Violent Mist

THE SECRET JOURNEY--James Hanley --Macmillan ($2.50).

Sometimes writers compose a cycle of novels because they want to continue relating the adventures of characters whose first appearance has been a popular success. Sometimes, like Jules Remains with his multiple-volumed Men of Good Will, it is because they work on a scene too vast to be portrayed in a single book. But in his novels on the wild Fury family, James Hanley gives the impression of having caught a bear by the tail and of being dragged along by the creations his imagination has called into being. That impression, strongly conveyed by The Furys, published last year, is conveyed more powerfully by The Secret Journey, in which Author Hanley again demonstrates his remarkable ability to bring the headstrong Furys to life and his inability to conclude their stories once he has done so.

The Furys began with the return of 18-year-old Peter Fury to the slums after he had been expelled from college where he was studying to be a priest. It ended, 549 pages later, with his going to sea after he had destroyed his mother's last hope, had a love affair with Sheila, his brother's wife, witnessed a general strike. Most vivid characterization was the demoniac Mrs. Fury, who fought the squalor that rose like a flood around her and was defeated in every hope.

The Secret Journey is a wilder and more powerful book. Centring around a sinister moneylender, Mrs. Anna Ragner, who has involved Mrs. Fury in fantastic debts, it is written in an even more sombre key than The Furys, pictures events more nerve-racking, hysterical, violent. Mrs. Fury has borrowed in order to keep Peter at college, borrowed more to pay interest, pledged her furniture, the earnings of her family, the possessions of her son-in-law, the compensation paid for her son's injury. At the day of reckoning Peter returns after a year at sea, is astonished when the ugly, middle-aged moneylender falls in love with him. Overwhelmed by her passion, Mrs. Ragner relaxes the screws on the Furys, until Peter reveals his disgust, neglects her.

The whole Fury family is dragged into the whirlpool. Old Denny Fury suddenly deserts his family, goes to sea again. Maureen Fury Kilkey frees her goodhearted, ugly husband from the debt with money she gets from an old admirer, then disappears. Desmond Fury, an ambitious, unscrupulous labor leader, detaches himself from the family while his wife Sheila resumes her affair with Peter. Peter meanwhile discovers for the first time the extent of his mother's sacrifices for him, works, tries to save her, makes an enemy of Mrs. Ragner's villainous assistant, at last, when the loan is called, kills the moneylender and races home to be caught.

A teaming welter of unfinished developments suggests that Author Hanley's talent is as uncontrollable as it is powerful.

Readers get little understanding of the poetic, mysterious Sheila, get only oblique glimpses of the creepy Mrs. Ragner and her servile helper. The Secret Journey is tumultuous, inspired and unforgettable in incidents, unclear as a whole. But in at least one episode it bears the stamp of genius. This is in a scene where Peter, after quarreling with Sheila, makes his way back to the slums through the fog, and finds at home the great mass of bills that reveal his mother's debts, "dumb witnesses to something that was smeared, secret, furtive, foul -- the whole mountain of threats, promises, pleadings, humiliations, satisfactory settlements." Readers must be unresponsive if they do not feel their flesh creep at James Hanley's picture of the boy shivering sleeplessly in the fog, his mind swimming with a realization of his mother's torments and with his longing for his mistress. Suddenly Peter imagines that he hears "the rustle of a dress" in the silence, begins to laugh and talk with Sheila and hears her ghostly whisper: "We are all in the mist, Peter. All in the mist."

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