RECENT FICTION
Hayes, E. Nelson
Recent Fiction by E. Nelson Hayes THERE was enough truth in Napoleon's witty half-falsehood about the English to enrage a generation of warring shopkeepers and to inspire a century of...
...6), consisting of poetry, fiction, and other prose from his magazine Horizon, from 1939 to 1950...
...Island in the Sun (Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy...
...3.75) has now been published for the first time in this country...
...596 pp...
...These three volumes by Tolkien are to be as treasured as—but there is no comparison, for they are incomparable in their spirit, beauty, passion, and wisdom...
...The finished portrait of figure and scene is realistic of detail but not wholly convincing...
...It epitomizes the dilemmas and dramas of a twilight-ing British Empire in a most exciting story of the mythical West Indies island of Santa Mara...
...None of these more deservedly gained recognition than the provocative, if depressing and sometimes even terrifying, George Orwell, who revolted against both right and left, then swung free into a dizzying individualism perhaps unmatched in modern literature...
...Finally, Houghton, Mifflin has issued the last volume, The Return of the King, (416 pp...
...Political intrigue, racial conflict, murder, adultery, arid the complex social life of a community in which the pigment of one's skin is the criterion of one's position express both in personal and in group terms the ugly and unpredictable aftermaths of slavery...
...it also passionately proclaims a cosmopolitanism...
...Anthony Powell, rightly considered one of England's leading contemporary novelists, takes us a bit higher on the social and economic scale to that world of intellect, of inherited wealth, and of accepted status which has thus far in the Twentieth Century survived bombardment...
...His defection, intentionally made similar to that of MacLean and Burgess, is explained and rationalized by a heaping high of impossible situations...
...214 pp...
...Well narrated, with many a name and story of the great and near great, it demonstrates the sympathy, sensitivity, understanding, and honesty which have made his career as publisher and editor such a literary success and such a solid achievement as to command respect and, in this instance, admiration...
...5), of J.R.R...
...The Whispering Gallery (Har-court...
...3.50) is social comedy at its best, not to be spoiled by summary or gloss...
...One of his early novels, Keep the Aspidistras Flying (Harcourt, Brace...
...Hamish Gleave, courtesy of the novel of the same name (Doubleday...
...The Acceptance World (Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy...
...He has written not a profound but a vastly entertaining and often instructive novel from which our Northerners and Southerners alike could learn much about good manners between different races...
...316 pp...
...Gleave, impatient of imperfection, intolerant of tolerance, and yearning for the imagined virtues of his father and his father's way of life —a nice Freudian touch—deserts to the Communists...
...its repelling, almost disgusting story is that of young Gordon Comstock who, during the depression, declared war on money by determining to live on as little as possible in metropolitan London...
...This vast poetic epic of prose ends in the ambiguous and tentative victory of the Hobbits and their allies over evil enemies...
...I thought Joyce Cary's literary versatility could no longer surprise me, but it has once again in A House of Children (Harper...
...Just to read it is to learn more than a dozen serious tomes will tell us about England during the Thirties...
...Recent Fiction by E. Nelson Hayes THERE was enough truth in Napoleon's witty half-falsehood about the English to enrage a generation of warring shopkeepers and to inspire a century of "revolutionary" British writers who have taken the petit bourgeoisie as one of their marks...
...Brace...
...3.50), an autobiographical novel in which the past is remembered not in tranquility, but in clear-eyed passion...
...Waugh is a professional writer with a conscience that heeds not only the needs of his own people, but those of all people, and above all those of individuals...
...276 pp...
...We watch his body and spirit degenerate into animalism as he sinks lower and lower into the nether world, almost reaching the level so shockingly described by Orwell in Down and Out in London and Paris...
...Not only does the volume eloquently testify to the liveness and liveliness of English literature since the beginning of World War II...
...5) is a longish chapter in the autobiography of John Lehmann, brother of Beatrix and Rosamond...
...3.95) is the latest, longest, and best of Alec Waugh's books...
...And precisely because of these dubious advantages, which have lead to a successful career in the Foreign Office, Mr...
...342 pp...
...538 pp...
...He has caught the energetic curiosity, the grasping sense of wonder, the sheer joy and love and loveliness which are the sheen of childhood too soon rubbed dull by adults and adulthood...
...While it shows some confusion of intent, some lack of sharp focus and clear-cut image, it disturbs deeply through its realistic depiction of that segment of the middle class which has since World War I been "downwardly mobile...
...Tolkien's trilogy which includes also The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, reviewed here earlier...
...Cyril Connolly, another publisher and editor, has compiled The Golden Horizon (University Books...
...248 pp...
...3.95), by Richard Llewellyn, author of the earlier and popular How Green Was My Valley, is of family more genteel, more fixed of mind and habit, more imbued with a blind feeling of superiority, and better heeled, than Gordon Comstock's...
Vol. 20 • April 1956 • No. 4
