TEEACHERY, TRAGEDY AND ROMANCE

(Heinemann. 10s. 6d.) Scott. (Hutchinson. 95. 6d.) Barker. (Hogarth Press. 10s. 6d.) Macmanus. (Cape. 9s. 6d.) (Seeker and Warburg. 10s. 6d.) (Wingate. 8s. 6d.) Rinehart. (Cassell. 9s, 6d.)
Reviewed by JULIAN HOLROYD
FOR the Record is a tale of the weariness of treachery. Miss Borden is an accomplished writer and she has clothed in the flimsiest of fictional dress, but so aborbit:41y that it is difficult to put the book down, the by now wellknown story of the swallowing of a small State by a larger one.
This is told in the first person by a man who, front his early inhibited years. has been infected with the virus of Communism.
Protagonist in the valiant warfare is Zatee. a priest loved and venerated by the people and still bearing on his frail old body the marks of Nazi torturings. He is, of course. trapped and brought to trial; and the hero, already aware of the hopelessness of his own fate, and beginning unwillingly to respond to the principles of decency and justice that inspire those he has been ordered to betray, reads (and here, for the first time, the tract element encroaches on an otherwise deft piece of story-telling) the description of a drug administered to those whose reason the Soviet masters of the country desire to liquidate. The individual tragedy of the self-duped has become one with the tragedy of a still struggling people.
Mrs. Montagu Scott, in her picture of Jarrow after the first World War, shows up a less obviously terrible but in its consequences an equally tragic form of social injustice.
The great ship-building centre had played a full part in the War effort; now, because of the five-year plan for shipping from Germany, the Jarrow yards were idle and her people starving.
The story is focused on one family of whom the youngest, a girl, is in danger of becoming as derelict as was her home town. Pen's tragedy is the tragedy of the interwar years; her victory is her own, for she is a courageous little person, full of the vitality with which this author knows so well how to endow her characters.
Miss Barker's title is entirely apt.
The whole of her book apologises for Charles Candy, a man whom one might almost term sub-ordinary, who had from his earliest years visualised himself as a swashbuckling hero, a man of terrific possibilities.
His wife fostered his spurious self while ministering to his actual, and it was only the intrusion into this neatly-ordered existence of an un
conventional sister-in-law that brought into his life a violence of which he had never dreamed, and which splintered the poor lookingglass of his illusions. Apology for a Hero is carefully built up, with flashes of real insight, but the theme itself grows too big for its author.
Mr. Maotnanus' new book puts one in mind of a slightly distorting mirror. His characters all have some twist that gives them their uneasy life. Mr. Golden, suave and solicitous, father of those two strange people Stevie and Maria (one hesitates to refer to them as " his children " because neither, one feels, has ever really been a child), Katie---refresningly straightforward-who loved them so unreservedly, and Larry who loved them in spite of his unhappy, misunderstood reserves. Then Miss Dreelin, most pathetic of them all, with her saccharine piety and hungry, hating heart.
It is round this schoolboy Stevie (so surprisingly understood by the large, deaf, distortion of a schoolmaster) that the narrative centres.
Age Without Pity is a story of the wishful thinking of a sentimentalist hardening into hatred.
Dick Graham, in Germany when the war is over, persuades a Catholic widow to marry him in a registrars office. He brings her home to England and later imports the son of
her first marriage. The boy has been efficiently trained by his Nazi Youth Organisation, and brings his twisted hatreds with him to wreck the marriage that had already begun so inauspiciously.
Mr. Max Peacock tells a spirited story of Stuart days: of the Court of King Charles II; of Colonel Blood circumventing the Puritan plot against the King's life; of the kidnapping of the King's ward, and of her rescue by the gallant who loved her. Men of Wrath is a swiftly moving, brightly coloured and readable romance.
After a lapse of some years Mary Roberts Rinehart returns to her public readable as ever. /1 Light in the Window tells of a war marriage and its post-war problems, set against the background of a publishing business in New York.