SOME BOOKS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20722, 15 November 1930, Page 1 (Supplement)

SOME BOOKS.

CHANGED FASHIONS

TIV KOTARE,

I have been trying to sort out impressions of the books I have read in the Inst three months. Thero have been war books and biographies and fiction. Tho war-book vogue shows signs of passing. It. was taken advantage of by a certain type of author and publisher to drain off the accumulations of filth left in many distorted minds after tho war flood had receded. One hopes that some bosoms arc Ul3 better for this riddance of much perilous stuff. The trouble was that they made the public mind their sewer. Under the pretence of anti-war propaganda, they lot their unfortunate nostalgic de la boue have its will with them. They managed to introduce into England certain continental standards. There is a fundamental decency at the basis of tho English character that has brought us through many a storm. After the heathen have raged their fill, the great tides of the national life will take their old course again. The final decision lies in the, deep places of the national life. They shall speak, and all this froth and dirt will be merely a nightmare memory. A Sincere Book. General Crozier's " A Brass-Hat in No Man's Land" has been savagely criticised. He is deliberately seeking to tear the romance and glamour from the soldiers trade. In his own way and out of his own experience he tries to do what Bernard Shaw aimed at in his " Arms and the Man."

Shaw reckoned that war is tolerated because its imagined pride, pomp and circumstance appeal to the silly romanticism of civilians. They, and not the soldiers, have idealised it, given it a glamour of romance. Ife docs not denounce it. He shows how a hero-wor-shipping girl suffers one disillusionment after another, till she touches reality at last. War is simply a trade like any other. There is no more glory and romance in it than there is in killing sheep or selling tripe. Crozier is starkly candid for the same reason. The soldier exists to kill. The more efficient he becomes as a killer, the more he focusses all his powers and talents to that end, the better for liirn and the cause he is fighting for. Crozier insists on confronting the people that cheer the soldier on his way to the battle line with the realities of the soldier's function as the military mind sees it. It is a cold-blooded picture he draws. The details he selects are the ones most calculated to emphasise the grimness of it. He says in effect: you enter lightheartedly on war, and from your civilian security prate of the romance and gloiv of war. Well, this is what war means to the men that have to carry it through. He hates war; he would kill war if he could. He writes to summon the public to make war impossible. 'I here is no piling up of horrors; lie leaves that to the emotionalists. But mercilessly he unfolds the effects of war on the soldier's mind. Changed Attitudes. Morris' " Behind the Lines" is simply a rattling good talc, with a most unusual war setting. Here is no propaganda one way or the other. I here is plenty of life and action, and the book is above all intensely human. 1 hero are no superhuman heroes and no deep-dyed villains —just ordinary men retaining their humanity and personality as they adapt themselves to the new conditions wai has imposed. It is something to have emerged from the neurasthenic tension of the atmosphere of the earlier war books; the cause of truth was never served by hysterical overstatement or piopagandist distortion. Ernest Raymond's " Jesting Army suffers from that ovcrbrightness that, to me at any rate, gives an air of unreality to most of his books. He is immensely clever, and lie writes exceedingly well. Hut somehow I always get the impression suggested by Oscar Wilde s pluase, "as large as life and twice as natural." People take turn at holding the stage and catching the spotlight. But life is not like that. Most °f us ;ilt: grey in tone, arid can be expressed only in a grey environment. The worst book I have read for many a day is the much-vaunted German naval novel, " The Sunken Fleet." It has had an immense success in Germany, according to the publishers blurb. I hat may well be. But it reads as if it had been written by an unusually/sentimental fifth form German school girl, and the translation reads as if it had been done by her bosom friend in England. Immaturity and sentimentalism often go together, but the combination is not the best equipment for writing a novel. Two Big Books. Two novels stand out in my impressions as works of the highest class, and as sure signs that after a period in the doldrums the novel is coming into its own again. Each is two or three times the length of the average novel, but no one would wish them a page shorter. First comes Stowell's " History of Button Hill," an amazing picture of the rise and fall of a suburb of Leeds. In many ways tiifs book is the biggest novel I have, como across in years. 'I he founding of Button Hill, its acquirement of a mind and voice and esprit de corps are magnificently told. The author's gift of penetrating characterisation, his feeling for atmosphere, his power to paint a large anil varied scene without. confusion of parts, his clarity and sedulous avoidance of fine writing, giyo bis work a reality, a poise, an inevitability that mark it. oi(t among the novels of our time. There are parts of it that are not pleasant. The section describing the adolescence of the last Button Hill generation seems to me overdrawn, and in many places false. He may have chapter and verso for all his incidents, but the general impression lie conveys is hopelessly wrong as far as my experience goes. He seems determined to show that youth in tho pre-war period was obsessed by two things—sex and religion—a glib simplification of a difficult problem that has far more factors in it than ho is able to

see. The book is really a study in frustration and futility; the author is a young man and may yet harness hi? exceptional talents to a worthier chariot. There is much more in life than shadow and disillusion, and when his scale of values is sounder and saner, there is no saying how far he will go. f ( " Angel Pavement " shows that " The Good Companions" was no flash in the pan. J. B. Priestley is an artist in words. He knows and loves life; he always is on th« side of the angels. He can make a little go a. mighty' long way, but ho never becomes merely verbose and tedious. He is developing mannerisms of technique that may handicap him later on. But " Angel Pavement" is a rich gift of the gods, for which we can be truly thankful.