Yorkshire Contrasts

QUORUM (309 pp.)Phyllis BentleyMacmillan ($3).

For 23 years, English Novelist Phyllis Bentley has been carpentering a literary chronicle of her native Yorkshire. In twelve books she has tried both to give a close-grained structure of regional manners and to trace the doings of the English merchant class from its ferment under Cromwell to its troubles under Attlee. Like John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett, her literary masters, Novelist Bentley seldom sparkles or shines. Instead, she hammers out workmanlike novels that, stolid or not, reflect a good deal of social history.

Quorum, her new story of postwar Yorkshire, is patterned on the weather-beaten but still serviceable formula of Grand Hotel. Author Bentley herds together eight more or less prominent citizens at a municipal committee meeting, and then, with dogged literalness, rehearses their past lives. Most of the characters conveniently pair off to personify the clash between the traditional virtues and the modern corner-cutting that is the main theme of the book.

Chairman of the committee and center of the novel is Thomas Armitage, a 75-year-old manufacturer who has learned his benevolence in the school of 19th Century liberalism. Counterposed to him is Sir Charles Considine, a finagler who is trying to worm his way into Armitage's business. Sir Charles thrives under the Labor government's program for organizing benevolence from WhitehallSir Charles knows his way around a bureaucracy. But Armitage feels obsolete. "All now was duty, nothing was love," Author Bentley has him reflect. "He was called vermin by a Cabinet Minister and told he did not matter a tinker's cuss."

In some of the other character contrasts among the committee members, a humanitarian labor leader of the old schoolwithout a trace of "class warfare" in his philosophyis pitted against a sloganeering Communist, and a dowdy but selfless schoolmarm is set off against a poisonous nymphomaniac.

By the time the meeting drags to its finish, Author Bentley has somehow tied all her plot strings together and worked out a pro-virtue ending. Old England, the book hints, will continue to bounce along. Unfortunately, Quorum itself has little bounce. Except for the old-school labor leader, Author Bentley's characters are inert symbols of her social scheme, with neither individuality nor idiosyncrasy. Transparently plotted and written in muttony English, Quorum is the sort of novel that may give more kick to a rummaging social historian of the future than to today's American.

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