The Hurricane
by and
[Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $2.50)
ELEVEN years ago James Norman Hall contributed an essay to the Atlantic which nearly succeeded in uprooting the present reviewer from New England and sending him to French Oceania to live. Mr. Hall reported, in ‘Sing: A Song of Sixpence,’that he could rent an acre of land with a shack, a stream, and sea bathing for three dollars a month. In 1925 this was somewhat below the usual rentals in Westport, Connecticut. But there was no means of ensuring that, if one settled in Tahiti, one would be able to write as well as Mr. Hall, so the pilgrimage was abandoned.
Then, after the names of Nordhoff and Hall had become associated in our minds, the mutineers of the Bounty inspired these two men to write a remarkable trilogy of adventure and romance. There were times, indeed, when some of us felt that the writing transcended the theme.
The Hurricane, we can believe, is the answer to those who imagined Messrs. Nordhoff and Hall were leaning on Captain Bligh and his men for lasting support. Here is a really superb fiction, in which, untrammeled by historical considerations, the authors have been free to utilize their unique equipment and create for us a story of great strength and beauty.
It is not a long novel, as novels go nowadays, but it has the distinguishing trait of first-class fiction, that the two hundred and fifty pages seem much less. Unlike many modern novels, it could not possibly be condensed. On reading it over one has the consoling conviction that Messrs. Nordhoff and Hall have done all the condensing and curtailing before publication. They have, moreover, achieved a style so deceptively simple and supple and strong that only a professional writer will be aware of those virtues. Which is as it should be. Without malice, one does feel that some of our modern great writers—Messrs. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe, for example—would derive immense benefit from a study of The Hurricane. For the small fry it should be required reading.
The story of this novel is simple in the extreme. The character of Terangi, the native, whose unjust incarceration brings about the series of events that reach their dénouement during the hurricane that sweeps Tuamotu, — Islands of the Distant Sea,—is sketched with profound truth and sympathy. So too is that of M. de Laage, the French administrator, and the trader Tavi. The hurricane itself is very well done; the scenes around the settlement when the church of Father Paul goes, and the only survivors are lashed to trees or riding in boats made fast to stumps of trees, are of breathless interest. One has only to compare this book with the stories of Jack London to see the value of restraint in describing scenes of violence.
The secret, one supposes, is that Messrs. Nordhoff and Hall realize their scenes and characters not only powerfully but freshly, and have no need of rhetoric or trickery to make us realize them. Another secret lies in the fact that they are dealing with natives and white people who have traditions and principles. To the reader who has been reading books about the new régimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan, these Melanesians seem to be the only genuinely civilized people left on earth. This, of course, is emotional excess; but they do excite our admiration nevertheless; and if this be due to the art of our authors we have additional reason for praising them. They have written a book of rare power and heroic beauty. It is fiction, but it possesses what Mr. Aldous Huxley insists all good art must have, ’a sort of super-truth — more probable, more acceptable, more convincing than fact itself.
WILLIAM McFEE