HISTORICAL NOVELS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 31, 5 August 1939, Page 20

HISTORICAL NOVELS

SOME RECENT FICTION

Historical novels are now having a great vogue. Amongst the latest is "The House of Travelinck/' by Jo van Amers-Kuller, which is colourful and crammed with incident and suspense. The ferment of the French, Revolution caused,unrest in many another country; not least, in Holland. Laui-ens van Travelinck was one of the most'important, figures in the Holland which saw the fall of the French Monarchy, and his eldest son, Dirk Egbert, was intoxicated by the new spirit of Liberalism and reform which issued from revolutionary France. This novel tells of how he played.his part in.Holland's rising against the rule of the House of Orange; how he became military leader of the young Radical movement, the Patriots; how the Patriots made their bid for freedom, and lost, and how Dirk with his sweetheart Anna Donkers sought safety in France. The Republican armies, however, invade Holland, Dirk among them, and at the- last he returns in triumph to Amsterdam. The repercussions of the French Revolution on the Low' Countries are new and fascinating ground for historical fiction. Sieges and the sack, of cities, skirmishes and battles, political >; intrigue and the private emotional conflicts of Dirk and his family, of Age arid the established order against Youth, and the spirit of change, make a dramatic and unusual story. The background of the wealthy Dutch cities of the eighteenth century, and the violent life of Paris under the Revolution, ' provide an abundance of colourful and exciting scenes. - :

In "The Gladiators," Arthur Koestler, author of "Spanish Testament," elevates to the height of a great tragedy the story of the Slave War, that rebellion of a group of gladiators and underdogs led by Spartacus which for two years, B.C. 73-71, turned parts of Italy into chaos. Beginning with a disturbance in an inn on the Appian Way, the gladiators' revolt moves from success to success. Malcontents and refugees swell their numbers, and though they are besieged in a crater on Mount Vesuvius, by a surprise sally, they massacre the legionaries who surround them. Spartacus, a combination of dreamy idealist and practical revolutionary, decides to establish a Sun State, a brotherhood of slave towns, in southern Italy. The rest of the book is concerned with the attainment and final shattering of his dream. The Sun State is set up near the rich city of Thurium: Mr. Koestler describes magnificently the pageantry of its building and Spartacus's difficulties in binding his unruly followers to the laws of the community. Though he becomes dictator over south. Italy, and begins to form alliances like a great ruler, his State is split from within, and after that division the road leads directly to the crucifix. Like all the great leaders of revolutions in history, Spartacus, on the threshold of success, is forced to establish a dictatorship and use terroristic means for the sake of the Utopian ideal—the revolution degenerates into a tyranny. Mr. Koestler's central, theme is this eternal problem of all revolutionary and reformative movements; the problem of ends and means. . 4 MISCELLANEOUS THEMES. . There is something of a matrimonial tangle in "Wisdom's Gate," a new novel by Margaret Ayer Barnes, published by Jonathan Cape. The scene is laid in Chicago, and the leading lady, discovering that her husband is true to her only in spirit, solves a difficult problem by divorcing him. {•s*© then marries her" brother-in-law, M diplomat by; profession and a charmed- by instinct. The two of them keep his fdrrrier .wife and her former husband, with tlie most embarrassing results. . When a sensitive child is separated by /the war from his home, and becomes a battleground for relations j jealous for. his custody, his life is likely to be as complicated and embarrassing as that of any grown-up hero of fie- ! tidn. Andrew, whose life from six to ten years" old is narrated in "Kind Re- j lations," by Robert Liddell, was fur-1 ther perplexed by conflicts of loyalty between nursery and drawing-room, or nursery and schoolroom, and by the advent of a stepmother, as well as by his own growing pains. Though told with sympathy, the story is told with ! considerable detachment. In the back- j ground is the war, sometimes deliberately forgotten as an obscenej horror, sometimes used, like . other ogres, for comic relief. ! Leonard Mann, who made a success with "A Murder in Sydney" retains Australia as the scene of his new novel, "Mountain Flat." Mountain. Flat is a former gold diggings, jiow occupied by a miscellaneous crowd of small farmers, j English, German, and Italian. Their rivalries, lovemaking, petty jealousies, and quarrels make up an engrossing story which is distinctly Australian in character. All the above novels are published by Jonathan. Cape, our review copies coming from Ferguson and Osborn, Ltd.