THE LATEST NOVELS

Southland Times, Issue 23954, 21 October 1939, Page 10

THE LATEST NOVELS

A Man From The North QUALITY CHASE By Marjorie Hessell Tiltman. Hodder & Stoughton, London, through F. S. Smart, Sydney. Price 8/6 net.

The love of old and rare things is to be found like a recurring theme in English fiction. Perhaps it is a manifestation of the mellow background, enriched with the associations of history and literature, for a sensitive writer feels the past in his bones, and responds naturally to a beauty that reflects the spirit of old craftsmen and artists. It would be interesting to discover how many English novels have had to do with curiosity shops or—in the more polite terms of this age—with the collection and sale of antiques. The latest addition to a company that includes distinguished names is Quality Chase,” a book which combines in a curious and most unusual way the boisterous energy of Birmingham in the middle and later Victorian years, with the cultivated outlook of London connoisseurs. Jonathan Chase is the son of an illiterate rag .and bone merchant. Left without a mother, he grows up with his father, accompanying him on country journeys that sometimes lead to the discovery of household treasures. He learns to judge a good chair, a piece of pewter or almost anything that has the aroma of age and the mark of skilful hands; and while he is still a boy he persuades his father to install him in a shop of his own. It is there that he first meets Joseph Chamberlain, then famous as the presiding genius of Birmingham civic life and already emerging as an English statesman. Jonathan has been discouraged by the slow arrival of custom and success; but after Chamberlain has smoked a cigar in the shop, given a short homily on the need to advertise, and aroused the young man by the exuberance of his own nervous energy and optimism, he throws himself into his work with new purpose and determination. In this, and several other interviews between Jonathan and the statesman (for their paths cross at critical moments) Joseph Chamberlain dominates the scene with the force of magnetic personality. Usually there is something stilted in the fictitious ap-

pearances of the great; but Miss Tiltman writes as if from a personal memory, or from an imaginative enrichment of some family contact. BUSINESS IN LONDON The book deals mainly with the business enterprise and expansion of Jonathan Chase. He marries an attractive young woman from a social sphere much beyond his own, and although there is a clash of temperaments in the early years of a somewhat difficult union the experiment is not altogether unsuccessful. There are three children, two boys and a girl; but it is the daughter, Gennie, who occupies most room in the later part of the story. Jonathan passes from one success to another and is driven by a fierce ambition to sell his Birmingham business and open up in London. He.makes some shrewd deals, incurs the rivalry of the trade, makes some expensive mistakes, and continues to live in a dream of precious things, so that even to the end he is unable to think of members of his family except as valuable and rather fragile possessions. The Great War robs him of his elder son and almost ruins him; but he struggles on, begins to make money again, and is close to success when a bad mistake threatens him with ruin on the eve of the great depression. Jonathan is lucky. At crucial stages in his career there is always someone to intervene and save him. This time it is his daughter, and there may be some readers who would have preferred him to face the music rather than to accept the kind of help which leaves him at last with the promise of tranquil years. “Quality Chase” may have minor flaws, but in many ways it is an impressive book. The love of beauty expressed through a rugged character is a motif that reflects the duality of idea within the story. Everywhere there is a contrast between force and stillness, temporalfever and the serene permanence of art, undisciplined energy and mellow achievement. Discriminating readers will make their way slowly through these pages, unwilling to end the experience too quickly.