Embezzlers

This novel, published in 1927, is a satire of Soviet bureaucracy. The embezzlers of the title embark on an embarrassing tour that takes them from Moscow to Leningrad and Kharkov and several small towns en route. They journey in pursuit of the high life but end up in abject poverty and captivity. The satire is a commentary on the greed of individuals in the context of the New Economic Policy begun in 1921.

The author, Valentin Kataev (born 28 January 1897), grew up in Odessa in present-day Ukraine. In 1915, without completing his secondary education, he volunteered to serve in the artillery of the Russian Imperial Army. During his active service, he was gassed and twice wounded and by the time of the October Revolution was an invalid in hospital. He fought in the civil war, at first as a White Army volunteer, and was later imprisoned for eight months. His first poem was published in 1910; he began writing short stories during the war; Embezzlers was his first novel.

At the start of the novel the trend for embezzling is introduced:
“They grab some government money, hop in a cab and away they go, nobody knows where. I imagine they drift around from town to town. I ran across an article today, for instance, where it said that in October at least 1,500 people left like that from different offices around Moscow.”
This information is told to Filipp Prokhorov, the chief accountant, by Nikita, a colleague. Filipp sometimes approached his work “with a sovereign air”:
“he would imagine himself to be nothing less than an experienced general courageously and astutely directing enormously intricate military manoeuvres from his vantage point on a hill above the battlefield.”
His military career had fed his imagination. He served in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and then was made a captain in the army reserves. The First World War “hardly bothered [this] reserve captain at all” as “thanks to his wife’s connections and the efforts of the firm for which he was working at the time [he] contrived to get an exemption.”

Filipp’s partner in the embezzlement spree is his cashier, Vanechka. When on the expedition he returns to the main town (Kalinov) near his childhood home, he perceives it as he did before he left home:
“It was as if nothing had happened to him since that childhood... no draft in 1916, no service in a field bakery, no company headquarters in Moscow, no evacuation stations, no Red Army guard battalion...”

Vain Adventure

This partly-autobiographical novel, written in 1923 and published in 1927, is set in London and Oxford during the first quarter of the 20th century. Its central character is Mary Carthew, an only child, whose father has business connections with Germany when she is young. When the war breaks out, her father's business goes into decline and Mary is removed from boarding school. The latter part of the novel is concerned with her life among the pioneering female students at Oxford.

The author, Kathleen Gibberd (born 5 March 1897), grew up in Hornsey and Enfield in Middlesex. Her mother died in 1905 and her father remarried in 1910. She had two brothers, one from each marriage, but neither were old enough to serve in the war. Her cousin, John Alexander Gibberd (born in 1898), was her closest relative to serve in the war (with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve). Like the central character of this novel, she was a student at St Hilda’s, Oxford. Although she went on to write more than 20 non-fiction books, Vain Adventure was her only novel.

The author reflects on the experience of grief and loss common to so many people in the post-war years by transferring her own mother’s death to the adulthood of Mary Carthew. Mary’s mother tells her daughter that she is excited to watch her grow up:
“Don't you see it has been an adventure to me just to see what sort of a woman you are going to grow into?”
Discussing her mother’s death with an elderly friend, Mary ponders life as an adventure:
“I've always liked to think of life as an adventure.”
He replies: “Well, can you have an adventure if you know exactly what's going to happen in the end?"
“We have set sail in our ship, you know, and we can either hoist our courage or we can spend our time looking for danger ahead of us. We choose between faith and fear.”

While at Oxford Mary is involved in founding the Oxford Peace Research Group. Its verdict on warfare was clear:
“the ultimate causes of war lay in defective systems of education throughout the world — defective, because they provided instruction for the mind instead of promoting the growth of the spirit.”
A friend makes a speech to a meeting of the group:
“When people talk about war being inevitable because of the fighting instinct in man, they are talking nonsense. There is no instinct which makes a man at certain intervals in his life go out and kill some one who he has never seen.”

Solemn Boy

This novel, published in 1927, is set in New Zealand, Australia and Fiji. Partly autobiographical, it describes the small-town childhood of the central character, Timothy Shrove, and his early adulthood as a newspaper reporter in Auckland and Sydney.

The author, Hector Bolitho (born 28 May 1897), grew up in Opotiki on the Bay of Plenty. On leaving school he began a career in journalism. He became a corporal in the New Zealand Army and was stationed at Featherston Military Camp near Wairarapa. There he edited the camp’s weekly newspaper. His first book was published in 1919 and he continued his career as a writer after he moved to England in 1923. He served as an intelligence officer in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve during the Second World War and edited the Royal Air Force Weekly Bulletin.

At the centre of this novel is Timothy’s initimate friendship with John Fielding. They are introduced by their mothers at church when John is ten years old and Timothy eight. This encounter is said to be momentous:
“Timothy had met somebody! Friendless, except for the people who lived just beyond his garden fence, the meeting with John was a new experience for him.”
Timothy learns confidence through his friendship with John:
“In two years, with school, and the companionship of  John, Timothy passed from the charming unrealities of extreme childhood, to the subterfuges, dirty knees, schems and enthusiams of boyhood.”

