OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerics.)
The evolution of the long novel appears to be following that of the human race. Instead of the individual, the family now threatens to become the central unit. I confess that this prospect, as evidenced by Three Pretty Men (Methuen), fills me with some just apprehension. Mr. Gilbert Cannan has set out to tell how a Scotch family, three brothers, a mother, and some sisters in the background, determines to make its fortune in a South Lancashire city (very recognisable under the name of Thrigsby), and how eventually all but one of them succeed. It is a long book and a close; and the dialogue (which of its kind is good dialogue, crisp and illuminating), being printed without the usual spacing, produces an indigestible-looking page that might well alarm a reader out for enjoyment. The book, in its record of the progress of the three, Jamie and Tom and John, is really more a study of social conditions in mid-Victorian Manchester than a work of imagination. But there is clever character-drawing in it, especially in Jamie, who from a worldly point of view is the failure of the group, making no money, and drifting through journalism to emigration; and in the finely suggested figure of Tibby, the ill-favoured kitchen drudge, who is his real centre of inspiration. But first and last it remains a dull business, partly from an entire lack of humour, partly from the absence of any settled plan that might help one to endure the dreariness of the setting. Mr. Cannan certainly knows his subject, and few novels indeed have given me, rightly or wrongly, a greater suggestion of autobiography. But for once the art of being exhaustive without being exhausting seems to have eluded him.
If you want really to get a picture of war as she is waged by an obscure unit in the thick of the dirtiest, dampest and most depressing part, read Patrick MacGill's The Red Horizon (Jenkins). Here we meet the author of The Children of the Dead End and The Rat Pit as Rifleman 3008 of the London Irish, involved in the grim routine of the firing line—reliefs, diggings and repairs, sentry-go's, stand-to's, reserves, working and covering parties, billets; and so da capo. With a rare artistic intuition, instead of diffusing his effects in a riot of general impressions, he has confined himself to a record of the doings of his section, and I have read nothing that gives anything near so convincing an impression of the truth, at once splendid and bitter. It is a privilege to be shown, through the medium of an imaginative temperament, the fine comradeship of the trenches, the heroism that shines through the haunting fear of death, mostly conquered with a laugh, but sometimes frankly expressed in the pathetic desire for a "blighty" wound—a wound just serious enough to send the envied hero home. You won't get much of the Romance of War out of this strong piece of work, except the jolly sort of romance of the little Cockney, Bill, who, when the regiment in reserve was crouching in the trench under heavy shelling, cheered it by delivering himself characteristically as follows: "If I kick the bucket don't put a cross with ''E died for 'is King and Country' over me. A bully beef tin at my 'ead will do, and—' 'E died doin' fatigues on an empty stomach.'"
If you were the hero of a novel, the only possible mate for the heroine, and, in short, taking you all round, an important sort of person, would you not consider yourself hardly treated if you were not allowed to make the girl's acquaintance till page 311, when you knew there were to be only three hundred and thirty-two pages in the book? I disagree entirely with Roger Quinn, in Miss Beatrice Kelston's The Blows of Circumstance (Long), when, reviewing the affair, he writes to a friend: "It's amazing that we fell short of perfect understanding." My opinion is that Roger did extremely well in the little time he was given. Of course he had conducted the case for the Crown when she was in the dock, charged with murder, and that formed a sort of bond between them; but even so I don't see how he could have got much nearer to a complete understanding, considering that the girl dashed off and committed suicide almost before he could get a word in. If my enjoyment of The Blows of Circumstance waned towards the end and the book seemed to me to lose grip, it was because the sudden discovery on the part of Quinn and Amalie Gayne that they were soul-mates was too sudden to convince me. Up to the beginning of the trial the story has vigour and an air of probability, with its careful building-up of Amalie's curious character and the vivid description of her life on the stage and off it in the society of a drug-taking husband; but from that point on it seemed to me to fail. In real life all might have happened just as it is set down, but real life is sloppily constructed. A novel must obey more rigid rules. Miss Kelston writes extremely well, if a trifle too gloomily for my personal taste, but she cannot afford to ignore the laws of construction and hurl her big situation at the reader with an abrupt "Take it or leave it!"
For Thirteen Stories I've nought but praise,
Although you'll find when you overhaul them
They're best described, in the author's phrase,
As "sketches, studies or what do you call them?"
Per Duckworth forward and back you trek;
You may book right through or choose between a
Peep at Perim or Chapultepec,
Sahara, Hampstead or Argentina.
You may halt, if you will, at phalansteries,
Where Mescaleros on maturangos
Eat or drink (whichever it is)
Baked tortillas and twang changangos.
Suchlike things come easy as pie
To the author, Mr. Cunninghame Graham,
And I quite like 'em so long as I
Have only to read and not to say 'em.
If 'tis love that makes the world go round, it is certainly the same force that maintains the circulation of the libraries. So it is safe to assume that such a title as The Little Blind God (Melrose) is itself enough to preserve the volume that bears it from any wallflower existence on the less frequented shelves. But as for the story to which Miss Anne Weaver has given this attractive name I find it very difficult to say anything, good or bad. Only once did its placid unfolding cause me any emotion, even the mildest. Old Lady Conyers had adopted as companion one Mistress Barbara Cardeen (need I interpolate that the time is the eighteenth century? O brocade and lavender! O swords and candle-light and general tushery!), whom she found playing a violin in the streets of Bath—I should say the Bath; let us above all things be atmospheric! As her ladyship had a most eligible son, and as Barbara—the chit!—naturally hadn't a guinea, I own I was slightly astonished to find the dowager positively hurling the young couple at each other's heads. However, doubtless Lady Conyers, as herself a novel-reader, knew that the thing was inevitable anyway. But before this there were of course the misunderstandings. Mistress Barbara had, in the violin days, a half-brother and this gentleman very obligingly turns up incognito at Conyers End, and even goes to the expense of hiring rooms in a cottage on the estate, for no other purpose in life than that his conspicuously clandestine meetings with the fair Barbara should be misconstrued as an assignation. Ha! out, rapiers! and let us be ready for the moment when Barbara, rushing between the combatants, receives in her own bosom the blade intended for——, etc. But of course not enough blade to endanger the happy ending. So there you are. A placid, undistinguished tale, that may be commended as nourishment or soporific according to the taste and fancy of the reader.
