NEW NOVELS
First fruits
BARRY COLE
The Scarecrow Man Christopher Bray (Heine- mann 25s) The Grasshopper Su Walton (Peter Davies 30s) Paiting Off Julian Moynahan (Heinemann 30s) An Abdication J. S. Mitchell (Faber 25s) The Send-Off George Bluestone (Seeker and Warburg 30s) The art critic Dore Ashton wrote recently, suc- cinctly if not originally, that 'all criticism, whether historical or "objective," structuralist and non-interpretative, or romantic and fanci- ful, is finally the result of some attentive individual's selection of relevant matter, and therefore interpretative, and beside your point. But you still hope.' Yet hope is what I seldom have. Still, here is my 'selection' of relevant matter from this week's novels.
It may seem unfair to a writer that I should pick on that rather than this passage, that rather than this aspect of his work. Christopher Bray's first novel, for instance, is vaguely sub- Beckett. Pause. 'What?' exclaims the author. Right. Beckett would never allow such clichés as 'sure of his ground' or 'warming to his theme' or 'her heart warmed within her.' But he might in an off moment write a story about two tramps called Gonlag and Mason.
Contemplative dropouts, inadequate adjuncts of an unsatisfactory society, each tramp has his soothsayer. For Gonlag it is a Brociklyntse alter ego who lives beneath the London .pave- ments; for Mason, it is the Scarecrow Man, a Christlike vision of dementia and hope. I could, of course, ignore the cliches, elect such passages as 'drawn by the elastic bands of community' or `Gonlag grunted, gave a penny he had put under the lid [of a tin of paint] a great bang with his left boot, which he had taken off, and the lid pumped into the air and rolled a little way down the pavement on its side, leaving a thin white spoor like a snail.' That last could be improved but remains fine. All the aotion takes place in London. which is often well described. At the end there is a violent death which, if contrived, is just carried through by Mr Bray's skill.
Su Walton's Here Before Kilroy was highly recommended last year, and it is easy to see why. She is a writer of considerable talent and unusual observation. But in The Grasshopper the machinery she uses does not seem strong enough to convi'nce.
Devlin Birchfield is a young man of irresis- tible attraction—and I mean irresistible. Not one woman refuses his facile sexual advances and most manage at the same time to fall in love with him. She sensed a compassion in him that made her want to fall on her knees and confess all . . . An unfair 'selection' perhaps, but this sort•of reaction happens too frequently to remain credible. The Grasshopper (Devlin) is, in almost literal effect, a succubus, a resus- citated myth made all too real (if paradoxically improbable). The scholars among you will re- call that 'succubus' is the 'masculine' form (with feminine meaning) corresponding to succuba„L, after incubus. He wells up from an earthy and winter hermitage to lay every female in sight, causing heart searches and re-evaluations galore. The trouble is that as a male sui generis he just doesn't work. He has 'turquoise' eyes and says things like 'I am the man all women dream about, lying beside their husbands in the tedious nuptial bed.'
Ancient rites and the contemporary scene flit through prose of hard-edged whimsy to produce a novel which remains, cavils apart, more than competent. This is clearly seen in Miss Walton's handling of an ending as violent as Mr Bray's, where Devlin is symbolically churned into the earth beneath a tractor. Incidentally, 'Violent Conclusions in the Novels of the 'Sixties' would make an excellent thesis.
Such a thesis would exclude Julian Moy- nahan's Pairing Off, which could, though this is but the second week of the year, rank as one of 1969's best novels. For once, 1 want to state explicitly the 'plot' of a novel.
Myles McCormick is a second generation American Irishman. He is also—and who isn't in these life-reflecting-art days of turbulence? —your 'marginal' man. His girlfriend, Millicent, is dying, dies, of cancer. This death forces him to reassess his own marginal existence. He takes up with Eithne, a more severe but practical complement to the dead lady. Myles has, osten- sibly, three ambitions following Milly's death: acquisition of a directorship at his Boston library, the expiation of his guilt through'care for Gerard, the late Milly's half-brother, and his 'pairing off' with Eithne. The half-brother is doomed to fade out, and Myles finds little but political bring-down in his professional ambition. A valid offspring of Bellow and Burgess, this apparent Bostonian crashes his way through a welter of sexual and social in- cidents to a moving and unexpected Irish finale.
We are convinced that his trip to the bog- base of his McCormick forebears has little pur- pose: just when it seems that his return is a sentimental and novelettish extravaganza he produces from his Aer Lingus bag Millicent's cremated remains; Eithne, whom he believes he has left behind, watches him from an ancient wall. If that does sound novelettish, even banal, Julian Moynahan's quality of writing makes it almost too convincing.
Here, though not strictly relevant, is a sample of his prose style: 'The way she said it and the loll of her head conjured up a preposterous vision of a moustachioed hussar, booted and spurred but otherwise unencumbered with gar- ments, flourishing a whip over something soft and squealing chained to a silken bed. Throw me a life-buoy Kraft, I'm ebbing. "That's not the same thing either," he said firmly.' The puns are not always as bad as that.
No 'selection' can convey the precision and beauty of ' this almost arrogantly successful second novel, and if Mr Moynahan's charac- ters have a tendency to speak with a familiar flippant pedantry, I can forgive him.
' An Abdication and The Send-Off are barely competent. The former is another first novel of:: school and recrudescent adolescence; the second another tale of energetic Jewish paternalism and the family's struggle to escape their own entity.
Finally, a word about dust-jackets. The Scare- crow Man has a scarecrow and An Abdication is letters; they pass. But the standard of the, rest is appalling : the young man on Su Walton's cover goes against the text and the picture on The Send-Off is ugly and off-putting. There's an exhibition in London showing works by out-of-work Guildford art teachers. Some pub- lishers could do worse than pay it a visit.
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