Paradise, an Historical Romance
by
[Harcourt, Brace, $2.50]
Paradise, the new novel by Esther Forbes, fills in a vast canvas. Besides the history of Canaan, founded in the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony by a number of Boston petitioners, it also includes the chronicle of Paradise, the house of Jude Parre, Gentleman, and the individual stories of his five children: the two boys, Fenton and Christopher, borne to him by his English wife, and his three daughters, Agnes, Jazan, and Hagar, the issue of his second but ill-considered marriage late in life with a servant girl.
Against the background of Colonial days before the Mathers had made their mark in Boston, and when the greatest scourge of the Colonists was still the Red Man rather than the Devil, the progress of Canaan village is traced from a sparse settlement to a thriving town. Jude Parre, a black sheep in Old England, becomes through his own efforts a respected judge in the land of opportunity. A stalwart generation, the product of the new world, grows up under him. But it is still a time of trial and transition. The vices from the old world cannot be kept out, and one of them — in the person of Bathsheba, who becomes Fenton’s wife — brings disgrace upon the family and causes old Jude to go in bitterness to the grave. Here, with the public shame of Bathsheba and Christopher before the Boston populace, when the letter of adultery is stamped in fire upon their foreheads, comes the true climax of the novel. Out of similar elements Hawthorne evolved The Scarlet Letter and made a period live forever, though with less scruple for historical accuracy than Miss Forbes and with an economy of means that made his characters symbols rather than living men and women. Yet, in spite of climactic finality, Miss Forbes’s novel is only a little more than one-third over. The story of Jazan is still to be told, and Hagar’s, too. After the scene of the branding, however, the reader’s interest flags, for the rest of the novel, though replete with absorbing material, seems superimposed. The transformed Fenton as the doting husband of his new child-wife, and Bathsheba as the witchlike slattern she later became, are hardly credible. Jazan, the heroine of the novel, comes too late to her destiny for her fulfillment to be other than pallid when contrasted with the scarlet passages that preceded. Too, her husband, Forethought Fearing, wavers too much between portrait and caricature ever to impress himself definitely upon the reader’s sympathies.
It is in the re-creation of past events that Miss Forbes is at her best, as in her final chapters on King Philip’s War. Enough this side of antiquarian to be historical rather than pedantic, her massing of detail is entirely trustworthy. The chief fault, if fault it be, is that Miss Forbes has given too generously of her wealth.
FRANCES WINWAR