Maker's Language
Langrishe, Go Down. By Aidan Higgins. (Calder and Boyars, 30s.) The World of Luke Simpson. By Vincent Brome. (Heinemann, 25s.) WHAT really lifts a novel out of the order of mere competence is the quality of the language, its precision, appropriateness of tone, and ability to reflect nuance, and it is here that Langrishe, Go Down scores so heavily. The language is poetic in the right sense of that word : it is a maker's language, never inflated but always con- , sidered, hard and bright, but flexible like a Toledo blade.
Aidan Higgins's first novel is set in Ireland. The Langrishes are three spinster sisters, sur- vivors of a once prosperous landowning family. The book begins slowly, but nothing in it is dispensable. Then, after the opening section, comes a switch in time, back from 1937 to 1932, and the solid centre of the novel that so brilli- antly deals with the birth, ecstatic fulfilment and bitter death of Imogen's love affair with a German student, a distinctly mature student but still a few years younger, we learn to our sur- prise, than his mistress. The affair ends literally with a bang from the shotgun aimed by Imogen at her departing lover, and the book concludes with an elegiac coda set in 1938, Imogen and her two sisters in the crumbling mansion, waiting for the sour mercy of death. A haunting, lyrical novel that will stand more than one reading.
Jozsef Lengyel is one of Hungary's most highly regarded writers, and on the evidence of Prenn Drifting, his first book to be published_ in England, it is easy to see why. The novel begins at the end of the First World War, with Prenn, a young deserter from the front, wandering about the cafés of Budapest. Through his inexperience, greed and apathy, he is inveigled into becoming a spy; he is captured and sentenced to death, but when the Communist revolt of 1919 erupts he escapes, joins the revolutionaries and fights with courage.
But the counter-revolution is successful and Prenn is not made of the stuff of martyrs. The end of the novel finds him as a small-time racketeer selling forged papers. He has drifted back to the point from which he started. The translation stumbles occasionally over idioms but is pretty serviceable, and I par- ticularly liked the young lovers, who must soon be parted, probably for ever, spending their last evening in `. . sadness which no mourners know, only lovers.' Ernest J. Gaines writes lucidly, with none of the feverish overwriting that mars much of the prose by much more famous American Negro novelists. Catherine Cannier is primarily a love story and the racial problems are approached obliquely and with remarkable detachment. A young Negro returns from his college education in California to his Louisiana birthplace and feels unable to readjust to an environment which he has outgrown. Then he falls in love with Catherine, whose father is a Negro, though light- skinned, and who is as intolerant of the idea of a black-skinned son-in-law as any white Blimp would be. The strange triangle of Catherine, her lover and her father is presented with objective sympathy, but under the simple texture of the prose throbs a baffled anguish which explodes in a final scene of inevitable and quite uncon- trived violence.
The Early Doors is a very likeable novel, completely free of pretension. The style is plain but works well enough in this tale of a middle-aged man's obsessive love for his mother, whom he believes to be dead but discovers at the beginning of the book is still alive. He leaves his job, his wife and child and sets off to Manchester, where he believes his mother to be living. A private detective is em- ployed and, after a fairly eventful time, the mother is found and is confronted by her son, with consequences that few readers could pre- dict, yet which are wholly credible.
While Mr. Mills attempts to understand mental disorder by artistic means—that is, through imaginative identification with the victim—Vin- cent Brome, in The World of Luke Simpson, has psychiatrists and their patients as his princi- pal characters and much of the dialogue is well stocked with the jargon of a notably jargon-loaded branch of the medical profession. But despite his apparent familiarity with psychiatric theory and practice, Mr. Brome does not really get inside the mind of Luke, a criminal lunatic sen- tenced for raping a young girl and sent to an asylum run by a humane and progressive governor. The best part of the novel is the escape of Luke and his voluntarY return to the asylum, where he is closeted with the governor's young daughter while no one knows that he is even on the premises. This is exciting suspense stuff and Mr. Brome's rather ponderous prose sheds excess weight and rises well to the occasion. VERNON SCANNELL
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