Four Interesting British Novels

...The "problem" of the novel is how one should deal with those intellectuals who have naively or calculatingly become instruments of the Communist party...

...Thorgill is worth reading because of the skillful handling of a situation that is possible and of characters as probable as ourselves...

...I feel that it would have been better if Reichenbach had not become emotionally involved with Franziska, Zempelmark's wife, if Reichenbach's motivation had been described altogether in terms of the conflict between his Christianity and his anti-Nazi politics...

...His patient, Zempelmark, undoubtedly was responsible for the execution of hostages, but it is also true that what he ordered he had been ordered to do and that such executions had become as conventional in the German Army as any other military order...

...This development does not argue a softening of head, but does show a softening of heart...

...Particularly in Hemlock and After, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, and the current A Bit Off the Map, he fulfills his definition of himself...

...In other words, they have learned rather more from Dickens and Fielding than from Henry James and Proust...

...In The Go-Between, the Eustace and Hilda trilogy, The Boat —in all of his best novels—Hartley is so intensely concerned with the inner life of his maj or characters that their external actions become almost unimportant...

...The intelligent reader will forget the defective ending, not forget the penetrating exploration of a problem that is nearly everybody's...

...At their equally infrequent worst, the novels of L. P. Hartley seem to be about characters who are never what they appear to be...

...There is Kenny, the Teddy-boy who seems to be a "mixture of John Keats and cretinism...

...You won't find an interior monologue Joyce would admit into Ulysses in any of them...

...Leadbitter is any man of any class who too long refuses the life of the heart...

...Not only March the Ninth but his ten earlier novels deserve to be read seriously...

...The situation in R. C. Hutchinson's March the Ninth is altogether probable...

...Tanner, a schoolmaster's wife who feels our age needs both manners and love...

...Would turning him over to authorities who would execute him really help anything, Reichenbach wonders, or would it merely continue a series of retaliations that might stretch into infinity...

...Though the picture of university life is less authentic than C. P. Snow's in The Masters and though the action seems more obviously contrived than it was in her earlier novel, Europe to Let, A Cup of Tea for Mr...

...March the Ninth is a good imperfect novel...

...Thorgill or in her other good novels, would probe themselves as deeply as Stephen Daedalus did or reject their environment to do so...

...But his overt expression of his feelings shocks Lady Franklin back into suppression and himself back into unfeeling...

...He is deeply concerned with the search for values, individual and personal, and portrays with sympathy the bewildered men of good intentions in this age of anxiety and be-fuddlement...

...Leadbitter, the hardened soldier become chauffeur, "was not ignorant of the emotions...

...Good but over-mordant in his first two collections of stories, he has developed into a writer who makes us see clearly the absurdity, the pathos and the honor of the rooted and rootless who are trying to find the way to the good life...

...Though Angus Wilson is a more experimental writer than either Hutchinson or Storm Jameson, he is a humanist in the E. M. Forster tradition who believes that the "reader should be unaware of techniques...

...But they deal with man confronted and affronted by society—not with man exclusively preoccupied with the secret places in himself...

...He has defined himself as a writer of comedy of manners, "trying to get back to the Dickens tradition...

...Because of the superlative melodrama of its conclusion, The Hireling is not as successful as the three masterpieces that preceded it, but it is still a very good novel...

...Maurice Lie-big, wrho wants a cause to serve and ends up being kind to his uncle's mistress...

...It takes Leadbitter's death and his final declaration of love to shock her again out of self-imprisonment...

...Lord Peacehaven, who fancies himself still an industrial dictator...

...One way of describing The Hireling would be to say that it embodies a meeting of repressions...

...Of course, there is concern with what people feel and think as well as with what they do...

...Particularly convincing are the portraits of Vancura, the Czech expatriate who deplores the modern fact that "the victims have become bores," and the characterization of Thomas Paget, the aristocrat, physicist and Communist who parodies Christ...

...But they are concerned primarily with their functioning in the Oxford society that represents the larger society that contains it...

...Reichenbach, who is both a confirmed anti-Nazi and a kindly Christian, is persuaded to leave his duties in Trieste to perform an emergency operation on a presumed Swiss...

...In her attempt to escape from the constriction of herself, to get away from her peers who do not want to see each other "for longer than a meal takes," she explores his otherness so gently that he decides he is for the first time in love, that barriers of class and income can be made to disappear, that he can allow himself to feel...

...When he discovers that his "Swiss" is actually a German officer who was responsible for the execution of hostages in Yugoslavia, he has become too deeply involved in the right-and-wrong of his patient's situation to withdraw to the comfort of his own secure position...

...Their craft, for the most part, is what has become slurringly known as traditional...

...The action centers about the attempt of the Communist underground to discredit the eminent writer, Miles Hudson, who has turned publicly against the party to which he had belonged...

...This does not mean that they are thoughtless, unaware, or insensitive...

...Lady Franklin is any woman who cannot love herself enough to care deeply for others...

...Not one of Storm Jameson's characters, in A Cup of Tea for Mr...

...But, granting her fictional premise, what happens illuminates the nature of university life and the life outside...

...The best of them accept reluctantly the inevitable egoism of the human personality, are on guard against any society that might leave "man at the mercy of man," recognize that there can be moments of grace in the life of anyone...

...The action, like the wild ride in The Boat and the suicide in The Go-Between, is more like an eruption of the man within than an effect caused by what outsiders can perceive...

...Lady Franklin, who hires him and his car frequently, tries to talk out to him the feelings of guilt she has about her dead husband she did not love adequately...

...At its infrequent worst, Angus Wilson's fiction appears to be too exclusively about people who are only what they appear to be...

...he was in flight from them...

...But I make my reservations diffidently about a genuinely moving novel that makes us feel and think about a major problem of our time, and I believe that R. C. Hutchinson is underestimated both as a moral force and as a craftsman...

...I feel also that the novel could have been drawn more tautly together and have dispensed with some of the minor characters...

...To a greater degree than any other modern novelist, Hartley makes you feel the internal conflicts that must either be released gradually or explode...

...I do not mean to imply that Wilson has lost his shrewd ability to detect and show up phoneys, like the pseudo-angry young men of the title storv, but his concern is less exclusively with the darling dodos in the wrong set he used to castigate— indeed, his concern with unamiable pretenders has become almost peripheral...

...In A Bit Off the Map, the seekers come from nearly all the castes and classes of contemporary England...

...Thorgill (Harper, $3.50), R. C. Hutchinson's March the Ninth (Rinehart, $4.50), L. P. Hartley's The Hireling (Rinehart, $3.50), and Angus Wilson's A Bit Off the Map (Viking, S3.50) are very diverse works of fiction, but they have one characteristic in common: They are all deviants from the tradition of the psychological novel Proust, James, Woolf and Joyce followed or innovated...

...In technique, to borrow a phrase from Auden, they are colonizers rather than explorers...

...I personally find it difficult to believe that Oxford or any university could contain as efficient a group of subversives as Miss Jameson portrays...

...The characters are put so fittingly in action that even a very short story like "A Flat Country Christmas," with its skillful evocation of Ray f whose cause died with the Spanish Lovalists' defeat), can be deeply moving...

...Reichenbach ends up by trying to help Zempelmark to escape and break the chain of retaliation, because he is more Christian than anti-Nazi...

...He fails and Zempelmark dies, but the reader is left to ponder not only this specific chain of retaliation but also the whole moral problem of who is guiltless enough to punish or to help punish...

...They help us to understand the world we, will it or not, live in...