COMPTON-BURNETT & OTHERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 734, 7 August 1953, Page 13

COMPTON-BURNETT & OTHERS

THE PAST AND THE PRESENT, by Ivy Compton-Burnett; Victor Gollancz. English price, 12/6. IN THE WET, by Nevil Shute; Heinemann. Australian price 13/6. THE HUMAN KIND, by Alexander Baron; Jonathan Cape. English price, 10/6. A HUNGRY MAN DREAMS, by Margaret eae eek: Peter Davies. English price, {2 ]VvY COMPTON-BURNETT requires us to read every line’ and to go at least half-way to meet her if we wish to comprehend. Her books need tranquillity because they make no clamour for our attention. Admittedly a hen is being pecked to death’on the first page of The Present and the Past. But the passions and sinister events of her stories do not disturb the polite and very mannered style, that conveys them, The highly individual form, and the human ingredients-masters, servants and children-scarcely vary from book to book. Only the intangible content, the breath of life, varies. The Present and the Past has much less of this than Two Worlds and Their Ways. Like many good professionals who deliver regularly, Miss Compton-Burnett has _barren patches where she falls back on routine. This book seems to me a barren patch, but the routine itself is a delight. After the first shock of finding the present Queen of England and her

family used as characters in a novel, one is haunted by Nevil Shute’s proposition. He pictures a time, 30 years from now, when the Monarchy is the only force binding the Commonwealth. By then, overwork and restrictions have made the Monarch’s post so unattractive that the heirs are likely to refuse the succession. In these matters a novelist has more freedom than a journalist and may be bold in his fancies because it is "only a novel." Mr. Shute hits straight at his readers’ feelings and imagination, as he knows well how to do. The plot goes through contortions in coming to grips with prickly political ideas, and it is not Mr. Shute’s best novel, though it may be the most talked of. There are things in it that needed urgently to be said. ; Alexander Baron’s short stories or sketches, placed consecutively in autobiographical form, are sample experi--ences of a young Englishman over the last 20 years, Some of the early ones are irritating in their egotism and selfdramatisation; and it is a pity that, for the sake of filling out the picture, Mr. Baron has included writing so far below his best. In later sketches, partic:larly the ones of overseas battlefields, he is lifted out of himself into brilliant reporting. Miss Runbeck writes of a German immigrant who makes good in America, and of his son who makes good in our own times, but in another way and with less self-confidence. The general theme is fairly familiar in modern American fiction. It is a readable book which deals generously with many different kinds of people, and looks sincerely for permanent values. The big class of fiction to which it belongs-the good but less than great-is one of our best guides to the normal life and thought of other countries. It is our only steady contact with everyday, America.

D.F.

T.