Books: Magnified Obsession

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HERE COMES A CANDLE—Storm Jameson—Macmillan ($2.50).

Among the English novelists who bite as well as bark, Storm Jameson is a lively terrier. She pounces on an idea, gets a firm grip on it, shakes, worries, chews it to bits. Sometimes she gets her teeth into a marrowy morsel, sometimes merely chews an old hat. For several years she has been chewing a huge bone—The Mirror in Darkness, a pageant of post-War England, three volumes so far, three more to come. Every once in a while she buries the bone (but not her bitterness—the War killed her brother, most of her men friends) and writes about Yorkshire moors or shipbuilding or the avocations of a harlot.

In her latest, Here Comes a Candle, her theme is tiny, but so industriously does she magnify it that every character is touched by it, obsessed by it. The setting is New Moon Yard, an old tinderbox of a tenement in London. Some of the characters, mostly tenants of the Yard: a happy old Italian who hoards pound notes against a return to Palermo, scorns wasting two or three of them on fire insurance; an ex-Captain who lost all his nerve under fire, all his possessions in a fire; a cabinetmaker, who keeps forgetting to mail a letter to an insurance company taking out a fire policy; a profiteer, who wants to build a cinema on the Yard's site, wishes a fire would save him the trouble of razing it; a wistful bum who pillages the Yard garbage bins with a candle in his shaky hand; a couple of professional arsonists.

Climax: a fire.