CONTINENTAL NOVELS

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27664, 21 May 1955, Page 3

CONTINENTAL NOVELS

Flesh and Blood. By Francois Mauriac. Translated by Gerard Hopkins. Byre and Spottiswoode. 190 pp.

We are Utopia. By Stefan Andres. Translated by Cyprus Brooks. Gollancz. 105 pp. To the imposing list of Mauriac’s novels in the collected English edition is now added an early novel published in 1923 ( La Chair et le Sang”), which has not previously been translated. It is a characteristic work in that it describes the power of the flesh with tremendous force, but opposes to it the virtue of renunciation. The central story concerns a young seminarist who has abandoned the priesthood because of unsuitability of temperamentthe flesh is too insistent. He returns to the home of his father, who is a bailiff on a large estate in the Gironde and falls in love above his station in . life with the daughter of the new owner of the estate. May is a timid and somewhat bloodless creature to whom renunciation does not come too hard. She briefly responds to the seminarist's passion, but upon finding that her secret is observed, quickly allows herself to be pushed into marriage with a limited young man of her father’s choice. It is suggested that, after a period of learning resignation during which she changes from the Protestant to the Catholic faith, the girl then finds deep satisfaction within . this unpromising marriage. Indeed the picture of May with her young husband on the second morning of their honeymoon is one of the few happy pictures of mutual love in Mauriac’s works. But unfortunately it does not entirely convince; nor does it move the reader deeply, for both renunciation and resignation have come too easily. The picture of the young seminarist, however, in the grief of his abandonment, is very movin'* There is almost a touch of sadism in the way Mauriac writes of his final discomforture in witnessing May’s married happiness. The flesh must be punished, perhaps almost hated. In the sub-plot, which concerns only lust, it can be openly hated. No-one excels Mauriac in conveying the barrenness and destructive power of lust, and he does it in this novel as brilliantly as anywhere. Edward— r the brother of May—who is a sceptic •as* incapable of love as of religious belief, brings about his own destruction when the love-affair he has planned for his pleasure and thinks to break off when he chooses, suddenly becomes necessary to him—to save him from boredom. Unable to extricate himself like his sister through a conversion, he commits suicide. Again, the denouement does not quite convince; the character is wrenched to suit the idea The characterisation in this novei is as complex and penetrating as always in Mauriac, and .the figures of evil as repulsive and remorselessly drawn. In spite of a certain harshness and aridity in his vision of life, more perceptible to English readers as more, of his novels appear, Mauriac remains pre-eminent among modern European novelists. » Mr Andres’s outstanding short novel is regarded as one of the best to have appeared in German since the war. Catholic m inspiration, it deals with some of the central facts of our times, when men have dreamed of Utopia and found mainly violence and terror instead. Stefan Andres seeks to concentrate in one brief but appalling incident—which takes place during the Spanish Civil War, but might have had a dozen other settings—all the atrocities and mass murders that Europe has known in this century, and all the b°th of the victims and the perpetrators whose consciences will not leave them in peace. “AH our violence has come to the surface and is raging itself out,” is his comment, spoken through Paco the central character, “and all our indecision, our weakness and fear of anything unusual, even our fear of bloodshed. For SJS® of ,as had used th e knife at the ngnt moment —but, comrades, let us surrender to God. God is the judge and God is merciful. The Pl°t of the novel is simple and unforgettable, stripped of all inessentials. Paco, a renegade monk, is imprisoned with 200 other prisoners of war in the same cell in the Carmelite monastry, where he once spent his novitiate and used to trace a map of Utopia from the damp-stains on the ceiling. The lieutenant in charge of tne guard, who has been guilty of the most heinous crimes against monks and nuns during the siege of the mon- . astery insists that Paco confess him. Though the means for his escape lie close to hand, does not take them, but accedes to the lieutenant’s demand. Together with aH the other prisoners, he is then executed at the lieutenant’s orders (which derive from headquarters “higher up”), conscious oi and acquiescing in his own approaching death, kissing his murderer P e fore T he dies, and speaking the genera t, absolution to his feHows as the maejfine-gun opens fire. The stages ° r ,<_ aco , s mental progress toward the sublimely detached and infinitely compassionate state of mind he reaches at the end are not altogether clear or convincing, partly because the character *s more of an abstraction than a human being. But his meditations “en route on the problems of sin and guilt, and on the nature of truth and freeOom, the ideal and the real, are full of suggestions of profundity. . And the fearful irony of his situation as wen as the mounting tension of the novel must leave every reader shaken. as a novel of ideas, which makes Sj v^c, ,, u ? e of symbolism, “We are diction. a W ° rk ° f