NEW FICTION

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27576, 5 February 1955, Page 3

NEW FICTION

ADRIAN AND JONATHAN, by Richard Martin (Hodder and Stougnton. 287 pp.) is the story of a friendship. Adrian and Jonathan are, even as schoolboys, obviously different types, but they manage to sink their differences sufficiently to form a friendship and a business partnership. Their enterprise grows from small market venture to an international concern, and the two men develop with it. The events of the second war make clear how different their characters are. Attempting the delineation of two complicated people is an ambitious venture. Mr Martin is more successful with Adrian, the less subtle, than with Jonathan, whose idealism is not so successfully conveyed. But there is a good deal of insight in some of the minor characterisations. PRINCESS CHARLIE, by Jan Laing (Werner Laurie, 255 pp.), is a romanticised version of the life of Charlotte Stuart, natural daughter of the Young Pretender and Clementina Walkinshaw. This girl, hurried away from her violent and difficult father when she was seven, lived in obscurity in a French convent with her mother, who regretted the man with whom she had found it impossible to live, though her feelings towards him remained unchanged. When Charles Edward’s legal marriage broke down and he faced a lon<gy old age he sent for his daughter to keep him company, and bestowed on her the title of Duchess of Albany. Miss Laing has made extensive use of dairies and letters to give her narrative an authentic tone, and she makes real people out of her little fragment of history. Her story is slight in its treatment of emotion, but she does convey something of the sadness of the story, and of the pathetic decay of the Stuart legend, as the once adored young prince sits drinking himself to his end in exile. THE LEOPARD’S COAST. By Ruby Ferguson (Hodder and Stoughton. 351 pp.) is the story of a woman dominated by a passion for a house. Geraldine le Chantain is a daughter of one of the oldest families on the small island in the English Channel where she lives. Her devotion to the family’s old and lovely house becomes an obsession so much stronger than her ordinary love that it consumes her energy and warps her judgment. Her story/ is linked with that of another island family, the Marroys, and of an orphan boy. Louis, who grows up with the le Chantains. This melodramatic story has its improbable moments, but most of it is surprisingly credible. The tension relaxes to something of an anti-climax in the last chapters, but the scenes set in the island have vigour and life. RAIN AND THE RIVER by John Atkins (Putnam 202 pp.) is a story of contemporary life in an English village. It tells of the people who live there and the happenings of their daily life as they appear to an outsider, John Atkins, who has come to live there. There are the troubles of the village cricket team, the disputes over the war memorial. Under the minor turbulences of everyday life an unsuspected tragedy is building itself. Mr Atkins has a promising theme and he is a careful observer of detail, but the book somehow lacks life. The fault lies probably in characters who are types rather than individuals, and who lack sufficient colour of their own to give momentum to the story. An exception is Mrs Turner, a woman who is finally driven to suicide by her daughter’s difficulties and her own. The book is more successful as a documentary on the English village in the 1950’s than as a novel. VALE OF TYRANNY by Suzanne Butler (Hodder and Stoughton 252 pp.) is a competent and ably written novel that without achieving any particular merit or distinction, still manages to tell its story with force and sensibility. Thorn Drayton is born in a valley in the Welsh Marches in the mid-eighteen hundreds. Her life is dominated and twisted by her love for her brilliant but extremely Unpleasant cousin Rhys, an infatuation that persists through two marriages of convenience. The characters are perhaps rather larger than life but the author gives them reality and earns acceptance for them. THE CARELESS PEOPLE, by Helen Fowler and Bernard Harris (Angus anc| Robertson, 211 pp.) is a study in guilt. Esther Southey and Martin Sloane wait in an Australian river resort for their secret meeting. Inevitably, since they both have rather mote than the usual feelings of conscience, both are tense with guilt and fear. An accident to Martin precipitates a crisis and brings them both to a feeling of renunciation. The book has only the one incident in it. For the rest, it is an analysis of states of mind; first as Esther waits for Martin, and then as he goes to her. This part of the book is extremely well done; in particular the picture of an oversensitive and tense woman is a piece of writing of rare observation. The book is much less convincing in the second part. The thesis of guilt destroying passion is reasonable enough, but it happens altogether too easily and never balances the intense feeling that the opening chapters suggest. One of the best features of the book is the satisfying way in which the authors use their extremely fine description of the country and the wide scenery of the river valley to heighten the emotional effect of the narrative.