Out of Tune
THE morality of profit is questioned in An Edge of Pride: by what ethical right does a man charge more for something than the total it cost him?
Deane Narayn sets his first novel in the world of New York violin dealers. Guy Richard joins the family firm run by his elder brother Maurice and is subjected to a hard apprenticeship. Initially diffident about the business, he proves himself first by insinuating himself by deceit into the household of a master violin-maker to learn something of the practical side, and then by selling a suspect violin bought for a hundred dollars to a rising virtuoso for five thousand.
From near hero-worship of his brother, Guy comes to have contempt for him through reve- lation of his business methods. He falls in love with Kay, Maurice's secretary, and asks her to marry him, only to find" that she, too, is dis- creditably involved in many of the firm's deals. In the background there is the blind father, retired and believing that the business is still run with the honesty and integrity with which he ran it; and the family home, as well, which is the centre of a structure of lies created to pre- vent him from finding out that it is not.
Having posed his ethical question, however, Mr. Narayn makes no attempt to answer it, or even to give it due moral emphasis: his ending (which is, incidentally, quite distressingly melo- dramatic in its unlikeliness) avoids the problem and makes a nonsense of it by concluding that excessive profitmaking is all right when done by nice people and only to be condemned when done by nasty people. This thematic weakness apart, An Edge of Pride is a good enough novel, sparely written and very readable. Mr. Narayn handles conventional form neatly, most of his characters are completely credible, and his ac- count of the violin trade is authentic. Athletics is a difficult subject about which to write convincingly in fiction, and Victor Price deserves congratulation both on his courage in attempting it in his second novel and on the success which on the whole he achieves in The Other Kingdom. The title refers to a purely phy- sical state the athlete passes into at extremes of effort: for Colin Warnock, a student at Queen's University, Belfast, this peak coincides with his coming to maturity. Affected not quite to the point of dominance by the memory of his greatly admired and successful father, and awk- wardly in love for the first time, his dedicated training and attempts to run the fastest mile ever bring unexpected catharsis.
Mr. Price writes very well on the country around Belfast and on the rigours of training ('privations were a currency : one used them to buy achievements'), and his student love-affair is delicately accurate. But he is let down by occa- sional use of cliche: after a very fine descrip- tion of the distinctive smell of a dressing-room, for instance, he ends by calling it 'a heady mix- ture.' This kind of fault, however, will be put right with more experience: and then Victor Price will be an impressive writer indeed.
Calder Willingham, author by now of some half a dozen novels, has had the unusual and fortunate opportunity of re-writing his second novel. This new edition of Geraldine Bradshaw is a fifth shorter than the original one, irrelevant material having been cut because it was related to a trilogy now unlikely to be completed. The heroine of the title is a lift-girl at an enormous hotel in Chicago during the war, and the book recounts her three-day affair with Dick, a young porter at the hotel who has fled from college to learn from first-hand experience. Geraldine is a pathological liar, and her lies confound and disrupt Dick's emotional stability to the point of causing him to have a heart attack.
The girl's baffling behaviour is very well done, but the fascination in trying to tell if each new story is the truth does not distract very long from the fact that these are unpleasant people behaving unpleasantly: there is not a single likeable character in the book. In spite of the cutting, there is still too much marginally- relevant detail, and, though the urge to re-write earlier work is understandable, in the case of Geraldine Bradshaw such superfetation is not justified by the result.
At a party something seems to snap inside the head of Geoffrey Cutlass, a handsome history don who has made a great public repu- tation for himself on television, and he thence- forward has the odd conviction that his self has somehow removed itself to a position above and to the right of his head. This is the highly in- teresting opening situation of A Man Beside Himself, by Andrew Shonfield, but there is little development to sustain the interest: Cutlass writes a book extremely rapidly, is attacked by a madman, and his mistress deserts him to become a policewoman. This is a short novel, but there is a considerable strain on the patience in read- ing it. Mr. Shonfield has not the command of language necessary for dealing with his meta- physical theme; throughout there is a feeling not exactly of woolliness but of words only partlY doing their jobs.
The Biggest Picture is that one about the Biblical epic despairingly made by the failing movie company, and in Stanley Price's latest version it oomes traditionally complete with the cigar-smoking Machiavellian chief executive named Goldman, the black-listed Red script- writer, and the rest of the Hollywood codswalloP.
B. S. JOHNSON
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