To those who love books there is something heady in reading a novel which gives evidence of new powers and a new name to be reckoned with. The race has been to the few rather than to the many books in 1931, but of those few there are certainly six worth talking about. At least one of them. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, has, I am glad to say, begun to receive the recognition that was its due.
FOUR Britons—two Scotchmen and two Englishwomen—have enriched the fiction of the current summer with a very diversified quartette of novels.
Dwarf’s Blood, by Edith Olivier (Viking Press, $2.50), has for its chief distinctions originality, narrative swiftness, and beautiful simplicity of style. In spite of the dreamlike quality of certain chapters, the book is no fantasy, but a novel dealing with a racking human problem.
Out of a subject that might be expected to make a somewhat morbid story—a family taint of blood that comes out now and then in a dwarfed body or a dwarfed spirit—Miss Olivier’s curious art makes something almost crystalline. In the first place, there was never a more healthy-minded, a better-balanced, or a pluckier nature than that of the girl who marries, ignorantly and happily, a man with dwarf’s blood in his veins, and whose second child soon proves to be unmistakably a dwarf. In the second place, this dwarfed boy proves to be an exquisite-creature, beautiful in body and in spirit. Further beauty is given to the book by such pictures as those of the half-ruined English estate and of the cottage garden above the ; Cornish sea. And the sunny Bavarian interlude has the freshness of a dream.
The conflict of the novel — the battle of the wife to ward off from her little boy all suffering for his abnormal inheritance, and to overcome the father’s angry abhorrence of his son — is vivid and real, and the one solution of the apparently insoluble is found. This curiously compounded book does not seem to me a perfect harmony. I think that Miss Olivier’s light hand grows somewhat heavy in depicting the pompous neighbor who is the clown of the piece. But the effect of the whole is of something clear, swift, and rare.
‘Elizabeth’ is ‘Elizabeth,’ and Father (Doubleday, Doran,$2.50) runs true to form. The undercurrent of naughty innuendo murmurs a trifle less audibly than usual, but only a trifle, and the other characteristic qualities are present in full force: the mastery of a comedy that is made up of the farcical, the fantast ic, and the sharply real; the passionate but reticent love for the beauty of the earth; and the passionate hatred for the coercion of one being by another.
This gay story tells how ’Father,’eminent novelist and household tyrant, marries a young wife, and thus involuntarily liberates his daughter from an almost annihilating compression; how Jennifer, the daughter, wings her ecstatic flight into freedom; how young James Ollier, the sister-ridden curate of Cherry Lidgate, falls wildly in love with her in the course of the innocent interlude on Jennifer’s mattress in the moonlit orchard; and how there is forthwith the devil to pay.
I doubt if there is a better preacher against selfishness and spiritual tyranny than the unregenerate ‘ Elizabeth.’
Mr. Bruce Marshall’s highly masculine wit snaps its way from end 1o end of Father Malachy’s Miracle (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50) like a fabulously elongated string of firecrackers that would last a little boy from sunrise to sunset with hardly a muffled fizzle in its whole glorious length.
Father Malachy, devoutest, most large-minded, and most lovable of priests, performs for the glory of God a twentieth-century miracle modeled upon that of the Flying House of Loretto: he ‘flits’ an Edinburgh dance hall to the top of the Bass Rock. The miracle comes off with faultless precision and smoothness; but the response of Father Malachy’s modern world, though various, is consistently grievous to his gentle heart.
In the course of this novel so many things are riddled with mockery that at the end the reader looks about in a daze to see what is left intact. He finds the pure spirit of Father Malachy. And, I think, something else which eludes formulation but which gives this wild satire its depth.
The question of taste being a question of taste, one may not dogmatize regarding Mr. Marshall’s endowment of this imponderable possession. My personal opinion is that his cavorting wit now and then gets above itself, not altogether to the enrichment of his satire. This I should deplore if I could.
Hatter’s Castle, by Dr. A. J. Cronin (Little, Brown, $2.50), which has come to us accompanied by uncommon salvos, is certainly a remarkable first novel, its faults are obvious; the tendency to melodrama, and the clumsiness of style that results partly from the loose knitting of the sentences and partly from lack of discrimination and self-denial in the use of words. But it shows the great gift never to he had for the striving — power. The reader of to-day does not very eagerly embark upon six hundred pages of fiction; but Hatter’s Castle sweeps him almost instantly into a strong current with which he must go.
This chronicle of the Brodie family, dwellers by the Clyde, is dominated by the head of the house, James Brodie. Brodie is vastly exaggerated: he seems almost more like a figure in some dark mythological story than a human. Yet the truth with which Dr. Cronin can portray emotion gives reality to this semi-monster. In the scene in which he casts out his disgraced daughter, already seized with her labor pains, into a storm that shrieks far too like an old-style theatrical tempest, James Brodie s conduct must strike the reader as un peu trop fort. But in his savage desire to have his little girl win a certain important school prize,—a desire compounded partly of pride in her but more of animosity toward the father of another competing pupil, — in his savage scorn of his invalid wife, his savage hatred for his worthless son, and above all his savage passion for Nancy the barmaid, he is a terribly living figure.
The same truth to emotion is found in Mrs. Brodie’s adoration of her weak and cowardly boy, and in the desperateness of her muddle-headed efforts to save him from the consequences of his misbehavior; in the dogged misery of little Nessie, overdriven by her father; and in the innocent and ignorant eagerness of the older daughter’s abandonment of herself to her lover.
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this book is the effect of concentration that it achieves in spite of its great length. This is partly accounted for by the compactness of the plot, but far more, I think, by the success with which the author charges the reader’s nerves with the formidableness of the central figure. One watches every episode with a scared wonder. How will James Brodie feel about this? And what violent thing will he do?
ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS