NEW NOVELS
Soothsayers
BARRY COLE
Under a Glass Bell Anais Nin (Peter Owen 32s 6d) The Revolutionary Hans Koningsberger (Andre Deutsch 25s) Watcher in the Park Marianne Sinclair (Jonathan Cape 22s 6d) Seven Days at the Silbersteins Etienne Leroux translated by Charles Eglington (W. H. Allen 21s) A ticklish and feathery question that has gone into my mind during the past week (and seems likely to make a nest there) is: what dis- tinguishes reality from fiction? Ignoring most academic argument, I am left a perplexity, left with what Eliot in a desperate moment might have called 'the intolerable struggle with ap- proximate definition.' I do not mean the 'real- ism' we often seek in literature, but the narra- tion of real events in time and place.
To be specific: The Family Man purports to be fiction, uses fictional device, often reads like a novel and yet conveys reality to a de- gree which not only convinces but hurts. It seems likely that fiction—in a literary sense— cannot make lasting hurt, yet John Gale's novel hurts in that it can force from the reader un- willing mental tears.
Here is a man, a just and humane adjunct to what in our wisdom we call civilisation, whose life revolves, simply, around his wife, his children and his work as writer and journalist. His concerns are ours but he makes vocal those imponderables most find too embarrass- ing to embrace. 'There is something I want to say: but when I sit down to write it, it eludes me.' Don't be fooled. Looking throughout the book for a meaningful pattern to his existence the narrator at one point asks of a companion, Is life on earth a reflection of a greater struggle between good and evil far out in the cosmos?' Again, don't be fooled, for pre- ceding, surrounding and following such re- marks a fine art and a very dry wit are at work. The companion's reply is, 'Stick to your own sort, boy, that's my advice. Believe me,. the British are the salt.'
Again and again John Gale builds up only to knock down. Or so, it seems. If he posits a seemingly portentous question it is made acceptable by its timing, by his exhilarating descriptions of everyday events and objects: lighting a fire, reporting his children's talk, collecting driftwood.
The writing itself is impeccable and some- thing of both the writer's style and his nar- rator's attitude comes through in a passage such as this, in which his children catch a baby octopus and then decide to let it go.
'Peter unknotted the top of the plastic bag and tipped out the octopus into the shallow water. It lay on the sea, and was carried to and fro by small waves. Then it revived, and propelled itself along, its tentacles streaming out behind like Medusa's hair. It turned in a semi-circle and returned to the shallowness near our feet.
"It's come to say goodbye," Lucy said.'
With this should be juxtaposed passages which detachedly lament the puzzling sick- nesses of our society, or the vagaries of the individual mind. And behind it all is the domesticity of the title, a gentle and beautiful affirmation of life. John Gale's previous book, Clean Young Englishman, was autobiography, implicitly factual. I do not know if his new book is fact or fiction. And I don't need to.
Anais Nin has a considerable international reputation yet her writing seems to present a nicety of style born more of practice than in- spiration. "Oh, Madame," said the Mouse, "I knew it would not last. We've had meat every day, and I was so happy, I thought at last I had found a good place. And now you're acting just like the others. Eggs, I can't eat eggs."' This comes from pages 206-7 of Anais Nin's journals, volume two, published last year. Her collection of short stories, Under a Glass Bell, contains, in 'The Mouse,' the same words (and more). Similarly with the story 'The Mohican' (see pages 99-100 of the
journals); aild suis le plus malade des surrealistesges 188-191).
What I'm ,trying to say is that the whole collection of stories is a waste of time and money. Embodied in a journal of 357 pages costing 45s they now reappear (with puffed- out emendations some twenty years old) in a book of 127 small pages at 32s 6d. Still, that's the publisher's decision and he presumably has his reasons. What I object to is second-hand fact presented as fiction. The writing, for what it's worth, is, as fey and modish as anything to have come out of the 'thirties. She says very little in excessive words.
Hans Koningsberger's The Revolutionary describes the present-day mid-European life of a potential assassin. The hero's socialism, as • the author admits, has the impatience or un- friendliness of a fashionable doctor forced to attend a tramp run over in the street. As a student he is barely tolerated by his working- class cohorts and is, in effect, our old friend the outsider, newly wrapped in purposive dogma. The book is competent and raises the right questions. But compared with John Gale's 'questions' Hans Koningsberger's are so in- volved as to mean hardly anything.
Marianne Sinclair's second novel is several removes from any truth. A small girl befriends Fritz, a middle-aged para-paedophile, and uses him to amuse herself. 'Pamela knew how illusory her power over "real" adults was, for if they sometimes pretended to be her victims, they reasserted their authority as soon as they wanted.. . . Fritz's subjection was real. Pamela knew that her power over him was far greater than she had any right to have over an adult, and that was perhaps the most depraving aspect of their association.' Mrs Sinclair's trouble is that she talks down to her readers and flaunts a throwaway wisdom wholly lacking in com- passion. She has made of a nice theme some- thing sickly and untidy. - I haven't much room to write as much as I would like of Seven Days at the Silbersteins. Translated from the Afrikaans it presents us with a microcosm of a modern utopia, set in South Africa, in which a young man, Henry, makes a sort of secular pilgrim's progress to- wards love and self-assertion. Unlike Mr Gale's narrator, Henry is 'caught in a pattern of behaviour . . . over which he desired no control.' His victory can only come through his knowing the nature of the bonum and the malum and necessary experience of what his real but metaphysically inclined host, a farm- ing empire builder, calls 'dualism.' The wit is sharp and the intellect delectable. There's no truth whatsoever, but as fiction the book con- vinces completely.
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