The Dividing Stone. By Michael Harrison. (Cassell. 10s. 6d.)
M. PERRET'S (well translated) fantasy scurries along before the wind of his words, lightly and dancingly, like a quqffle with sails on. ,.rizzled old Gaston Le Torch, home from a' life-time of soldiering, uegins, as a hobby, to trace the history of his family. All goes well with his researches until his discovery of a print showing Eugene Le Toreh, captain of La Douce thirty-two suns, fleeing before the ,lizabeth, captain John Hogg, twenty-four guns, in 1697. Gaston's Honour is impugned; and when his family won't help him there's riMiling for it but to find enough of a breeze to blow him to the (parterdeck of La Douce. What he does on his arrival there is m. Perret's story, a story told with a delightful disregard for logic, rarely fantastical eye for colour, a whirl of cutlasses and conun- (birums, which ends with honour halfway re-established and Gaston aek in his favourite bar sipping a light, red Bordeaux with a dash Of Vichy.
, M. Perret's book doesn't mean anything very much; but it was !°viotisly fun to write—and the fun is communicated. Mr. Davis "Pw, is much more serious about his sea. • His is an Atlantic of wise,
1 tramp-captains called O'Hara, eager apprentices called Billy, 6nadY first-mates who redeem their honour far more earnestly than Mpaston Le Torch. Here comes the gallant little Antares steaming „e the storm to save the battered littler Slieve Mhor; and here's the Old Man making Irish jokes to the bo'sun; and here are the aves and the spray, the broken collar-bones and the deaths that are („ne natural products of Mr. Davis's sea. A simple story of a rescue 'flat really sinks the rescuer and a long haul back to Falmouth with 1.1n. old man giving all his wisdom and a young man trying to find °0111e, The Gentle Capta'n is Masefield's sort of sea-story; all very attIlletalC, all very worthy and—once aft of the storm—a little dull. Mr. Streeter is a humourist who squeezes his wry smiles from the uefeat of the American male. His book consists of twenty odd !ketches of tactical setbacks suffered by Mr. Hobbs on his summer nr,Miday. Yet, as he and his wife drive away from the shambles of 'rev Gables, his capacity for acceptance gives him a kind of Dunkirk stature: The confusion, the moments of weariness, his failure to emir out his original plans, the times when he felt he had blundered into a world to which he did not belong—all the petty exasperations and frustrations were already in the process of being washed out of his consciousness.
The pictures he was carrying home with him were of a different sort—the feel of wet sand under bare feet, the two-note cry of a scolding gull, the sigh and moan of the south-west wind as it poured through his bedroom window, the dive of a tern, the lift and fall of
, seaweed as the incoming tide....
`41ehe-ridden when he is being sentimental like this, Mr. Streeter is as crisp as one of Mr. Hobbs's martinis when he's watching his hero W_restle with garbage, cope with his sons-in-law or sail a dinghy. ilenerally he writes far better than he pretends, at the superficial fejel of life's lesser tactics. So well indeed, as to make one wish
at he'd try to look at the overall strategy one day and write a serious uuuk. It would, I feel, be very, very serious.
et Mr. Weidman, who is also American, is already concerned with t,srateey. The TI, rd Angel tells the story of What happens to a small o'nwn, in Connecticut when the home of a MacArthur-like Admiral is ,‘"erefl to the Government by his widow as a national monument. ;1. neurotic columnist bent on 'exposing' the Admiral, a neurotic r_Ustorian bent on getting away from hi rich, bitchy wife and a neurotic ex-Wave still in love with her dead boss add out-of-town Vavour to a stew of provincial characters: the local rich man, the ;sn%ctire editor of the town paper, the lonely woman trying to keep ,r family by making real-estate deals, her son and daughter with Le usual adolescent agonies, the pompous local parson, the lost it Usual bad girl—all the studies one has come to -expect in novels about 'i,"111all towns in (one has come to expect) Connecticut. Not that . Weidman writes badly or that his book is dull. It is not. The • rd Angel is an organised and workmanlike piece of novel-making rd the plot keeps the characters firmly under control. And yet the Zling remains that Mr. Weidman is yet another pretty successful ,rnerican author who, able now to live at commuting distance from Vey', ouYork and finding himself surrounded by Types, cannot resist ding a book around them.
remains nevertheless a very readable working out of a very topica subject: should we stop being beastly to the Germans?
Phyllida Hammond is still mourning her husband, a much- decorated pilot killed by a German bomb while in hospital recover- ing from wounds. She has had inscribed on his memorial tablet lines which are as forthright in their condemnation of his 'murderers' as they are unacceptable to the Bishop. After a few days the national press gets to work and Mrs. Hammond becomes a world figure. A sub-plot revolving around the publication of an idealised biography of her husband (an unsuccessful writer before the war) by an un- pleasant literary entrepreneur is handled with great skill and marries well, at the heart of the book, into the larger issues which Mr. Harrison invokes. And, believe it or not, you'll be surprised by the last page of the book. Now this isn't a great novel. For Mr. Harrison is a modest craftsman who aims for competence rather than greatness. Nor, in terms of sustained control of narrative, is it, even at that level, as efficient as The Third Angel. And yet it is a far more satisfying book. One feels perhaps, that Mr. Harrison wanted to write this, this book and not another, where Mr. Weidman wanted just to write a novel—and there he was in Swindon, Connecticut.
JOHN METCALF
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