Faraway
THE MANof the MONTH
[Harpers, $2.75]
J. B. PRIESTLEY’S new novel, Faraway, is not so buoyantly blithe as The Good Companions. Nor does it search the heart like Angel Pavement; no character in it squeezes the sympathies in so painful a clutch as does the patient and worried Mr. Smeeth. But it dares more, and in my opinion successfully dares more, than either of its predecessors. For Faraway is an audacious blend of the realistic and the fantastic. It plumbs the soul of William Dursley of Buntingham, Suffolk, an unremarkable man but an excellent sort withal, a maltster by trade but possessed of a romantic temperament; and it plunges him into exotic adventure a quest of priceless treasure on an uncharted island so artfully narrated that it must vanquish the lethargy (I speak knowingly) of any spirit, naturally lethargic toward tales of adventure.
This is a novel of uncommon vitality. It describes with an equal effect of vividness the Pacific in storm or a particularly inebriated party in Tahiti; Ramsbottom, the ’Lanc’sher’ man, fleeing from the ‘damn great eel.’ or William Dursley wincing at the glances flashed by the beautiful girl Terry Riley to the loathsomely handsome leading man of the R. O. V. film company; the sighing, strumming, fragrant Tahitian nights, or the lonely great statues in the desolation of Easter Island. It narrates with equal reality William’s first meeting with Garsuvin, the villain of the piece, who ‘looked like a melancholy intellectual clown with a queer touch of decayed and unscrupulous aristocracy about him’; and the mad and miserable night spent by William in being shown New York; and the death of Commander Ivyhridge — one of the finest pieces of narrative, to my thinking, that Mr. Priestley has written.
Not the least skillful thing in the book is its portrayal of character so largely through conversation. I Ramsbottom, the huge, innocent glutton and sensualist, who says of himself with simplicity, ‘ Ah like good stoof,’ and whose talk of food has dithyrambic fervor, quite unaware paints back handedly his own portrait in his unofficial elegy on the Commander: ‘Being a strict ish sort o’ chap anyhow and a bit simple, be was an oldfashioned sort wouldn’t do this and that and the other and sometimes, if you didn’t happen to be amused, he could get on your nerves a bit. But all the same, when you got down to it, he was worth ten o’ most, of the new-fashioned sort.’ The young-old Commander himself, with Ids thick gray hair and his iceblue eyes, discloses with every word that he utters his honesty, courage, sweetness, and stubbornness, and his placid high-minded simplifications of life. A particularly revealing passage is the homesick outburst of the reticent and practical Margery Jackson — like William, from Suffolk—among all ‘these big showy sticky sickly flowers’ of Tahiti. ’Those little wild flowers we have at home,’ she cries, ‘that come peeping up in the woods and the hedges when it ’s still cold and wet - there’s something in Shakespeare about that, isn’t there? — we used to learn it at school — but it ’s all true too . . . and then the green, green fields . . . all fresh and sweet.’ A tour de force, though of minor importance, is the betrayal of monstrous callousness in the complacent reminiscences of Messrs. Ennis and Jubb of the R. O. V. studio. And as for that average man William Dursley, whom we watch through so many vicissitudes, if is when he bursts surprisingly into oration on the disposal of the pitchblende treasure that we really know him.
As in Angel Pavement, the scene that rounds the novel is a faintly sardonic echo of the opening scene. Upun the sleepy game of chess that seems an unbroken continuation of the game on the first page obtrudes a swift, significant interlude at the gate, in the rain. And it is clear that for William Dursley, confirmed maltster, ‘to the end, spring winds will sow disquietude.’ The same is forevermore not quite the same. Thus the novel, like Angel Pavement, does not come to a close with its last seulence, but travels on independently fora while in the reader’s fancy.
ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS