Some weeks ago Mr. Bates hinted that the new book would be different from the previous works, in treatment as well as in subject-matter. “Charlotte’s Row” bears out that promise; there is town life instead of country life, and a choice of language made rugged and incisive to suit the subject.

The slight change of idiom is interesting. It does not mean that the old gut of description through the elimination of the more obvious and superficial things has been laid aside, but it does mean that the colours are more restricted and that the atmospheric detail is scarcer. It relieves the author from the onus of showing that his store of nature prints is unlimited, but it compels him to battle without one of his strongest weapons.

Hitherto a genius for interweaving beautiful things has softened a natural bent for looking at the seamy side of life, but Mr. Bates fashioned “Charlotte’s Row” without his box of paints, and we have in the main a series of vigorous charcoal drawings.

Those who have interested themselves in Mr. Bates’s writings – and they are in good literary company – must now decide what they think of him without his gentler arts; they can consider him as a dramatist and take less account of him as a decorative artist. They will also see very clearly the extent of his creative powers.

To one reader, at least, it seems a pity that “Charlotte’s Row” is a story of life in a boot town – actually the story of a man who makes boots in a “back shop” and sends them out to be sewn. This is the kind of setting that has long been wanted in a novel, but “Charlotte’s Row” despite its cleverness, is not the novel that is wanted for the setting. It may be truth, but it is not the whole truth.

We of the boot world may, if we take our reputation seriously, be glad to realise that the one-sidedness of this story is apparent to any mind. The more a reader knows his Bates, the more readily will he perceive that a section of life has been lifted from the whole and submitted to a fixed method of treatment. If we like to think that the apple is good between the maggot holes, we may please ourselves; Mr. Bates is concerned with the maggots. It is all maggots and cankers. Modern authors say they are good for us – we just bite round them and learn the preciousness of life as it should be.

Art is truth, say the moderns. Some people like their art neat, others prefer it watered. “Charlotte’s Row” is “all-in” art. It is thickly bespattered with jet-black blasphemings and coarse little bits of sex. The characters are few, but they manage to make their slum-street astonishingly sordid. There is a young woman, Pauline, who seems really nice to know, but even she must go off with another woman’s husband. The young boy Adam has an appeal, too, but he must become lazy and steal a loaf. Then there is a grandmother whose devotion makes an impression, but she does not get along very far before it is time for her to hunt for nits. Everybody else is uncouth, or oppressed, or rude at the table, or full of beer or weak in the stomach.

These references to the characters are given as facts and not as criticisms. By way of comment it may be said that even then the portrayals of human types are not particularly sound or vivid they are employed with remarkable skill to re-act one against another and to build up, without preaching or labouring moralism, a powerful impression of the ills with which poverty is ever encompassed. The whole study is a deeply-etched impression of inevitability and quite dispassionate.

Take the case of Quintus Harper, the drunken shoemaker. There is marble logic in his career – not so much in his imprisonment for an act of violence as in the misery he endures through realising by slow degrees that he has some devotion for his daughter. The sketch is somewhat marred by a trite remark that Quintus makes on the subject of dogs, and the frail boy Adam, so skilfully drawn as one of the stunted growths of slumdom, makes a surprising descent from the high artistic level of a Bates book when he steals bread in the approved Victorian Style. Pauline, however, is a brilliantly successful study, we learn by inference many details of her brave, strong, sisterly compound.

One feature of a highly debatable book is bound to win recognition. The story may be slight, the characters may be depressing, the dialogue may be too lurid, and the sexy smatterings may read like tiresome obsessions left over from an earlier book, but nothing that is liked or disliked will hide the fact that when Mr. Bates describes a scene he gets the essentials over and makes them vivid. A boot factory from the outside, a whirring workshop when the door is opened, a tapper’s shop with its smell and litter – things like these are handled with consummate skill. Through them “Charlotte’s Row” becomes in part the immortalising medium for which the county of shoemakers has been waiting.

“Charlotte’s Row,” by H. E. Bates, published by Jonathan Cape, 30, Bedford-square, London, 7s 6d.