New Adam
THE hero (and narrator) of I Can Take It All is a type that we seem to find with great frequency in new English novels : so much so that one is hardly surprised that Anthony Glyn should have given his hero the generic name of Adam. Adam is energetic, lustful and ambitious, with a sharp eYe for the 'expensive Sanderson wallpaper' in the managing director's office, and a sharp word of reproof for other people's snobberies. Girls find him irresistible, of course; and when Adam looks around the kitchen of his latest girl-friend's flat, and notes there the mixmaster, the waste- master, and the diShmaster, he remarks that he is the human equivalent: 'the girlmaster.' This is only one of the many things that Adam says about himself which would carry rpore charm and con- viction if they were said about him by others; still, on balance, I think I preferred Adam to his girl-friend, who is beautiful, divorced, tall, clair- Voyant, Swedish-Finnish, has hair like aluminium, and is the extremely successful creator of a kind of Finnish Noddy, a comic-strip character called Lonk. Lonk, we are to understand, stands for something deep in the Finnish girl's subconscious, With which the masterful, rapacious, irresistible tnglishman has to come to terms. This he suc- ceeds in doing, and thus becomes wise as well.
Meetings, partings, beddings, big deals, little d, eals, all take place in the book as effortlessly as in a dream; the scenes of the dream are set exotically in Finland, British Guiana, and the best West End clubs; the writing is knowledgeable and 14P to the minute. The book contains, in fact, all the usual fantasies of sex and wealth and travel; :11•1 it contains, too, the fantasy that the other Lantasies are in some way 'seen -through' by the hero. They aren't. I Can Take It All will, I am sure, be extremely successful.
American Earth is a reprint of Erskine Cald- well's very first collection of short stories; when opened the book, haphazardly, my eye fell immediately on this : 'She unfastened the under- garment. The berry lay crushed between her breasts. They were milk-white, and the centre of each was stained like a crushed strawberry.' This occurs on the last page of a story called 'The Strawberry Season,' and one way and another it is pretty frequently that kind of season in Mr. Cald- well's calendar. Sometimes it's peaches, as in 'The Visitor' : 'The peach fuzz still clung to her and we both felt it tickle when our faces were close together.' In 'Midsummer Passion' they 'rolled in the dirt and on the peavines. . . . They rolled over and over, tearing up more of the peavines.' American Earth could, I suppose, be called an auspicious beginning to his subsequent career.
The lovers in The Nunnery talk and behave very differently, as they should, being sixteenth- century Englishmen and women. (' "By my truth," he said. "I know there is no healing for me of body and soul except in you." She clung to him. "Pray that the evil days do not come again." ') The Nunnery is a very long and immensely studied piece of work; I would have found both the length and the self-consciousness more acceptable if the book had had what seemed to me a coherent story, a plot in which the people acted upon one another in a consequential way. (And the complaint 1 have against Miss Charques's novel could be made with equal force against the other novels under review. In none of them do the characters make real demands upon the events, or the events upon the characters; still less do the people ever make unexpected demands upon one another.) In this book, for instance, there is an heiress who is the ward of the prioress of a nunnery; the prioress wants the girl to take the veil, so that she will bring her money into the foundation. But there is nothing that the prioress can do to the heiress except to bully her—which hardly seems an effec- tive way of bringing about what she wants. So she bullies and bullies, and the heiress falls in love with a nobleman who becomes betrothed to her. The nobleman goes off to London to be with his friends of the Boleyn party in the hour of their disgrace, and is put in gaol when Anne Boleyn is put in gaol. Afterwards he is released, and conies back to his betrothed. In the meantime the nun- nery has been dissolved and the prioress has gone off to Dijon, and there's nothing to stop the lovers saying to each other what I have quoted at the beginning of the paragraph. It all has the air of being a plot, but it isn't; the characters never do much more than nudge each other in the direction they would be going anyway. And if this particular nobleman hadn't been available, one feels that another would have served just as well.
Mr. Boulle:s book is a series of studies in organisational futility—the organisation in ques- tion being that of a rubber company in Malaya. The company orders a house to be built on an impossible site on one of its plantations, so gangs of Chinese coolies alternatively dig and fill up great holes in the ground; the company orders a time-and-motion study to be made of the rubber- tappers, and succeeds merely in wasting the time and disrupting the movements of the Tamils. Mr. Boulle is convinced that the company (which be- comes a figure for all companies, all organisations) is unspeakably silly; he is also convinced that it is enormously powerful. The silliness he anato- mises at great length, but he is unable to explain why it is that people should sacrifice their lives to the company, how it is that the com- pany is able to produce rubber out of what had previously been blank Malayan jungle. His irony lacks point, and merely churns away upon itself, like one of the company's own committees.
DAN JACOBSON
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