SOME RECENT FICTION

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 120, 18 February 1928, Page 25

SOME RECENT FICTION

All About Capri. To write a novel describing the life led by the big British and American community at Capri, the quaintly-beau-tiful island near Naples, which was the scene of that now famous story “South Wind,” is inevitably to challenge comparisons with Mr. Norman Douglas, who, by the story just mentioned, and Lv his delightful topographical study “Siren Land,” might be imagined to have made Capri his own. In his new story, “Vestal Fire” (Cassell), so skilled a novelist as Mr. Compton .Mackenzie has, however, succeeded in picturing many new aspects of Capri, and if, in some of its eccentric characters, the author of “Sinister Street” may seem to have attired in new clothes not a few queer figures appearing first in ’’South Wind,” he has given them new temperaments, actions, and ideas, lhe Pap worth-Dixons, the jolly old cafe proprietor, the Rabelaisian Effie Maccadam a variant of the tippling English li.dy of “South Wind,” who, when ‘overcome,” was given to the discarding of her raiment and her defiance ol the Capri police—these and other characters are essentially Douglasion.

But in the bogus French Court Marsac, whose wealth' wins him municipal and police blindness to his vices, and who sets the whole British Colony by the ears, Mr. Mackenzie has created an eminently original, and in many ways verv ug'lv figure. It is somewhat unusual in an English novel to find placed in such prominence a figure who, in his personal traits only too disagreeably suggests memories ol that odious old nobleman, the Comte de Charlus—Mr. Mackenzie must surely have been reading the later volumes of Marcel Proust’s great work. But although without much plot Mr. Mackenzie’s story of the almost epic dispute—over Marsac —which split up Sirenean society into two warring sections, is a vastly amusing effort. As a sequel—bv another hand to the Norman Douglas story. “Vestal Fire” is decidedly amusing—as unlike, thank goodness, as possible as the three very tedious stories in which Mr. Mackenzie described the spiritual diragations of his parson hero. Sundry Stories. Thcie is some good material, not always, however, too well used, hi G. P. ’ Robinson’s “Contrast. A 1 ale of Two Generations” < Duckworth). An English author, and the son and daugte/aie living at Bruges, when the war breaks out. The father, not always being as discreet as he might be in his relations with the Germans, being eventually shot. His son warmly espouses the Belgian cause, and eventually succeeds, with a brother Englishman, in crossing the frontier. Later on, in London, the young man, by this time a promising artist, and his sister Isobel, for a while n professional dancer, see much of post war Bohemian life, thg girl forming on acquaintance with a young foreigner, Torrestro, who is proven to be a.traitor and spv, is arrested, and commits suicide. The narrative is a trifle disjointed, but the way the young people triumph over the obstacles with which they are confronted is sympathetically and well described. From Dymock’s (Sydney) come a couple of American novels, “The Seagal,” bv Kathleen Norris (Doubleday, Page and Co.), and Johnston McCulley’s “A White Man’s Chance” (C. 11. Watt Company), either of which can assure its readers of much pleasant entertainment. Kathleen Norris, from whose pen we have had so many excellent novels, with a Californian background, is quite up to her own high standards in her story of Juanita, who, living with her supposed mother, lhe Senora Espinosa, at the latter’s adobe ranch, suddenly finds herself thrown into the vortex of a much varied life, without home, friends, and bereft of a protectress, but makes her way to sunshine and happiness by dint of sheet personal grit and charm. Another Jarrold book, brief mention only of which is imperative in these all too crowded days, is Catherine I. Dodd's “Three Silences,” portraits and pictures of figures and scenes from old-time family history, a story with many delicately-woven interests, and gracefully-written passages, and containing as quotation headings, sentences and verses testifying to very wide and tasteful literary knowledge on the part of the author. From the same publishers comes an American story, “Prairie Fires,” by Lorna Doone Beers, which reveals with dark realism the struggle between two communities, one agricultural, the other of an encroaching city, two leading characters being a daughter of the soii and her husband, a city banker. The struggle of the producer to hold his own against the greed of the urban financial and business interest is evidenced very strongly in a well-plan-ned and vigorously-written story of life in a typically prairie farming district in South Dakota.

A recent aildtion to the new long list of novels of the Wild West, in which that redoubtable . young lady, Connie Morgan, appears, is to be found in Mr. James B. Hendryse’s story, “Connie Morgan in the Cattle Country” (Jarrolds), in which there is the usual admixture of stirring adventure and pleasant love-making, which are usually to be found in this class of fiction.