In England, Too

IN THE SECOND YEAR--Storm Jameson --Macmillan ($2.50).

When two different writers have the same idea, proceed to write about it in exactly the same way, it is not necessarily plagiarism, collusion or telepathy. Some ideas are in the air, and the air is free to all. Storm Jameson's In the Second Year will be called the English version of Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, because Author Lewis' book appeared in the U. S. first. But both were written at about the same time, and most discerning readers will consider Storm Jameson's by far the better job.

Storm Jameson has a stubborn Yorkshire temper. When she gets mad, she gets good & mad. She was horrified by the War, and when she began to realize it was probably not the last great war she would have to live through, her anger began to grow. What she felt about the situation and its prospects she told in the angriest book she has written. No Time Like the Present (TIME, June 26, 1933). Since then, the world situation has hardly changed for the better, and Storm Jameson's horrified anger has hardly cooled. Last summer it was still hot enough to make her write (in two months) this bitter account of how even old libertarian England might take the Fascist road to war.

It is 1942. England's worst depression, beginning five years ago, had brought a second General Strike and had upped the Fascist National Volunteers to the most powerful armed body in the State. An impotent Labor Government, despairingly voted into office, has just been swept out again on a flood of financial panic and bewildered rioting, and the National Volunteers have hoisted Dictator Frank Hillier into the saddle. At the head of a pasteboard National State Party, with Parliament dissolved and a yes-man Council as his catspaws, Hillier rules England. Royalty has apparently vanished at last. There is no opposition. There are a few scattered Communists still alive, but in hiding. There are still a few liberals not yet confined to barbed-wired "camps." Factories are silent and empty; the ports are clogged with rusting ships; only the rich have enough to eat. When old-fashioned Liberal Andrew Hillier, second cousin to Dictator Frank, gets back to England from his self-imposed exile in Norway, this is the England he finds. Andrew's sister has married Richard Sacker, the Dictator's right-hand man, so Andrew has some privileges where otherwise he would not have been safe.

Sacker and the Dictator have been friends for years, and now that they are at the top of the heap, Sacker thinks he is sitting pretty. As organizer and commander of the 1,600,000 National Volunteers that put Hillier in power, he feels himself indispensable, thinks Hillier will give him a free hand to reorganize England into a tight little fighting machine. "He began describing the England he would create when he and his friends were in charge. It made me wince. It was like nothing more than a fearful sort of public school, with willing fags, a glorious hierarchy of heroes in the persons of himself and his Volunteers, and floggings for the unwilling or rebellious. For the rest, all stout and jolly together, and daring the other nations to come on and be licked."

But Hillier and his banker backers consider Sacker's private army a menace, now that it has served its purpose, and plan to disband it. Sacker, who cannot believe that his adored friend Hillier would double-cross him, thinks he would be unofficially glad to have his hand forced, plots a dangerous coup. Because he lets the wrong people in on his secret the plot is nipped in the bud. Sacker's arrest and execution is the signal for a general blood purge. Before it is over and England shudders into regimented quiet, Liberal Andrew is glad to make his escape to Norway, even though it means he will never see his own country again.

Author Jameson has shrewdly taken more than one leaf from recent history. To skeptical readers who might say, "It can't happen anywhere," she has only to point to Germany. But Frank Hillier and Sacker are not so much copies of Adolf Hitler and Ernst Roehm as translations of them into recognizable English types. Author Jameson has made an ominously plausible case. A Cassandra who hates what she foresees, she prophesies so graphically that, unlike Cassandra, she may be listened to.

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