Fiction

THE well-intentioned but somewhat humorless blurb writer for this, Mr. Cozzens' third novel, declares on the jacket that it is "A dramatic and exciting novel of Cuba, where SUGAR dominates and warps men's lives." His unhappiness of expression is lamentable, but a perusal of Cock Pit discloses that his analysis is substantially correct. It is rather to be regretted that he does not mention any other of Cock Pit's qualities or characteristics, for Cock Pit is a pretty good book.

The setting is convincing and not obtrusive--always a danger in writing of "far lands and strange peoples." The plot tends toward the melodramatic, with a correct and fatuous happy ending--very satisfactory from the perfectionist point of view. One perceives in the first forty pages that dirty work is afoot; the dirty work is done; it is straightened out, and if, with the aid of a map inside the cover, one untangles the maze of proper names, one can comprehend and appreciate the situations in the sugar intrigue.

The plot, however, with its complications and solutions, is really rather incidental, for the book is essentially a book of character studies, and therein lies its chief virtue. It is mainly concerned with the interplay of the emotions and desires and actions of a group of people in a given setting, complicated by the influences and forces that their foreign environment brings to bear on them. Mr. Cozzens uses Cuba much as Kipling used Simla. And as in Kipling, the writing is character portraiture, rather than development. Consequently the people are painted in rather brighter colors than strict realism allows, with its penchant for neutrals. The effects must be created quickly--partly because so many, almost too many, characters are introduced--and the characterization is more rapid, more intense, more dramatic than in the works of, say Sterne or Madge Kennedy. It is, moreover, very good on the whole, and few writers can produce a life-like image in so few words as can Mr. Cozzens. And in addition to being convincing, his people have the eminently desirable virtue of being amusing--the combination forming a nice evidence of the author's talent. Their conversation crackles with a verve that is seldom actually attained on Wall or Main or Maple Street, though, in truth, the whole book is pitched in that vivid key, kindly reserved by Providence for fiction.

Cock Pit, however, is really a lateral book. It deals with a cross section of society, with the relations of individuals in that cross section. Mr. Cozzens pretends that this is not so--he furnishes a plot, and a rather melodramatic plot--but it, is really unessential. The longitudinal, progressive element in the book is insignificant, and the plot loses its claim to conviction in the happy ending, when Don Miguel, the omnipotent and implacable dictator, presents the heroine with some of Queen Isabella's jewels, in admiration of the really remarkable way in which she has thwarted his best laid plans