Men at Arms
The Arm of Flesh. By James Salter. (Cassell, 13s. 6d.) The Siege of Battersea. By Robert Holies. (Michael Joseph, 15s.) A Place Like Home. By Thomas Hinde. (Hodder and Stoughton, 15s.) A Spirit Rises. By Sylvia Townsend Warner. (Chatto and Windus, 16s.) AMERICAN flyers in Germany, British troops in a former African colony—why can't novelists leave the armed forces alone? Because, when you think about it, armies are still our most blatant images of society. Every army is a cul- ture, with its own foods, rituals, chants and vernacular, usually those of the last war it fought (the army which sailed for the Crimea was still Wellington's, the one which faced the Boers still wore balaclavas, drop into any Ameri- can service club and the clock still stands at 1942, with Glenn Miller dripping from the PA system). And those cultures which armies are mirror, in their crudest coherence and contrasts, the larger societies to be defended. Army discipline will express the national super-ego at its sternest—Church, Queen, the most rigorous standards of 'good form'—while in the ranks, free-spoken and blasphemous, the national id ramps at its most wildly permissive. Look round our literature, theatre and cinema, and the armed services provide our nearest equivalent to tragedy, the imagery of our fallen Victorian greatness; while also yielding, at the Whitehall Theatre, the matter of our modern priapic farce.
This has something to do with the odd im- pressiveness of James Salter's novel, on its sur- face of brusque pulp-magazine sentences and neat, knowing air-jargon just a workmanlike piece of writing-school realism. But it also has the fascination of a subject we all see daily and know nothing about—the jet-trails of vapour, thirty, forty thousand feet up, which curl over NATO Europe from the Baltic to Tripoli. The Ann of Flesh describes that private civilisation, scattered from airfield to airfield across the Continent, of young men from Alabama, Ohio, Minnesota, who guard a Europe we have never seen : a huge sky whose provinces are weather- systems, drifting up from Africa to. the Arctic.
September sky and we ascending, noisy no longer, dizzy as angels. It was clear going north. Then, at Ingolstadt, the start of some clouds. A thin, floating fence of them, nothing more. They went in a straight line toward Berlin, grey as a river, cakes of ice flowing to the pole. We stealthy two. Streaming like princes. Breathing like steers. Come and get us. I thought, full of ferocity. We're out in the open. Cruising alone. Climb to meet us, brothers. Bring us down.
Mr. Salter achieves lyricism in his evocation of their life: scrambling from dark hangars to scale cold dawns, sprawling on barrack beds in farm-boy card games, reading little but comics, combing the Munich bars for girls; men with no skills but outracing birds and sound, who will be senile and twitching at thirty-five. If they survive : in a radio-play pattern of monologues, one voice taking the narrative from another, Mr. Salter tells the story of Cassada, the young Puerto Rican pilot who doesn't quite fit, is never quite accepted, and crashes trying to prove him- self to the others. The scene of the crash, in grey, drizzling dusk over the airfield, has anguished suspense, but you know from the start Cassada must die. In such strong, closed societies, the primitive superstitions work: there is a doom upon the hero and outsider. Mr. Salter, who survived twelve years as a pilot, shows himself not only an insider but a kind of poet of his dizzy new element.
Robert Holles's The Siege of Battersea is about an older military culture, the one which produced the winklepin moustaches and inflex- ible code of RSM Lauderdale, veteran of India, Palestine, Korea, who holds the European Ser- geants' Mess of the Second Battalion West African Rifles against an assault by local Afri- can revolutionaries. Formally, this is a Whitehall comedy camouflaged in the jungle green of a newly independent West African republic which remains technically nameless. Within a single set and tightly timed action, Mr. Holles stages an exhibition of all the attitudes, types, favourite slang and obscenities of our post-war army, with the same intimate expertise which distinguished his first novel, Captain Cat. If this book seems cruder and thinner, it's because its rigid theatri- cality and barrack humours cramp development of the main, serious theme—the defeat of Lauderdale's old, imperial virtue by the con- ditions of disintegratirig empire. There's no time or depth, between the ratatat jokes, to make this a matter of more than garish military senti- mentality. Nor for Mr. Holies to dissociate him- self adequately, for my taste, from his troops' Cockney view of the Africans as quaint, poten- tially dangerous monkeys.
Thomas Hinde's A Place Like Home is set on the other side of Africa, in altogether a subtler, more bitter climate. It's about white Nairobi, which Mr. Hinde sees as an attempt to turn one of earth's Edens into a kind of tropical Sunning-
dale. In its suburban way, it crushes John Wild for attempting to befriend the two white rebels who try to live on the larger scale Kenya's land- scape proposes—Sally West, the mildly promiscu- ous daughter of one of the old colonists, and Brian Johnson, a violent young district officer who talks to Africans. Mr. Hinde doesn't falsify the shortcomings of these, two—Sally is drunken and self-pitying, Brian histrionically paranoid— but he makes the rest of the community's lack of charity toward them symbolise its whole nar- row lack of response to the marvellous land it has indifferently caponised. Perhaps Mr. Hinde leaves too much of this contrast to be negatively implied by the stuffiness of his colonial sub- topians, with the effect that his book seems rather muted and sour. It might have streng- thened his picture, made it both deeper and juster, to include one settler (there are many, after all) who had chosen Kenya not as a second-rate home-county-from-home, but out of love. They are the interesting, because the tragic, ones. Why don't people take more notice of Sylvia Townsend Warner? I'm not sure whom this cry is addressed to—she's a perfectly well-established name, her stories appear in the New Yorker, her novels are respectfully welcomed and found in all lending libraries. All the same, I have the feeling that more people should know how good she is, in an old-fashioned way which has no more to do with fashion than a fine bit of mahogany or good tweed or a taste for Marvell. Her stories, that is to say, retail odd or surprising turning- points in out-of-the-way lives—two hand-woven liberals shelter an escaped convict, a widow planning suicide is frustrated by her lodger's similar attempt—but they've always some much subtler surprise curled up inside them, and any- way they're really pegs for displaying a mar- vellous nose for character and an almost surgical sense of the bone-structure of English provin- cial towns: the gaunt churches with their glutted graveyards (that comes from a story about a Young doctor's return to his Yorkshire birth- place); the female crafts of cooking and cleaning and dressmaking; all the crabbed sociology of strong family relationships and local religion. 1 suppose all this implies that she has limitations. Maybe, but she has so learned how to put them 10 use that it's impossible to tell them from her Powers; which seems to me one of the definitions of genius.
RONALD DRYDEN
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