FICTION

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 105, 6 May 1933, Page 14 (Supplement)

FICTION

RAHAB AND RACHEL, by Geo. C. Foster (Chapman and Hall); pp. 309.

Here is a novel written about time present. There is a new note creeping into fiction and this is the best novel of the new period. Since Mr. H. G. Wells wrote “Anne Veronica,” which was then considered shocking, there has been a progression in the matter of frankness ou the part of novelists. Excluding such sex appealists as have followed in the wake of Eleanor Glyn in capitalising sex excitement through the pages of the novel and confining attention to the serious-minded writers who seek to come to grips seriously with the subject, the frankness has perhaps been overdone. Nevertheless, there has been not a little of frank writing which has been written of good intention. Mr. Galsworthy wrote on this subject when dealing with the lives of the Forsytes not only with good intention but to good purpose. Nevertheless, taking literature as a whole, there can be no gainsaying that the sex interest has been very much overdone. Personally I think that the public has become. tired of sex-appeal. I notice that it is not the sex-play, nor the sex-film, nor the sex-novel which is winning the greatest of attention. I interpret this to the fact that the excitement and looseness engendered by the war period

has worn off. People have become blase about the whole business and frankness has torn the coverings away from it and consequently there is not even curiosity to be aroused. “Rahab and Rachel” is a novel of disillusionment in the matter of sex. It states plainly that there is nothing in it, that it is definitely overdone as a motif for a novel, that it does not amount to the tremendous thing in life that it has been presented over and over again, that marriage means something more, and to which it is incidental. But Life is still a complex business, and especially so for women, and the author docs not pretend otherwise. He tells his story and gets his point of view well to the foreground without spoiling the book, which is an artisticachievement. Briefly the story is this: Christopher Kent, a young man, is engaged to marry Alice, a German girl. The war opens, the marriage is delayed, and eventually becomes impossible. Alice marries a German friend, because she cannot have the man she wants. The two men, friends in peace, find themselves engaged in an air duel during the war and the German gets wounded and becomes an invalid for a long time, and after that a stodgy old party with no vices. His death after the war permits Alice to return with her daughter to England and revisit her o’xl friends. Christopher is still unmarried, but he is being paid attention to by not a few girls and women. There is Denise, the sporty war period girl, with whom lie used to go weekending during and after the war, to whom he used to propose and be turned down because Denise wanted to enjoy her youth. There was the seriousminded. Cherry, who wanted neither to entrap a man with her allurements nor have him entrap himself for such ends. She uses the advantages of a Nudist colony to make sure on that point. Normal people usually discover a proper basis for marriage with less exceptional methods. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that the Nudist movement started in Germany for the express purpose of killing abnormal sex interest and there can bo no exception taken to this theme being used in a novel. Annemarie, the daughter of Alice, becomes concerned about her mother becoming interested in a bounder, Otto Muller, and the following conversation, takes place: “This pig—this Otto —this Muller fascinates her. Listen! Mother pretends to think that she does not think sex is good. It is higher to despise it, not to want it, to forget it. But it is there and this Otto — “From one extreme to another. I see,” murmured Denise, who saw very clearly. No experience. Can't handle that sort of man. I know.” “If she married someone else that would be good—a nice man who could interest her —”

“She isn’t going to marry this fellow, surely?” interrupted Denise. “She might. She may say, ‘No, unless you marry me,’ and then* he will, because there is some money. Otherwise—things happen. Not nice for one’s mother to have an affair, but better than marriage with that,” exclaimed Annemarie with contempt.

“Must one either be a Rahab or a Rachel!” cried Denise, suddenly, with such emotion that the younger girl was startled. “Which is the worst? To be cumbered with much serving like this Alice—to miss all the thrills of life, passively acquiescing in someone else’s pleasure unsharable with you? A good wife, a good mother, duty—sublimation —or as I have done, taking all I could get while the going was good?” She saw that Annemarie was staring at her curiously.

“Yes, my dear, it is a difficult problem for women, and the pity of it is that it should ever face them at all. It doesn’t—the lucky ones. Your mother is at one end of the bad luck scale and I’m at the other, and we’ve both been left. She is Rachal and I uni Rahab. 1 have my memories, and she—what has she?”

