BOO KS
99
barmaid is the novelist's mistress, and the young man murders both the
girl and the novelist. The Eastwoods then settle back into marriage.
I t is perhaps unfair to Mr. Hartley to summarize the main lines
of his plot this way, for the strength of his novel lies in the amount
of just observation he can bring under the control of its meticulously
planned structure. But in the end there is something dead about
A
Perfect Woman.
The conception of the central characters, the Eastwoods,
is too simple for a novel so nobly planned. The robot-like simplicity of
Harold Eastwood's feelings is a convention. The same thing is true, in
a smaller degree, of Isabel. These are characters devised to be the butt
of satire; in a realistic novel they are unbelievable. Mr. Hartley has at–
tempted in
A Perfect Woman
something like what Mr. Marquand at–
tempted in
Sincerely, Willis Wayde
and has failed for very much the
~ame
reason.
The last book among these eight which deserves to be taken quite
seriously is Mr. O'Brian's. Mr. O'Brian is a virtuoso of language and
of narrative deployment, what one would expect Mr. Frank O'Connor to
be like if he could add to his sense of comedy and pathos a sense of
terror, for like Mr. O'Connor, Mr. O'Brian can use fantasy as an
integral part of reality, as he does in "The Drawing of the Curranwood
Badgers," where a minutely detailed account of the digging out of the
badgers grows more and more ominous, until the two hunters find them–
selves looking down wi th horror at something very strange: "Aloysius'
other hand came up to cross him, came blindly.... A harsh noise in
his throat there was, . . . and Gethin's tongue ran of itself and said,
'But a badger has no hands ...
?'"
It is this power which makes Mr.
O'Brian so skilful with abnormal states of consciousness. Sometimes the
abnormality is a simple one, as when a girl with a terror of heights can–
not resist pushing her jolly, un terrified husband as he leans over the cliff
he has dragged her back to so many times; "Samphire," the story is
called. Sometimes it is the advanced but reasoned abnormality of "The
Clockmender," the man whose weakness for exactitude has led him to
identify his whole consciousness with his collection of clocks. Stories of
this kind are the finest and the most frequent in Mr. O'Brian's book;
they constitute about half of it. But there are also fine stories of a
more conventional kind, like "A Minor Operation" (during which the
patient dies); and there is one brilliantly comic story, "The Virtuous
Peleg," about a simple Irish saint's battle with a whole army of devils
who, like the police in a Keystone-cops comedy, always get the worst
of it.
If
Mr. O'Brian secms occasionally to have worked up a story in
