Books: British Family Life

SLEEP IN PEACE—Phyllis Bentley—Macmillan ($2.50).

DAUGHTERS AND SONS—I. Compton-Burnett—Norton ($2.50).

So many British novels are family chronicles that modern British fiction sometimes looks more like contributions to Burke’s Landed Gentry than to literature. Last week two better-than-average female British novelists added two more family chronicles to the lengthening shelf.

In Sleep in Peace, the partners in a Yorkshire textile mill, Alfred Armistead, liberal Conservative, and Henry Hinch-liffe, conservative Liberal, are posed as two representative, conflicting types of Victorian capitalism. Their children are involved in the conflict that dissolves the partnership, are nevertheless drawn together in their common rebellion against their parents. Author Bentley makes this two-way conflict the most interesting part of her story, which otherwise runs so true to form it resembles the competent playing of a piece of music that everybody knows. Out of family conflicts, the War, Depression, the two families produce one unhappy intermarriage, one well-known liberal, one feminist, one famous artist, one War victim, one monk. The third generation turns out a talented left-wing artist, an illegitimate-born Communist, an avowed Fascist. Despite this disturbing picture of British family history, Author Bentley takes a calm view of the future: If half of the preceding generation muddled through, reasons one of her characters, why fear the fate of the next one?

Less substantial but funnier, Daughters and Sons varies the conventional family novel by concentrating three squabbling generations under one roof. The Ponsonbys consist of a hard-bitten old grandmother, her bludgeoning spinster daughter, her son (a popular author on the down grade), his five children. Isolated in a big country house, the Ponsonby children while away their leisure making dirty cracks about each other, unite in making dirty cracks about their grandmother, who repays them with interest. All hands join in deviling the succession of governesses. For awhile it looks as though they have met their match when one ruthlessly honest governess gives them as good as she gets; but when she herself catches the Ponsonby family disease of dishonesty, all attempts at family betterment end. Only hopeful one left is the eleven-year-old daughter, who sheds sarcasm as a duck sheds water, thinks Ponsonby malice and Ponsonby messes are awfully funny.