Dark and light
Caroline Hillier
A Game of Dark William Mayne (Hamish Hamilton £1.25) The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris Leon Garfield (Longman £1.25) I know of a father who reads Arthur Ransome in the loo (possibly under the bedclothes as well, or wrapped in the jacket of The Naked Ape, I don't know). This is all wrong. One therefore salutes the liberal publisher who comes right out with it and says, of William Mayne's A Game of Dark, "a book as much for adults as for young readers," although I feel the author intends this as a children's book which adults will also read, rather than as an adult novel children will enjoy.
Like most of Mayne's books, it is complex but here he seems to me to be dealing with emotional depths into which he has not plunged before. This does not make the book more obscure, but on the contrary more readable, and more exciting. The game referred to in the title is an imaginary game which a boy plays in order to escape from the cold realities of his life at home — home being a tidy house with a paralysed, ranting Methodist father and a mother who is at the end his tether. Donald, too, is at the end of his tether; "he had eaten out all the circle of life round himself." He longs for normality, represented by his friend Nessing's little sister who would "tear up the clothes she was sitting in if things went against her," or the household full of burnt baked beans and babies where the school chaplain, Berry, lives. He is a man Donald respects, and occasionally pities, for his willingness to communicate, his bawdiness, his sense of balance. Failing these, Donald pursues his private daydream adventure, which both terrifies and fascinates him, in a medieval land where he becomes squire to a roughish lord, champion of a dream girl, Carrica, and killer of the house-high worm, the nastiest fiction monster I have met. It is not a whimsical fantasy; it is a fantasy full of Freudian womb-like undertones, alive with warmth, with people crowded in huts, with dogs, earth, dirt and humour. It becomes immensely gripping, and the reader hurries from this saga to the equally tense counterpart in Donald's real life in which his father is rushed to hospital, faith in the Lord having failed him.
The book contains more questions than answers, dealing as it does with this dark thread of human blood-ties. The characters are superbly in true — Berry with his charm and his priestly eagerness for sensual confessions, the mother so bravely and imperceptibly cracking. William Mayne has used his imemnse skill with words to great effect.
Leon Garfield is another writer who is patently not sitting back on his laurels. In The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris, he has concentrated on comedy, and has totally succeeded. The setting is early Regency Brighton. The main protagonists are a dreadful pair of schoolboys, the lumpish Bostock and his admired friend Harris, who is inclined to be overawed by his own brilliance and powers of reasoning. (" Bosty, old friend," he whispered. "There ain't no God . . . The sky's empty, old friend," went on Harris grimly. "There's just us Bosty." "What you and me?" Bostock was shaken to the depths of his soul. " No," said Harris irritably. "Mankind. All of us down here. We're all there is, Bosty. The rest is — is air."). Harris conceives the appalling notion, during Mr Brett's class on Ancient Histtory of exposing his infant sister Adelaide on the Sussex Downs, to be suckled, not by a she-wolf but by a vixen with full dugs. A trampling in the brambles indicates the approach — instead of the vixen with full dugs — of Tizzy Alexander, the Arithmetic master's daughter, and Ralph Bunnion, son of the head of Dr Bunnion's Academy, intent on having his profile admired, and, failing that, rape. Tizzy, who is a delightful heroine, scoops up the abandoned baby, and from there follows on an intricate web of Shakespearian complexity, with a substitute foundling baby, prowling round the school cor
ridors at night, Harris and Bostock desperate to return Adelaide to her home, and Major Alexander challenging Ralph to a duel (" A gel's honour, I need hardly tell you, is a delicate flower. Had to act as a father you know. But now I've come to see you, man to man, to discuss what might be done about avoiding bloodshed . . . Real friendship . . . silent . . . strong . . . hoops of steel and all that. Settle it out of court, eh?").
The loser in all this is Dr Bunnion, trying in vain to keep some semblance of propriety in his Academy, so that Ralph can marry the local baronet's daughter. The winners are Tizzy, with belladonna in her eyes, and her bodice arranged by her German mother ('I made your bodice; but Gott made vat's under it "), and poor reserved James Brett, who finally deserts Ancient History long enough to catch her as she falls, literally, into his arms. The pace never falters, and the jokes never fall flat, which is no mean achievement. It is a book full of character and brilliance, beautifully evocative of Brighton under shifting moods of sun, sea and cloud, and with some ribald wit of which the Prince Regent would not have been ashamed.
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