NEW BOOKS

Southland Times, Issue 23444, 26 February 1938, Page 14

NEW BOOKS

A DISTINGUISHED NOVEL NORTHWEST PASSAGE. By Kenneth Roberts. Angus and Robertson, Sydney. .Price 10/6. The hero of “North-West Passage” is Robert Rogers, the scout, explorer, Indian fighter, promoter, speculator, adventurer, soldier of fortune, and Tory recruiting agent whom readers of Parkman will identify as the most skilful commander of colonial rangers during the French and Indian War. Narrated by a young artist who (in the Catlin manner and rather anachronistically) wants to paint the Indians, the first half of the novel deals with the raid of Rogers’s Rangers on St. Francis and the return through early winter and without provisions across northern Vermont to the Connecticut. 'Hie raid was the most spectacular episode in a war sufficiently horrible, the return from it was one of the most agonizing marches in history, and it had. a macabre climax when the supplies which had been sent to the rendezvous on the Connecticut started back to Crown Point just a few hours before Rogers’s party arrived. The story is well fitted to Mr Roberts’s hand, and he tells it with the dash and gusto of his earlier books. But there is an important change when Langdon Towne, the war ended, goes to London to study painting, and Mr Roberts turns to Rogers’s ambition to discover the North-West Passage. The pace slackens, Mr Roberts gets interested in challenging Thackeray, readjusting the verdicts of history, and pondering its less palpable forces —and the novel changes in kind and con-, siderably improves. The challenge to Thackeray comes off very well. There are a few unnecessary displays of historical characters in walk-on parts, and an occasional cheap touch of the kind which has a character make a prediction which is grotesque in the light of what we now know, or has another one call James Boswell an ass and lament the time Johnson wastes talking with him. But, this granted, the London of the period comes variously and most amazingly, to life: the London of ' “characters,” eccentrics, grotesques, Mohocks; of Hogarth, Clive, Reynolds, Benjamin Franklin, the young Burke, Sir John Fielding, the Royal Society; of gin-shops, debtors’ prisons, slums, beggars, “monsters”; of Townsend and the Bute ministry and the Stamp Act and the sceptical Whigs. No communities lived so vividly in Mr Roberts’s earlier work, and you will read this evocation with as much satisfaction as you ever got from “The Virginians.” Even so, it is not the best part of “North-West Passage.” Rogers’s efforts at length get him the governorship of Michilimackinac, Langdon Towne goes with him to paint the Western Indians, and suddenly Mr Roberts is animating his material with an imaginative warmth that he had not shown us before. The, hunger and desire to the nation just about to break westward into the untrodden lands, the tangle of cupidities and venalities and stupidities that in great part conditioned them — they are in “North-West Passage” as they have not been in our fiction before. The soldiery, the traders, the voyageurs, and the first wave of the pioneers are done with fine versatility, and the Indians are done with genuine! magnificence. Parkman and a good many others are at the author’s shoulder while he writes, but his treatment of the Western tribes displays historical imagination of a high order. And we are all likely to be in Mr Roberts’s debt: the signs point to an early extension to precisely that ground by the present wave of historical novels, and it is good to have a high and authoritative standard set at the beginning. As a historian, Mr Roberts is something of a revisionist. Jonathan Carver was not so scaly as he makes him out, and the specifications for a romantic hero have forced a lot of plastic surgery on Major Rogers. As a novelist, he remains conventional in all his detailed characterization and quite uninterested in psychology. No one in the book has much intellectual life, no one meditates much, no one is an introvert; there is no Henry Esmond, there is not even an Athos or an Aramis. The love story is trite and Ann, its heroine, writes letters far less like an eighteenth-century gentlewoman than like a twentieth-century boarding-

school girl. On the other hand, the book is not defaced by archaisms or self-conscious period work. Mr Roberts wisely contents himself with an occasional touch of formality or floridity in dialogue, an occasional obsolete expression, and a mass of homely and appropriate details, so that the atmosphere passes off quite naturally. It is a first-rate job, a novel that is read with intent interest and is sure to be remembered with satisfaction, head and shoulders above most of the period pieces that have recently come into favour. —By Bernard De Voto in The Saturday Review of Literature.