At the outbreak of war, Timothy is moved to write his first poem, attacking the Kaiser for having
“the blood of Belgium on his lips
and child-blood on his hands.”
It was published in the local newspaper and Timothy began to think of writing as a future career. When John leaves for university in Auckland, Timothy, aged 16, abandons his home and school life to join him there and gets a job as a newspaper reporter. A year later John enlists in the army and when, after training, John is about to be sent overseas, Timothy reflects on their friendship:
“The strong, surging river in his life had been John — clumsy, big-hearted, generous, real John.”
While emigrating to Australia, Timothy receives a wireless message from his father to tell him that John had been killed in action in France. He imagines explaining how he feels to his family:
“If he said to them: ‘John is dead and with him all the beauty of the 19 years I have lived’, they'd think he was mad.”

In Sydney he prospers in his career as a journalist and falls in love. When Timothy marries Grace, he is insistent on wanting a son. When the child is born, he remembers his closest friend:
“Grace was very ill — son healthy. He'd call the boy John Fielding Shrove. He remembered the last day when John and he had wandered about the hills of Kawau. That was before he went to the war. He was killed. And now Grace was ill... and a son — healthy — had come to take their place but mostly John’s place.”

Soldiers’ Pay

This impressive debut novel, published in 1926, concerns an American aviator and his return to his home in Georgia at the end of the war.

The author, William Faulkner (born 25 September 1897), began writing poetry as a teenager but did not turn his hand to fiction until the mid-1920s. He was unable to enlist in the United States forces in 1918 because he wasn't tall enough. Although he was admitted to the service of the Royal Canadian Air Force, the war had ended before he could see active service. Beginning with this novel, Faulkner’s fiction was received with critical acclaim and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.

The central character, Donald Mahon, son of a clergyman, has been reported missing and was presumed to have died by those at home, including his father and his fiancée. His father tells a visitor what he understands to have happened to his son:
“That was Donald. He was shot down in Flanders last spring.”
He shows him a photograph that was placed on the mantelpiece.
“The boy was about eighteen and coatless: beneath unruly hair... a thin face with a delicate pointed chin and wild, soft eyes.”
He tells him that a companion had sent back a few of his possessions:
“from a drawer he took a tin box...and...spread on the desk the sorry contents: a woman's chemise, a cheap paper-covered 'Shropshire Lad', a mummied hyacinth bulb.”

Donald, not dead but an invalid, is brought all the way home by comrades. He lies in bed, largely uncommunicative, not recognising his friends and fiancée, and not recalling what has made him an invalid until the very end, when in his blindness he has a reverie of flying over Flanders:
“And suddenly he found that he was passing from the dark world in which he had lived for a time he could not remember, again into a day that had long passed, that had already been spent by those who lived and wept and died...
He swept the horizon with a brief observing glance, casting a look above, banking slightly to see behind. All clear. The only craft in sight were faraway to the left: a cumbersome observation plane doing artillery work: a brief glance divulged a pair of scouts high above it and above these he knew were probably two more.
Might have a look, he thought, knowing instinctively that they were Huns... No, I guess not, he decided. Better get on home. Fuel's low... Ahead of him and to the right, far away, what was one Ypres, was like the cracked scab on an ancient festering sore... He passed on lonely and remote as a gull. Then, suddenly, it was as if a cold wind had blown upon him... It was that the sun had been suddenly blotted from him... In the moment of realising this, cursing his stupidity, he dived steeply, slipping to the left. Five threads of vapour passed between the upper and lower planes, each one nearer his body, then he felt two distinct shocks at the base of his skull and vision was reft from him as if a button somewhere had been pressed.”

Paris Peasant

This surrealist novel, published in 1926, is set in two different parts of Paris: the Passage de l'Opera, a city lane that was demolished in 1925, and the Parc des Buttes Chamont, a large public park in the northeast of the city.

The author, Louis Aragon (born 3 October 1897), was a key member of the French artistic movements of Dadaism and Surrealism. He was a trainee doctor when in June 1918 he went on active service on the Western Front. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his courage on 6 August when as the only doctor with his unit he took great risks to recover the wounded from the battlefield at Couvrelles. So severe was the scene that some days later he came across a grave with his details.

The first part of the novel relates the fears of the small-scale businessmen whose livelihoods are threatened by the planned destruction of the Passage de l’Opera. One of them has put up the following notice:

“Having been robbed for the benefit of a finance company by an expropriation which has ruined the tradesmen of this passage and being consequently unable to re-establish myself elsewhere, I am seeking a buyer for my bar equipment.”
After his signature he appends “War Veteran, 1914-18, Disabled Serviceman” to generate sympathy and honour. The author documents the ordinary features of what will be destroyed.

He concludes the second part, which concerns the Parc des Buttes Chamont, with a beheading, a detachment of the thinking head from its body :
“He tears it off his shoulders, and with unexpected force... hurls fare away from him his head with its pale eyes and clever lips.”
“He who had finally parted company with his thought... stirred from his immobility like an inverted question mark.”
“The whole useless body was invaded by transparency. Gradually the body turned into light.”
Here the author reflects on aspects of destruction that shape Parisian society at the time.

The novel ends with what the author describes as the peasant’s dream in which he resists criticism of thought and expression:
“I do not admit the right of anyone to re-examine my words, to quote them against me. They are no the terms of a peace treaty. Between you and me, it is war... I positively do not admit criticism.”