NEW NOVELS
Moravia Deserta
Two Women. By Alberto Moravia. (Seeker and Warburg. 18s.) The Greengage Summer. By Ruiner Godden. (Macmillan, 13s. 6d.) Awake for Mourning. By Bernard Kops. (Mac- Gibbon and Kee, 15s.) Still Alive Tomorrow. By Wayland Young. (Cresset Press, 16s.) Playback. By Raymond Chandler. (Hamish Hamilton, 12s. 6d.) ALBERTO MORAVIA is the Grand Master of prolixity. Those who have read The Woman of Rome, say, or Two Adolescents may perhaps remember the vast tracts of footling verbiage across which he expects us to struggle. It is like visiting a provincial museum : case after case of seemingly identical flint implements, before every one of which we are halted by an officious guide. Finally, just to inject a little holiday zest into the occasion, the guide will allow us a quick peep at something faintly naughty—the old town gallows, perhaps, or the top-coat of a celebrated highwayman. In the same way, Moravia, having abused our patience and good
will for hundreds of pages on end, will at last give us a few tricked-out paragraphs of sex as a reward for our fidelity in still being there at all.
Two Women might have been written expressly to confirm this judgment. Like all Moravia's
books, it starts promisingly enough : a widow and her nubile daughter leave their grocery shop in war-time Rome, having nothing left to sell, and make for the country near Terracina, there to wait amidst what they hope will be rural plenty for the Allies to sweep away the Germans. Splendid, one says to oneself. Whatever else, we shall have a first-class piece of documentary about Italy during the invasion. Alas and alas and alas. The story is told by the widow in the first person: she makes it plain that she knows nothing and wants to know nothing about wars, politics, Rome, ideas, Italy, religion, culture or even love; in the past she has been interested only in making money, she is interested now only in using that money to find food. Even this limited aspiration is not without possibilities; after all, money and food are the proper stuff of drama when a country already ran- sacked by one army is being invaded by another. But this endlessly prosing narrator would see the Fall of Troy in terms of shopping lists: page after page is covered with the detailed machinations of her domestic prudence. Moravia, however, abides faithfully by his formula, and finally lobs out our childishly sensational reward. The daughter is raped and then goes in for some inflammatory amateur prostitution. This road, like all others, leads back to Rome, and so to the end of the most tedious.novel I have read for months.
The Greengage Summer is told from the mouth of a pubescent girl called Cecil. She doesn't
know much, but she does know one bed- room door from another : so what is the hand- some stranger Mr. Eliot up to with the proprietress of the French hotel where Cecil and her family are spending the summer? She guesses that right, but the mystery around Mr. Eliot only deepens. The children spend their long days by the river at the bottom of the garden; but what about Mr. Eliot's fictitious visits to Paris, his alarming changes of mood, his appearance, one day, in the disguise of a sailor from a river barge? Mr. Eliot is clearly a gentleman. Or is he? This is a very pleasing tale, light, humorous, pathetic and intriguing.
Bernard Kops is a vigorous newcomer who has written a vigorous but implausible book about an
AYM, strictly lower-class, with blond hair and a
prison record. This creature is built up as a teenage idol (Mike Rebel, if you please) and nearly sets off a teenage revolution. Luckily he decides instead that all lie really wants to do is to marry a girl who reads Greek Myths and has just had a baby by somebody else. Because, you see, he is really a splendid young man who has been warped by the thought of the Hydrogen Bomb : he is the victim of a criminally negligent Society which didn't provide him with a spiritual purpose along with his free milk. That was a goodrecord, Mr. Kops, cool and groovy; but no one is allowed to play it a second time.
Still Alive Tomorrow is to be recommended for brilliant reportage of the North African scene.
The Portuguese Escape is packed with lively
Buchanesque adventures, but also contains many passages of tendentious silliness in which we are told to admire the aristocracy, the Roman Church
and Dr. Salazar—particularly Dr. Salazar. Play- back is worthy Chandler—beds, bullets and Spar- tan jokes : beds strictly for loving, bullets strictly for killing, and Spartan jokes to beguile the very few sterile minutes in which neither tumescence nor entombment is immediately in prospect.
SIMON RAVEN
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