Fiction
London sighs
Peter Ackroyd
The Camberwell Beauty V. S. Pritchett (Chatto and Windus £3)
The Black House Paul Theroux (Hamish Hamilton £2.75) The Terrors of Dr Trevites Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle (Routledge and Kegan Paul £2.80) Mr Pritchett fashions his stories with the same care as other men collect ferns or the rarer kinds of mollusc, warming them and drying them with his sighs. There is a capacious lugubriousness about The Camberwell Beauty since, as Pritchett says of one of his more wayward characters, "He was in his sixties and was damp and swollen with the public secrets of his customers." Public secrets and private lies can find their ecological niche without discomfort in Pritchett's easy and assured style, a style that is so central to our tradition that it seems transparent, letting tiny objects and tiny people wink and gleam through. Pliny, an antique dealer of fixed abode, shuffles and sneezes over his one precious possession who can be touched by no one; Gilbert, "like a touchy exclamation mark".takes solitary walks in a London park; Molly is "as noisy as, a blowlamp but pretty"; a newspaper editor does notkknowwat is missing until he sees it . waling away.
Mr Pritchett creates his fictions in the form we most easily recognise and with the tone We most appreciate — neither high nor low, neither complex nor simple, neither too long nor too short. Recognisable human figures imitate
Words and actions in a recognisable landscape, and generally represent those sexual and Personal bonds which are supposed to bring certain people together and keep others, alas, aPert. The heights of the nineteenth century love' have been flattened until they leave only ne barest traces, and we are regaled instead th Comfortable entertainments which take us 7Yond ourselves and into the warm, well lit, a-somewhat cramped, purlieus of the suburban soul.
Theroux has a similarly transparent style, put his is more willed and alert. He is an intelligent writer who manages to use his intelligence without jokiness or self-aggrandisement. Alfred and Emma Munday have returned from that romantic haven, 'darkest' `frica, to an English countryside which is no less dark and considerably more hostile. Their n,eW home, the "Black House" of the title, gleams like wet coal and will not let them alone; eventually, Emma sees something pasty at an uPstairs window. A series of small but ominous events gather their own momentum and the rarrative reaches a point of almost visible aarkness. It is all very nearly done, and the
deh arranges itself into patterns almost as iberate as those of Theroux's ideal landsea . pe. the language is ordered, the theme is ettled "But it was frozen, the green looked Infertile, threatening to die and discolor for the Winter."
Some obvious analogy might be made here Itrta Africa's rather more fertile chaos, but it is e book itself which must bear the strain of ,canParison. For it, too, is threatening to fade :way precisely when Mr Theroux lavishes the care and intelligence upon it. The initial ritering of moods and moments, so cleverly 4,,uggesting menace, is dissolved by what 9pears to be a wilful spending of Theroux's PoWers: his sure line in characterisation, his wit and r his ear for dialogue become the substance sather than the shadow of the novel, and the Sc her is clouded by light-weights and leit-mo-,
The power is undoubtedly there, if only Mr '",eroux would keep a firmer hold upon it.
s2 11, e Terrors of Dr Treviles is composed as a a'llea of short sections, which means that only effort is required in reading or writing. rat'ne `occult' and the sublime have become r cheap commodities recently, as this ibl:yheel will testify. It is self-interested without ■ ying adequately self-conscious, and is a it:mance" only in the sense that a number of ',ages and allusions are pushed up to and 1.7Yond the point of no return. It also contains a nber of boring verses which must have been ii'Llten by Miss Shuttle, since I see that Mr ex'u'eigrtiri°vge British iteisschribed as being "one of the most poets and novelists now c. The book will no doubt be given a sUbsidy by the New Fiction Society.
Pseter Pectator.
Ackroyd is the literary editor of The
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