THE LEAVER OUT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 510, 1 April 1949, Page 11

THE LEAVER OUT

THE UNKNOWN SEA. By Francois Mauriac, Eyre and Spottiswoode. 9/-. FRANCOIS MAURIAC has_sibeen called the greatest living French novelist. .I am half inclined to agree with this dictum, in spite of its crudely competitive flayour and in spite of the existence of Andre Gide. Mauriac is a brilliant narrator, objective and unselfconscious, striking unerringly at the incident or trait which twists a plot or illuminates a character. He is a "Straight" narrator, with a "normal" story-telling method, who yet manages to see the story, in turn, through the eyes of all the important actors in it. He combines the incompatibles, surprise and inevitability. What is important in art is what is left out. Mauriac, magnificently economical in means, is a triumphant leaver out. Only the essential, the clinching and overwhelming detail .is included. Re-read The Forsyte Saga or even L. H. Myers’ The Orissers, in some sort his English equivalent, if you wish to gauge the measure of his accomplishment and_ skill. This story, like so many of his, is planted in the high bourgeois society of Bordeaux. These hard-headed French businessmen have the awkward habit of breeding families of idealists, not all of whom surrender to middle-aged prudence, The Unknown Sea gives property the high place it always has in French life: money and the family, these are the

ingredients which engender- high tragedy. Here a family is ruined, and another, once its friends, contrives to make the disaster worse. But things are never what they seem; on their almost simultaneous death-beds, poor Lucienne Revyolou, whose husband embezzled his clients’ money and committed suicide, is happier, contemplating her half-rebuilt fortunes, than Leonie Costadet, who so disgustingly saved her money, dominated her sons, and saw them turn from her with ingratitude and contumely for her base and shameless nature, Family fortunes are not rebuilt without cost, and the Revolous have paid for their rehabilitation with a sordid misalliance. His psychological penetration of the relationships he has depicted between brother and sister, mother and _ son, lover and beloved, and that superb création, the clerk Landin, show Mauriac’s talent at its highest, unwearied by time. He is another Balzac come to judgment, but gifted with a ruthlessness and economy of means unknown to the earlier master, who was a massive "putter in." | This edition of the novels of Mauriac, of which The Unknown Sea is the third to appear, is gracefully translated by Gerard Hopkins and printed with an

unusual elegance,

David

Hall