all four of her children and her many grandchildren simultaneously. They provide her with plenty of worries, especially the adults, but all the complications are smoothed out as nicely as can be expected by the time the end of Mrs Lorimer’s far from “quiet summer’’ is reached. A new popular historical novel is WRITTEN IN THE STARS (Museum Press. 319 pp.) by F. Hope Fisher. This tells the story of the wife of Albrecht Durer, the famous German painter of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Frau Durer is usually reputed to have been of a shrewish and nagging disposition, but Miss Fisher, basing her novel on the more charitable hypotheses of some recent biographers, depicts her as a sympathetic and sensitive, if stubborn, woman. Miss Fisher is free to use her imagination in writing this story of the Durer menage, as there is little actual fact to go on, but she appears to have gone to no little trouble to provide an authentic “period” atmosphere for her pleasant and romantic tale.