ROYAL IMPOSTER THE LOST KING. By Rafael Sabatini. Hutchinson and Co., London, through Whitcombe and Tombs. Price 8/6 net. Mr Sabatini has an easy and convincing way with historical personages. In his new book he opens with a gathering of revolutionary leaders in the prison of the Temple, Paris. The central figure is the boy king, Louis XVII, now being encouraged to repeat, parrot-wise, the infamous deposition that is to play its part in sending his mother to the guillotine. Around him are men made familiar to many readers by the writings that have grown out of one of the most fascinating and terrible epochs in history—fascinating, perhaps, by reason of its terror. Mr Sabatini sketches them with brief, sure strokes—rather in the manner of the young artist Florence la Salle, who sits there in the shadow and pencils a swift portrait of the boy prisoner. This La Salle is a cool customer. He detests revolutionaries, and is willing to serve the royalists, although he admits that his one motive is self-interest. Under a monarchy, he believes, there are better opportunities for an artist; and he is

therefore willing to listen to the wily De Batz and take his part in an audacious plot to snatch the king from his prison. Up to this point the story is on safe historical ground; there was no lack of rumours, at a later time, that the young Bourbon had escaped from prison, and still lived. Mr Sabatini makes these rumours the mainspring of his plot. He gives the difficult task to La Salle, and explains the way in which, after more than one revolutionary has been corrupted, he performs the final daring feat. For a time it is judged safe to keep Louis hidden in Paris; but when the shrewd Fouche begins to suspect that there has been trickery there is need to rush the boy towards the Swiss frontier.

This part of the book is intensely exciting; and when it ends with the apparent death of Louis the story comes to a pause. But not for long. La Salle continues an adventurous, if not very prosperous career, until there comes a day, years later, when a face seen in a crowd stirs a strange memory. His fortunes have come to a point where something desperate must be done if they are to be retrieved. France is ri’d of Napoleon, Fouche is in retirement, and there are rumours that everybody is weary, of the monstrous Bourbon now seated on the throne. La Salle believes that an impostor would have a good chance of success if he were armed with the secret evidence of the escape of Louis which he alone possesses. Therefore, he proceeds to draw Chariot Deslys under his influence, schooling him carefully in a dangerous part, and tempting him to break away from those who love him and to seek honour and riches in France. Everything goes surprisingly well, and Paris seems ready to acclaim the new king. But new situations arise, and under the impact of crisis it is disclosed that Deslys is no impostor after all. From this moment the story moves on to a climax during which the attentive reader seems to feel the approach of Bonaparte. These final chapters are handled with great skill, as indeed are many passages that must have contained pitfalls for any but an experienced novelist. The vacillating character of Louis seems to be thoroughly in keeping with his background and antecedents, and the wily politician Fouche is excellently drawn. Nevertheless it is the presence of La Salle that dominates the book. There is

no lack of incident; it is difficult, indeed, to avoid the thought that with the right treatment “The Lost King” could be made into a first-class picture.

BITTER AND VIOLENT EUROPA IN LIMBO. By Robert Briffault. Robert Hale and Co., London, through Whitcombe and Tombs. Price 8/6 net.

This large and untidy book opens with some realistic scenes of the bombardment of Antwerp, in the early days of the Great War. Among the fugitives are Julian and Zena, known to readers of an earlier book—“Europa”—as a pair of romantic lovers recently arrived from dramatic experiences in Russia and Germany. They escape to England, and are soon separated by the necessities of the times. Zena returns to Russia; and Julian—in spite of his hatred of war, and of England—joins up, apparently as the easiest way of committing suicide. After this he passes through scenes of battle and mud. Disillusioned and bitter, he remains curiously objective in the midst of much danger. Numerou. people move in and out of his life. Brother officers, nurses, women of all kinds—but curiously alike in their determined amorousness—meet and talk with him, and pass on. He does a great deal of talking, mostly in a vein of extreme bitterness; and the reader is inclined to feel relieved when he finally gets away from the war and enters Russia in time for the revolution. After this things happen more swiftly. Julian sees some of the bad days, joins Zena only to lose her in an atmosphere of tragedy, and finally escapes to that England which, for all his hatred of her smugness and “hypocrisy,” he contrives to find useful in times of stress. “Europa in Limbo” is large and formless. Its people are mere puppets who live in a little world of undiluted melodrama. There is enough violence and bloodshed to suit the strongest stomach, and Dr Briffault seems to have political convictions which he announces in positive terms. With more than a tinge of sadism he broods over the sufferings of his characters and of the world, and seems to take delight in destruction. Many readers may be attracted to these turbulent and bitter pages; but it is an unpleasant book that need never have been written.