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