Fiction
IN a recently-published study, The Art of Simenon, M. Narcejac sets out to demolish the view that M. Simenon is, or ever has been, a crime novelist in the ordinary sense, and he points to La Verne sur Bebe Donge as one of three novels which he considers to be master- pieces by general standards. The appearance in English of The Trial of Bebe Donge is accordingly to some extent the trial of M. Simenon himself. Is he guilty or .innocent of thriller-writing? M. Simenon seems to have been ironically aware of these proceedings in regard to himself when he wrote The Trial of Bebe Donge, for he tells a story of attempted' murder, beginning with the crime, going on to a full investigation of motive, and ending with the sentence, which_remains in doubt to the last chapter. Thus, he seems to say, appearances may indeed be flagrantly against me; my formula here is in the main tradition of detective fiction, and yet if you look closely (or even not so closely) you will find it transformed by imagi- nation into a serious work of art.
When Bebe Donge put arsenic in her husband's coffee it was after nearly ten years of a marriage which was generally supposed to be successful. Her husband's infidelities were known about, but, for all his self-centred ruthlessness, he was considerate to his wife, honest, even about his infidelities, and careful to provide her with everything for which she asked. No one could have been more astonished by the arsenic than himself; it forms the starting- point of an investigation which leads him by stages to the admission that, in spite of appearances, he has been so lacking in love and ordinary humanity that his wife had practically no alternative. Clearly there is an essential departure here from the ordinary crime-story. Instead of being tantalised by the possibility of in- numerable solutions, any one of which may finally click into place, we are faced by the simple fact that Francois Donge, without realising it, had driven his wife to attempted murder. How had he done this? How had he failed to know what he was doing? What exactly was the extent of his guilt? These are the only questions which sustain our interest, and they concern only character and human relations instead of incident, accident and plot. On this showing it seems clear that M. Simenon must be acquitted of thriller-writing, and the more difficult question remains to be answered, whether he is a major novelist. There are qualities which speak strongly for him. His imagination is powerful, and he not only writes innumerable novels, but he moves with impressive ease in the distinct atmosphere of each of them. His atiitude 'of personal reserve is admirable; he com- ments on his characters scarcely at all, but shows them to us as they have shown themselves to him, without weighting the evidence for or against. ' If one still feels inclined to reserve judgement, as I do, it is perhaps because some of these qualities make so strong an impres- sion chiefly by contrast with the tradition (and in this book the actual trappings) of detective fiction; whereas other of his qualities, like the professional detachment, seem to derive from that tradition itself. Why, moreover, La Write sur Bebe Donge, when the truth about her prosaic husband Francois is the only thing that matters? Not, surely, because Hollywood prefers Babies? These and similar doubts continue to add a special fascination to M. Simenon's novels which, quite apart from them, would be fasCinating in themselves.
A Bag of Stones was a courageous, if slightly repugnant, title to a novel which deals with the brutalities inflicted on a boy's mind and the adult miseries which flow from them. In many ways Mr. Hampson gives us the characteristic pattern of the mid-twentieth- century novel; childhood demands the first half of a book whose second half simply works out the consequences which have been foreshadowed. It is true that Mr. Hampson introduces one hopeful element, in the warmth of a family which befriends and shelters the hero for short periods, and, if we—and the hero—could have had more faith in this relationship, we should have looked forward more cheerfully to the outcome. As it is, the grown-up boy moves on to the murder of his father without any real chance of escape. One must add that Mr. Hampson writes with a direct simplicity which is most moving. It is very difficult to believe that A Bag of Stones, for all its sordid horror, is not a true vision of life as it must exist in some luckless hells.
To isolate a group of uniformed technicians on a barren mountain- top overlooking Palermo for months on end during the invasion of Italy would be to forewarn any but the most military intelligence of disaster. The disasters which Mr. Robin King duly puts before us in Breaking Point are again of the kind one would expect, but are here on the more arbitrary basis of a handful of individuals who break up in different ways under the pressure of confinement and proximity. Mr. King holds tight to our interest throughout these miseries, which remain sharp and clearly recorded to the end. But if Breaking Point has for the most part the precision of a documentary report, it is sometimes verbally butter-fingered ("a shame-faced feeling," "the corporal's fear-drained face"), and there is too much insistence about an admonitus locorum which fails to impress us as being the mysterious influence on the men's "innermost beinf" which the Sicilians and Mi. King's publishers believe.
Two short novels by Signor Moravia, which were published separately as Agostino and Disobedience, are now valuably combined in Two Adolescents. They show a needle-pointed familiarity with adolescent experiment and delirium which makes Proust seem to belong to the historic past. For those who were disappointed by Signor Moravia's The Conformist, this book will serve as a reminder
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