By chance I have been agreeably occupied this month with four new books from the British Isles. The Raronelle Riddle by E. Best Black (Loring and Mussey, $2.00) is a happy introduction to a new author and a new publisher. Even in the politest circles this would be regarded as a highly accomplished murder. The plot is ingenious, the action swift, the characters few and distinct, and the girl beautiful. The book follows the authentic tradition in that Scotland Yard goes one way and the amateur detective, known as ‘the American,’ quite another. When I say that there are the usual divergencies of opinion between I he competitors. and the usual laceration of the feelings of authority, I do an implied injustice to an excellent plot and a solution calculated to frustrate the hypotheses of the old-timers.
From Ireland the Viking Press has imported a unique book, Twenty Years A-Growing ($2.50). The author, Maurice O’Sullivan, a young man still, is a native of the tiny Blasket Islands in the Bay of Dingle. His only book-learning came from the grammar school on the mainland, but in his mother tongue, Gaelic. he was moved to describe the day’s work of the islanders and the old dances, the old songs and legends (preserved by ear), which were their entertainment. Fragments of this rich material reached a Cambridge don, who favored a translation into English. Thus was cultivated a genuine life of the Irish peasants written by one of themselves, a life so remote, so island-ed as to be mediaeval. The great winter seas with their harvest of wreckage; the fierce cliffs infested with birds; the summer sun that distills ‘a fine coat of sweat’ as one fishes or toils with the boats; Old Nell with her pipe and her gossip — these are daily concerns on the Blasket Islands, and these, together with folklore older than Beowulf, have been shaped with Gaelic wit and poetry into an autobiography as fresh and savory as new-risen bread.
Sea and mist, heather and dripping solitude, are the elements which most influence the Scotch novel No Second Spring (Stokes, $2.50) which has just walked off with a $20,000 prize. As one who has judged four novel contests, I am prepared to say that this first hook of Miss Janet Beith’s is amply good enough for the award. This story of Hamish, the fervent, handsome minister, his lovely and pathetic wife, Allison, and of Andrew Simon, the portrait painter and wanderer who invades their lives, is no lucky beginning. The marked simplicity of the style, the selection and emphasis of the historical detail (time, the 1830’s), are at once the evidence of discipline and the announcement of a sturdy new talent. There are naturally certain flaws to reward the critical. The beginning is not prepossessing — the coming of the young couple to the Highland kirk and the conspiracy of weather and hostility which oppose them results in some seventy pages of sombre, mirthless writing. Again, when describing the illness of the children, is the author too heavy-handed. Finally, Miss Beith occasionally lapses into phrases (‘primeval terror,’ ‘a trapped animal,’ ‘fine Italian hand’) which are trite. But the heart of the book, the love story of Allison and Andrew and their brief vision of island happiness, is written with such warmth and felicity that it wholly redeems one’s minor objections.
Mandoa, Mandoa! (Macmillan, $2.50) is a novel that comes to us much heralded from London. The author, Miss Winifred Holtby, is unfamiliar, hut one does not have to venture far in her pages to realize that here are a capacity for invention and a love of satire such as few established writers possess. The plot, which Swift would have relished, is suggestive: in 1932 a black principality (Mandoa) in the centre of Africa opens its doors to English ‘civilization,’ and winging overseas come representatives of Prince’s Tours, Ltd., of the Foreign Office, of humanitarian societies, the curious, and the ’go-getters.’ The Mandoans place their own evaluation on their exploiters, and a sane and delightful evaluation it is. The English, of course, set to work to clean things up in the best imperial style — hotels, airports, tourists, and jazz. Cruelty is matched with vulgarity, and the struggle is a joy to behold. The combination of direct narrative and skillful, thrusting satire is touched with astonishing reality — without hitch and with recurring surprise the story sweeps you into Mandoa, the best of impossible worlds.
