NEW NOVELS
Officers and Men
The Assassins. By Nicholas Mosley. (Hodder and Stoughton, 25s.) The Mask of Apollo. By Mary Renault. (Long- mans, 25s.) Night Games. By Mai Zetterling. (Constable, 25s.) Welcome to the Club. By Clement Biddle Wood. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 21s.) John and Mary. By Mervyn Jones. (Jonathan Cape, 21s.) MR SIMON RAVEN is a moralist, which means he believes there are still some things left you shouldn't do, even if there is no good reason for not doing them. When the moralist is an artist he must begin from scratch and make us feel the emotional impact of his judgments. If he suc- ceeds in doing this, we don't really care how odd his system is. He has let in a little light and shown us a part of life which our system had missed. So whether he is as odd as Celine or Hemingway or Rolfe we are grateful.
The morality of the Sabre Squadron might be described as the most outdated that ever existed. With their cherry-red trousers, regimental silver and officer's-word-is-his-bond code they don't exactly break new ground. But there they are in the novel, quite lively and kicking. Into their Mess wanders Daniel Mond, a somewhat less lively Jewish mathematical genius who has come to Germany in 1952 to research into the Dort- mund squiggles that have baffled the best brains of the Reich. As a symbol of man's labyrinthine search for the Ultimate Secret this is not much more than a joke, although Mr Raven does his best with metaphors of spaghetti and woolly balls. Daniel Mond uncovers the terrible secret and the various spy-groups begin to swoop. He Is juggled between the neo-Nazis supported by the Americans and the English (who are the real crooks) until the Sabre Squadron takes him to its bosom and almost saves him.
Mr Raven writes about the upper classes the way some Catholics write about their Church. And like them, he tends to empty the world of all possible rivals. Accept the dogma or else—a hell of blood and darkness. The glimpses of hell and a continuously sinister undertone in the book are (Ate real and quite frightening. Against that blackness, the more rigid and colourful the code the better. The Sabre Squad- ron may be Gilbertian; Daniel Mond's research may be. a 'facile symbol; the description of army manoeuvres is certainly over-long and self- indulgent. But there is a bit of real live horror in Raven's work which marks him off from the poseurs who have embraced the spy-thriller. The Assassins, by Nicholas Mosley, is yet one more in the genre which threatens to oust
all others. Written in a staccato, jolting rhythm, I found it disconcerting. Only at times of high emotional tension does the abruptness seem to fit the action; elsewhere there is a sense of injected melodrama, as if every second were high- tension, whether the characters are drinking a cup of tea or talking about the weather. There is a defence for this in the plot: Sir Simon's fifteen-year-old daughter disappears while he is engaged in diplomatic talks with Korin, a Communist, and the two situations are used to throw light on each other. In fact, the novel is too long for this defence to work and the reader wearies of continual suspense.
Mary Renault's success as a historical novelist (The King Must Die) is because she refuses to be sentimental or nostalgic about the past—very often the chief motive for the writer using the subject. She is brisk and direct without making fourth-century Greece sound too modern or too slick. This story is about an actor, Nikeratos, who travels from city to city in Greece with his own company. Mary Renault achieves verisimilitude even with the most im- possible characters: Plato, for instance, or Dion. The attack on Syracuse has immediacy and ex- citement, but inevitably the question arises : What now? Now the novel can begin: the area that lies outside time in which we are most in- terested. Finally, it doesn't matter a bodkin whether the novel is historical or not, but the chief interest here is archaeological and it is the presentation of Greek acting methods and stage- craft that stays in one's mind.
A long way from history is Mai Zetterling's first novel, Night Games. It is a long way from most of the novelist's traditional concerns, a strange lopsided work that is impossible to stop reading but which leaves no after-images in the reader's imagination. The narrator recounts the history of his relationship with his mother, 'a portentous tart with promiscuous tastes and emotions' and a great deal of money. It all takes place in a timeless, placeless, peopleless vacuum and although the narrator is supposed to be married to Mariana, we know nothing about her. There are a number of symbolic happenings and at the end the family mansion is blown up and the mother's ghost exorcised. But for all its gaps this writing has a rare quality in it: the words leap off the page.
In Welcome to the Club, Clement Biddle Wood deals with cherry-blossom time in Hiroshima, 'the April after the Unpleasantness.' His hero, Andrew Oxblood, the last of a long line of warrior Quakers, is DMO (Divisional Morale Officer) from the 50th (Houndog) Division, and a virgin to boot. The deflowering of Lieutenant Oxblood is actual as well as symbolic in a novel which is dedicated to the deflowering of shibbo- leths and pomp in the dadaist world of the American army. Clement Wood is the best comic writer I have read for years. He plunges the reader into the thick of an incomprehensible world where rows of letters stand for names and where the hoary old business of human rela- tionships has been reduced to an unfathomable ritual. With tremendous speed he skates from one position to another, encompassing the con- servative, the liberal, the anarchic with an accuracy that brings the ridiculous postures of men to the front of his stage. Using the device of letter-writers (which has an original freshness after its long seclusion), he sets up a cross-fire of advice bombarding the young lieutenant from his Quaker parents, his negro friend, and his old headmaster. But the targets are serious, and the writer assumes a compassion which makes it unnecessary for him to comment. The book is free from sentimentality, because everybody has heard of Hiroshima and knows what has been left out. And in his use of the American vernacular this seems to me the liveliest advance since Catcher in the Rye.
Last, and I'm afraid least, is Mervyn Jones's John and Mary, which recounts in alternate chapters John and Mary's views of a relation- ship which develops after they have met at a party and got into bed. There are some random insights, but the disconnected love story remains disconnected and there is nothing here that has not been done many times before. Like so many novels, it is neither art nor life but some ineffectual ground between the two.
JOHN DANIEL
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