Recent Fiction
Rodell, Katherine
Recent Fiction Men at Arms, by Evelyn Waugh. Little, Brown. 342 pp. $3.50. The Frontiers, by John Strach-ey. Random House. 250 pp. $3. Many Mansions, by Isabel Bol-ten. Charles Scribner's...
...But the thin thread of story (aside from the story of her reminiscences) seemed to me confusing, and I kept feeling that the young man the old lady picked up symbolized something that I just didn't get...
...Charles Scribner's Sons...
...215 pp...
...However, for sheer literary enjoyment there are pages in this book that are superb—and that is a good deal to get from any book...
...It seems to me that this may well be Waugh at his best—the satire, the irony, the incomparable observation are all there, but it is infinitely more relaxed, perhaps more mature...
...She writes sparingly, evocatively, yet with a sure sense selects the perfect incident, the perfect word, to express or evoke a mood or feeling...
...There is no trace of bitterness, of dramatics, of heroics—rather, it gives the curiously insulated and unreal world of the army in simple and matter of fact presentations...
...Since what we have here is only a third of the whole, a final judgment is obviously not only impossible, but unfair...
...There is apparently no desire to shock and horrify, as was apparent in some of the earlier books—unless, indeed, the very idea that a cultivated and sensitive man might look upon the war and the army as a way of personal redemption is in itself shocking...
...Perhaps it is because in this book its hero and his beloved regiment have not yet reached combat—that we will have to decide when the other volumes appear...
...It may be, too, that the difference is that of generations, for Waugh, who spent the whole war as a junior officer engaged in simple soldiering, is a good deal older than some of the cynical young men who have recently been bursting into print...
...Isabel Bolton, author of The Christmas Tree and Do I Wake or Sleep, is one of the most talented craftsmen writing today...
...It is at times wildly funny, and two of the three principal characters are fantastic to a degree that probably only Waugh could have imagined—but it is a serious, sensitive, and enormously interesting book...
...and yet this book stands in its own right, with no sense of incompletion, only (and this is a test of how well the author does his job) leaving a desire to know what happens next...
...And the old lady's feeling of protest against the clamor, the frenzy, and the despair of today are likewise valid and impressively done...
...It is a good book, a thought-provoking book, and, because it is clear where Strachey's own hopes and beliefs lie, a heartening book as well...
...Yet, oddly enough, this book has a good deal in common with From Here to Eternity...
...Men at Arms is of course a "war novel" in that it is about nothing but the war and the army—but the difference between it and, say, The Naked and the Dead is the difference between two worlds...
...and that, considering the world we live in, seems rather naive...
...The frontiers are not only those tangles of barbed wire which mark the arbitrary lines between nations, but the confusions of thought and philosophy which lie between man and his own intellectual and moral freedom...
...In Many Mansions an old lady's recollections of her childhood and youth, of that Victorian world of security and that Edwardian world of manner which today seem to us farther away than the Fall of Rome, are beautifully done...
...Reviewed by Katherine Rodell EVELYN WAUGH'S new novel, Men at Arms, is the first volume of a proposed trilogy, dealing with what has been described as "a long love affair between a civilian and the army...
...Well, we will have to wait and see, but even if the trilogy is never completed, this book will remain as an interesting and provocative footnote to our "war" literature...
...It may seem at first odd that John Strachey, M.P., author of The Coming Struggle [or Power, should have written a novel dealing with a shot down RAF flier and of his escape from Occupied France with the aid of the French Resistance...
...Although it is a good story, and one of the category which the Crime Club dubs "Chase and Adventure," it is primarily a novel of ideas...
Vol. 17 • January 1953 • No. 1
