Books: Far from the Madding Fight

MARLING HALL — Angela Thirkell —Knopf ($2.50).

Novelist Angela Thirkell has achieved a devoted readership by reducing the English novel to a humorous commentary on almost complete inaction. Like her master, Anthony Trollope, whose literary landscape (Barsetshire) she has borrowed for her own books, Novelist Thirkell’s world is timeless, cloudless, windless. Practically the only motion is that of the British gentry and middle classes pouring tea. Practically the only sound is the titters, snickers and snorts of confirmed Thirkell readers at the foibles of familiar Thirkell characters.

Marling Hall, Thirkellians will be glad to learn, is much like other Thirkell novels (The Brandons, Northbridge Rectory). Its setting is an English country house in Barsetshire, with inevitable chicken runs, dogs, servants’ quarters, eminences and inheritance taxes. Tucked into the folds is a plot which unravels aimlessly without haste.

Heroine and Marling daughter, Lettice Watson, is the widow of a naval officer killed at Dunkirk. Lettice lives in the Marling stables, which are fitted up with electricity, a drawing room, nurseries. She is courted by three youths: a poet, covered with long hair and conceit; an R.A.F. officer; an Army captain. This wooing is all the plot there is.

Novelist Thirkell simply shows the three suitors weaving in & out of Marling Hall and stables, records their chatter and well-bred rivalry with a pallid smile. Color is added by a village idiot (“mentally far below even the standard that the BBC sets in its broadcasts to the Forces”); a British governess who has scrubbed the infant faces of half the nobility of England (“there’s nothing like the English nursery for making ladies and gentlemen”); a French governess to whom the Britishers speak in their own version of he French language (“J’admeer beaucoup General de Gole, le leader des Free French”).

As the moan of doves in immemorial elms drowns out the faint echo of World War II, Authoress Thirkell seems to say hat while her Marling gentry may be vague and snobbish, they are good people o depend on in a crisis that never really comes. With a few comedy feathers stuck in an old hat, she leads the Marlings’ stately stroll through the outskirts of war, leaves them peering absently toward the uknown tomorrow.