NEW FICTION

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27191, 7 November 1953, Page 3

NEW FICTION

The Hive. By Camilo Jose Cela. Translated by J. M. Cohen in consultation, with Arturo Barea. With an Introduction by Arturo Barea. Gollancz. Cela is one of the outstanding novelists writing in Spain today. His style in the original is said to be elegant and subtle and full of vigorous metaphor. Some of thi£ is undoubtedly lost in translation, but the outstanding quality of his writing is still apparent. “The Hive” is a novel about life in Madrid with an original technique. It consists of a series of short scenes which touch on the lives of some 160 people. This, Cela declares, is the only way to write a novel Certainly, in his hands, it is a most effective way to write a novel presenting a composite picture of the life of a great modern city. The opening scenes are in a small cafe in Madrid; in a series of brilliant sketches with excellent snatches of dialogue the reader is introduced to the “habitues” of the different tables, the unpleasant proprietress and her staff, the boot-black, the cigarette-seller and the gipsy-child who sings to the clients. Then the scenes' branch out to the life outside the cafe. The chief centre of interest is Martin, an unemployed writer who is thrown out of the cafe, but no one character holds the reader for long. The life of the city itself as it appears to Cela’s vision is more important than any chara .ter or fragment of plot. What Cela sees is mainly the degradation, pain, misery and corruption of the big city. The bleak and comfortless pessimism of his view of life is not as certainly to be ascribed to political events in Spain as Arturo Barea suggests in his introduction. Cela’s spiritual outlook is obviously a complicated one. The few details of his life provided—that he fought on the Franco side in the Civil War, that he has probably suffered from consumption since, and has written a powerful account of a sanatorium for consumptives—and the vivid quality of his writing and depth of compassion revealed in this novel are enough to stimulate curiosity about his other books, which are also briefly described in the introduction.

Until the Phoenix. By F. S. Chang. Gollancz. 310 pp.

This moving novel, written in a style of beautiful simplicity, provides a wonderfully clear picture of the old and the new China. For anyone who wants to understand the human reality and the real meaning behind the news about the Communist victory in China, it i$ the ideal book to read. The first two chapters provide an impression of the traditional life of a landowning family in a remote Chinese village before the coming of the Communists. There is dignity and charm and above all order in this Confucian household. The next section shows what happened when the first Communists came to the village and set about changing the old order. The good-hearted simplicity and lack of sophistication of the villagers at first seem to defeat their slogans and arguments, but soon they succeed in turning man against master and poor against rich, breaking down old loyalties and the old morality. The scene shifts with the escape of the young hero and his wife to Shanghai. Their sufferings are intense in the inflationary period, which together with the corruption and gangsterism of Shanghai is described with wealth of vivid detail. From Shanghai the good and gentle young couple, caught so pitifully in the midst of all these terrifying events, finally escape to Formosa. In Formosa, as F. S. Chang makes clear, there is none of the corruption of Shanghai and in spite of the overcrowding, there is peace and hope enough. The story is worth reading as a delightful and exciting narrative, quite apart from its obvious political interest. .The Joyful Condemned. By Kylie Tennant. Macmillan. 395 pp. Kylie Tennant presents in this book a revealing story of underworld characters in the slums of Sydney during the last war. “The Joyful Condemned” are mostly young persons—juvenile delinquents, so-called—who cheerfully accept the risks of life in the back streets of Australia’s greatest city. Big Rene, the central figure, a girl in her ’teens, young in age but old in experience of her sordid environment—a buoyant, generousnatured, unpredictable creature—presents at once a vivid human character and a challenge to the system that permits the existence of the conditions in which she and her type are nurtured. Not in words, but. by implication, Miss Tennant scathingly denounces the system and half-hearted, fumbling attempts to reform it. Australians might read this book as a reBroach8 roach to themselves and as a spur to lought and endeavour.

Poison in the Shade. By Eric Benfield. Heinemann. 217 pp.

The scene of this imaginatively written novel is a mental hospital. The story concerns two persons of deranged mind, man and woman, who plot in a nebulous sort of way, the destruction by poison—deadly nightshade, to wit—of the people about them. The dominating character is the woman, who fancies herself a sort of Lucretia Borgia, wielding the power of life and death over those about her. The man becomes the almost unwitting instrument of her design; and the hospital authorities have a rare old time porting things out till the woman, over-reaching herself, gives the plot away. This macabre story is cleverly contrived.

The Undefended Gate. By Susan Ertz. Hodder and Stoughton. 252 pp.

Though Susan Ertz has probably over complicated this novel with psychologically maladjusted characters, it still has a quality of reality that makes them believable. The principal character is Beatrice Chadwick, who dearly loves her husband, Walter. Walter’s psychological difficulties stem from what is known as a “mother fixation.” His earlier life has been dominated by his intense love for his beautiful French mother. Though she has died, his mother’s influence remains with him and coerces him into unreasonable demands on the wife he truly loves. This strains the relationship between husband and wife unbearably and leads to an indiscretion (pardonable word) involving Beatrice and a former lover. And so it goes on, the plot working out a somewhat tortuous course with the arrival of a distant relation of Walter’s, a widow with a psychologically maladjusted son. It is all very involved and painful, but Miss Ertz manages to straighten the whole affair out when the adored mother is demonstrated to have been no better than she should have been and after Walter has been engaged in an affair with the engaging widow. THE GOOD AND THE BAD (Hutchinson. 213 pp.) is a well written story by Joan Fleming about a young smalltime crook on the run from the British police. In Paris he meets MarieCeleste, a middle-aged widow with an idiot son. The story of their -relationship is deeply touching, but when the tale branches out into a gruesome murder and a pathetically ridiculous attempt at fraud, it becomes a secondrate crime-story instead of the sensitive character-study it gave promise of being. The theme announced in the title—“there’s so much good in the worst of us,” etc.—thoroughly worked out though it is in the story, does not rescue the novel from banality.