Fiction

MAN, THE UNCHANGING
Conquer. By John Masefield. (Heinemann, 6s.).
Corridor of Mirrors. By Chris Massie. (Faber, 7s. fid.).
Swamp Water. By Vereen Bell. (Collins, 7s. 6d.)
Reviewed by FRANCIS BURDETT.
NO-ONE to-day can tell a story in 11 simpler and more beautiful prose than Mr. Masefield.
in Conquer hewrites of the Nika Rebellion in the sixth century and of how nearly it overthrew the throne of the Emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora at Byzantium. It is related
in the first person by Origen, a court official and friend and adviser of Justinian. He narrates, the events as they occur and of his own occasional part in them. For nearly a week the Emperor remained helpless and besieged in the Palace whilst the factions burnt the city and the great church of the Holy Wisdom.
So vivid is the telling that it might well be a contemporary event. There are revealing pictures of the leaders of the factions that prove, it proof were necessary, how unchanging and unchanged men are. " Rrefinus was proclaiming that men are naturally pure and virtuous, yet feeling that nine-tenths of the community ought to be murdered at once. He had undoubtedly a plan for reducing the population by ninetenths, not from bloodthirstiness, not even wholly from injured vanity, but from the narrowness of a perverted and frozen mind. He had no personal ambition; he was wholly the Devil's."
At the eleventh hour the revolt was quelled in a frightful way. Then we are told of the ideals of Jpstinian and Theodora for the restored city. "In all her notes, Theodora urged that the rebuilt city should be as an concing theatre set for a performance of wonder, with all the citizens the performers, each perfect In his part; in his Justinian, imaged forth his concept, of the centre of the world, about a Place of the Holy Wisdom. a church under a star, to which all the Wise Men of the world would turn, seeking and bringing wisdom." It is a book to be read for its prose, for what it narrates and for what it implies.
CORRIDOR of Mirrors is in several ways a dreadful book. It is extremely well written: an intensity and power pervade it
and an ever-increasing tension. From the moment that ,Mifanwy, happily married and the mother of three loved children, gets into the train that takes her from Wales to London on a shopping expedition. and on her own secret purpose, we are gripped. In the train she goes over in her mind that episode with Douglas Mangin that so affected her life and was so pregnant with horror. Her own present domestic happiness, as well as her own realised incompleteness, increases Live significance of what she recalls.
Mifanwy, like most of us, was not altogether what she seemed. She was impressed on her first introduction to Douglas with his personality and his early nineteenth-century clothes. The third meeting took place one evening in a deserted London square, a hansom cab, Tong out of date, passes, stops, and returning, Douglas. its owner and occupant, invites her to a mad gallop round the square, and, excited and pleased by the novel experience, she returns with him to his home. The house suited Douglas with its eighteenth-century beauty and distinction. He, she learns, paints. but only for his own amusement. His subject is girls in period dress. The house is filled with beautiful dresses of bygone centuries and Mifanwy, who is vain of her beauty, is presented with a crinoline dress and all its appurtenances. Excited, captivated, charmed by Douglas' attitude to beauty, and especially to beautiful clothes, she shares for a time with him his mania for dressing her up in various past modes. She, in response to his unspoken desire, plays to perfection the part of a greedy, trusting, beautiful child: a doll that can consciouttly plas its part. Love has no part in this, for have would destroy the illusion. She no less than he is, for a time, wholly absorbed in a game that is something more than a game. For him it is an overmastering and destructive obsession, whilst she retains an inner mastery over herself.
The episode ends; she marries and lives in Wales. Later there is a murder trial and Douglas is condemned to death. The shop ping expedition is subsequent to this. On the return journey to Wales we are told , more of the past and the significance of her Visit to Madame Tussaud's. Finally, we see " The Document," wholly unexpected and terribly revealing, which, whilst confirming much of what we already know, upsets yet more.
It is an extraordinary revelation of a thwarted nature, an enveloping love and, on the part of Douglas, of conscious or more probably unconscious cruelty. The book is a pathological study done with insight and subtlety. But because it is pathological hardly suitable or interesting to, the general reader.
IF it were not for the intolerable American • jargon which fills so many pages of Swamp Water it would be a good story of a young man and his dog and their adventures in the jungle swamp of Okepenokee. Ben and his hound, Trouble, venture into the swamp and come across the outlawed Tom Keeper. They become secret partners and trappers. Discovery is inevitable and equally so the tragedy that follows.
The sinister beauty of the swamp and its teeming animal life. alligators, coons, snakes, panthers and multitudes of birds are ably described. There are vivid pictures of the primitive settlers.
Film
ANDY HARDY ONCE MORE
Life Begins for Andy Hardy
IT is some time since I saw an Andy Hardy • picture and so I do not regard the
bouncing boy with the jaundiced eye of some of the critics. More than that, I applaud much in this latest phase of the lad's development and consider something is to be learned therefrom,
For instance. Judge Hardy has the next six years all scheduled for his son—at a university studying the law. But Andy wants to study life at closer quarters than that and so he petsuades his Pop to let him go to the city and get himself • a job. He joyfully takes a header into the New York maelstrom only to hit his head on the rocks of hunger, indifference, cold charity and colder vice. He befriends a boy who wants to earn his living by dancing—and the boy dies of a cracked heart on the floor of Andy's bathroom. Faithful Judy Garland watches the modern pilgrim's progress and when she thinks things are getting too drastic even for tough little Andy she dials " Trunks " and Pop comes up to investigate. But not before Andy has fainted with hunger on the floor of a shiningly efficient office where he has after much heart and foot weariness landed himself a job.
Lewis Stone is then given the formidable task of putting over on the screen a talk on sex fidelity. He does it so expertly and with such a lack of " preaching " that he merits an Oscar • for the cleverest sequence or the year.
„a C.
Empire
International Squadron
THIS film, if it does nothing else, demon• strates the loss the cinema has sus tained by the death of James Stephenson. In his later pictures. it is true, one gets the impression of a sick man but his acting never lost its subtlety and his personality was such that it always dominated, without any apparent effort on his part, any scene in which he appeared.
Here he is, a member of the R.A.F., whose overwhelming friend, an American playboy airman comes over to help on the war and who by his thoughtless pranks and his attitude that the war is just another stunt costs the life of a valuable pilot.
I wonder what our pilots will think of the idea of holding a burning feather duster outside the plane to make the enemy think it is on ffre 13. C.
Warners