"The Furys"—A Story of the World's Working Classes

Radio Record, Volume VIII, Issue 42, 26 April 1935, Page 22

"The Furys"—A Story of the World's Working Classes

HERE is nothing of the gay insoucciance of Michael Arlen’s Mayfair about "The Furys." In fact, the people who come to life between the covers of James Hanley’s splendid book might be creatures of another planet. Life for them is a grim and earnest business, and almost their only pleasureif pleasure you could call it-is a weekly seat in the pit of the Lyric Theatre. The plot and the book are the family of Fury. The principal characters are Mrs. Fury, who is a woman. built on an heroic scale; Denny Fury, her husband-once a seaman and now a railwayman-an old grandfather, and children-three boys and a girl-of widely. differing fortune. The background is the city, large, impersonal, but as vital as those who have their being in it. Mrs, Fury dominates the story. She is the woman who would raise her family above their surroundings. Not a mere yulgar climber-she is too big and too earnest for that-but a woman who craves. to see her children’s feet set.on the ladder | that leads to respect and wisdom. She is the driving force behind her husband. and yet at times she leans with a childlike weariness upon her aged and decrepit father who is scarcely tolerated in the house by the rest of the family. When she learns that her son Peterthe son who is her pride and who has kept her near to poverty during his

years at school in Ireland-is coming home.again, she turns to her father Mrs. Fury felt a lump come into her throat as she looked at him now. He would never know the boy. How he‘had changed. He seemed to have grown smaller, ‘His skin was the colour of old parchment, it was dry and leathery like that of a bird. The eyes set beneath the shaggy white brows appear like two tiny beads. His huge hands wandered about the chair, as though the little life left in him had swum into these hands. They rose and fell, dragged themselves to one arm of the chair, then the other. "No," thought the woman, "he will never recognise him, nor will Peter his granddad. » She. tried, to conjure up in her imagination the figure of her son as she had last seen him, with his small, neat figure dressed in a stiff navy blue suit, his round red face, his large eyes, brown as her own.... Perhaps now he woulc be tall and erect, like her own mother had been, "The Furys" has been painted on a bold ecanvas-there are strike scenes, magnificent in their realism, and a police charge which recalled the horrors of Peterloo. At one moment the author reminds one of Lionel Brittan, the writer of "Hunger and Love"; in another place he hag the fine detail and pitiless minuteness of: John Cowper Powys. In fact, the latter, in a long letter to the author, said: I do congratulate from my heart.,.. It’s a great book; the realism convincing, the

characters convincing, and. the subject tragic in the noblest sense. .. Here ig a book that should lift its author into the ranks of the great writers of to-day. It is'a major work and one which embraces the entire world of the working class, "The Furys.’ James. Handley. Chatto and Windus, Our copy. from. the, publishers,