The Foisting of Farbridge

FESTIVAL (607 pp.]--J. B. Priestley--Harper ($3.95).

What in the world of 1951 is a festival? With the Festival of Britain beginning next month, Britons have been asking themselves the question and arriving at one of two opposite answers: 1) the festival should be mainly a show-window for the achievements of Britain under Socialism; 2) it should be mainly a chance for Britons to have a little fun.

Novelist J. B. Priestley (The Good Companions, Angel Pavement), a man who loves both the Labor Party and his pint of ale, is not exactly opposed to the first idea, but he is vehemently in favor of the second. In his sprightly new novel, Festival, he makes the point with the high glee of a sturdy toper laying about him in a temperance meeting.

Harridans in Cholers. Priestley sets out to tell how an average British town plays its part in the Festival of Britain, quite against its better civic judgment. The festival is foisted on Farbridge by a certain "Commodore" Horace Tribe, a spurious old dear with "a piratical nose and tiny bright eyes as busy and wicked as mice."

The commodore actually means as well by Farbridge as he does by himself. He needs money, the town needs a little fun. By promoting a festival, the commodore intends to see that both needs are satisfied. From there on, his task resembles, in its ticklish reconciliation of opposites, the difficulties of a con man trying to play Santa Claus.

The commodore's difficulties are complicated by the shoals of odd fish that abound in even so small a puddle as Farbridge. There are "fierce, gay anarchists," mothers of prodigies, blustering M.P.s, professional yokels, degenerate nobility, gumshoes in broom closets, harridans in cholers, blond giants with Chinese grandmothers, hard-faced Communists who gnaw rock-cakes at their meetings; in all, as fair a mess of stage Englishmen as have recently been caught in one volume.

Commodore in Arms. One Farbrigian, a mean, scraggy man who owns half the town, screeches at the commodore: "You'd better stop mountebanking round this town and clear out as soon as you can . . . There won't be a festival here . . . That's all." Another leading citizen d'gs into the commodore's naval record, finds it a sorry mess, and tries to bullyrag the old boy out of town.

But the commodore sticks to his guns, even though they aren't loaded; Farbridge has its festival, a merry one indeed, and the former naval person devolves into the arms of a wealthy, amiable semi-lunatic. All of which, says the book's jacket, "proves that life's worth living." The evidence may be a bit thin for the claim, but the book does demonstrate again that Author Priestley is a good judge of characters if not of character, and unquestionably one of the most fluent, enthusiastic word-jobbers in the language.

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