Books: Business in the Bystreets--

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Business in the Bystreets*

ANGEL PAVEMENT—J. B. Priestley— Harper ($3).

Through the dingy parts of London, beloved of authors and others, pleasantly rambles this latest novel of J. B. Priestley. Characters and plot are both unexciting and vaguely familiar, but their simplicity is followed out with such a happy fertility of notions that one spends hour upon hour completely pleased. There is much reminiscent of Dombeys and Forsytes, but this book is content with a more humble standard of artistic verity, and if for that reason the thousands are less appreciative, the tens of thousands will be the more delighted.

Angel Pavement is a dock-tailed street shuffled in somewhere in E. C. 1 or E. C. 2, and one of the forgotten firms upon it is Twigg & Dersingham, Veneers and Inlays. Upon this languishing business bursts James Golspie, breezy and bumptious, fresh from the Baltic with the sole agency for foreign inlays and veneers procurable at a fabulous economy. In a day affairs are metamorphosed. Impressionable young Dersingham (Twigg is dead) makes a vague sort of manager out of Golspie, who scorns a partnership. Prosperity descends upon the stuffy office. Everyone is cheered, and if Smeeth, withered cashier, Lilian Matfield, condescending stenographer, or Turgis, scrawny young clerk, could any of them fatten they would do it.

Golspie proves to be a not unmixed blessing. His roaring conceit disturbs the office and is incompatible with Dersingham's public-school rationale. When Golspie's handsome daughter Lena appears she shows also that conscience does not run in the family, for she amuses herself at the expense of the lowly but amorous Turgis. Unable to see the fun, one night Turgis nearly strangles her, to his own and the reader's great surprise. For that evening he wallows in the melancholy of a murderer, and afterwards in (hat of a jobless man. Solace comes to him, however, in the unbeautiful Poppy Sellers, second-string stenographer.

Had his exit been later, it would have been less dramatic. Dersingham, suspicious of his ungentlemanly manager, has tried to purloin the Baltic agency for himself. But Golspie is too quick for him, and he manages so that Dersingham finds his firm caught in fatal advance contracts with prices of foreign stock raised prohibitively. At this juncture Golspie, with the resuscitated Lena, embarks for South America, while Miss Matfield, who had finally consented to a weekend trip with her tycoon, forlornly looks for him at Victoria station, waiting to be seduced. The book closes with glimpses of the Smeeth and Dersingham families, sitting about the collapsed business and hoping for a fall of manna, while Golspie floats vociferously down the Thames.

The Significance. Author Priestley writes freshly and smiles frequently. But his humor and facility engender their allied failings, and the book never bites through to reality. Lacking the sincere emotionalism of Dickens, he yet does not reach the labored truth of Galsworthy, though he has learned from both. Still his lively perceptions create a very readable and satisfying counterfeit of life. Accomplished craftsman, lie has an excellent understanding of the novelist's profession, a less imposing knowledge of the art.