“She has me,” said Annemarie, simply, “if that’s anything.” “You, dear child, you are the only worthwhile thing she has at all. Why can’t husbands be lovers and lovers husbands? There is perfection, but 1 haven’t found it. It’s just there for the taking in many married lives, and they don’t know it. Just for the taking—love, ecstacy, purity altogether—the time, the place, the loved one, if I may be poetical, it is worth while. . . Don’t be either a Rahab or a Rachel, my dear girl, I beg you.” “ ... I think you modern girls have a much better chance, whether you’re British or German, or anything else, than my generation did or your mother’s. You’ve no false ideas or inhibitions of any sort. You can be naked in the presence of a man and keep your virgin purity. I couldn’t and didn’t. Your mother couldn’t and —well, I don’t know what she did. but she seems to Lave made a mess of it. She was brought up in the ‘ littlc-girls-mustn ’t-be-seen-or-heard ’ period—particularly seen. It wasn’t so bad in her day as it had been, but it was still on. It was the war period when the morals of my sort went hang.” “I suppose it was the atmosphere. All the men one knew were soldiers or sailors and men who might die in a week wanted to live to-night. One felt one would sacrifice anything for them and some of us did. It vasn’t wise, but there Air raids, darkened streets, dancing and money being blown out of the guns. . . Some of us just Jet go.” She smoked a cigarette. “Yes, you have a better chance. You’ve scrapped your mother’s puritanisni and my libertinism. Nudity means nothing to you girls to-day, but chastity quite a Jot. You’re moderate, you’re balanced.”

It is a sane novel, and a frank one. It closes fittingly and right on time. It might have finished yesterday, or even to-day. The prospect looks quite hopeful to Air. Foster and many of his readers will agree with him.

THE ANIMALS NOAH FORGOT, by A. B. Paterson (“Banjo”), illustrated by Norman Lindsay (The Endeavour Press). Those who have pleasant recollections of “Tho Man from Snowy River,” “Tho Geebung Polo Club,” and “How Pardon Won the Gup,” will hail with a great deal of delight another collection of “Banjo” Patersou’s work, which has been published in book form under the title of “The Animals Noah Forgot.” There is a quaint Australian charm about Paterson’s poems and ho has retained that in this new collection. “A land of sombre, silent hills, where mountain cattle go By twisted tracks, on sidelines

steep, where giant gum trees | grow And the wind replies, in the river oaks, to tho song of the stream below. A land where silence lies so deep that sound itself is dead And a gaunt grey bird, like a homeless soul, drifts noiseless overhead. And the world’s great r'ory is left untold, and the message is left unsaid. There is pathos in those lines which giips and which enables the reader to sense tho loneliness which Australia's wide vistas inspire. Turn now to the poem on the army mules and there is revealed a freshing sense of humour aud an understanding of the true significance of team work: The Brigadier of the Mounted Fut, like a cavalry colonel swanks As he goeth abroad like a gilded nut to receive the General’s thanks; The Ordnance Man is a son-of-a-gun, and his lists are a standing joke; You order ‘ ’Choke arti Jerusalem one” for Jerusalem artichoke. The Medicals shine with a Number Nine, and the men of the great R.E., Their colonels are Methodist, married, nr mad, and some of them all three. In all these units tho road to fame is taught iu tho Service Schools, But a man has got to be born to the game when he tackles the Army Mules. . . .

It is a rough-house game, and a thankless game, and it isn’t the game for n. fool,

For an army 's fate and a nation’s fame may turn on an Army Mule.

This publication of “Banjo” Paterson’s, “The Animals Noah Forgot,” will surely be welcomed by hundreds of New Zealanders. Andrew Barton (“Banjo”) Paterson was born at Narrambla, in New South Wales, in 1864. He received his education at tho Sydney Grammar School, and after qualifying as a solicitor commenced practice in Sydney. During the Boer War ho acted as a war correspondent, and then as a newspaper correspondent in China. From 1903 to 1906 ho edited the Evening News, of Sydney, and later was editor of the Town and Country Journal. In 1908 he abandoned cuff and collar occupations and engaged in pastoral pursuits. His Australian ballads, which were written for the periodicals, have had a phenomenal colonial success in book form. “Tho Alan From Snowy River,” the. first collection, published in 1895, sold about 50,000 copies and is still in print. Ju addition to other volumes of verse he has published a novel, “An Outback Alarrriage. ”

MAGIC IN THE AIR, by F. E. Penny (Hodder and Stoughton); pp. 318. This is a well fold tale of Indian magic. It is interesting, however, for more than that, for it gives an interesting insight into life as it is lived by British officials far away from the centres of Government. The setting of the story is the hill country of Southern India, where the mountains come down to the sea. Everyone will be interested in Govind, the Indian fakir, who uses his powers for not altogether evil ends, although the British official learns to know his tricks. There is a not impossible love interest which will appeal to the stern male as well as to the freakier sex.