The Kingdom of Oal,
Auberon Waugh
Rock Rude, Edward Stewart
Joseph £2.10). A711 January is the dead season for EN, Tit. novels, but I never thought I would icfai forward with such eagerness to the allr/foi crop of American imports. Whether it 'pc product of the greater vitality of N,wi American society I do not know, but sad fact that English novelists are sil)tu running out of things to say and disces,pr More and more they take refuge ill TE guistic experiments, deliberate incohere,ITI and literary word-games to hide the "wi that they have nothing to say or deg; m which has not already been said or
cribed in our existing culture. bY(
The picture of American society won( one might glean from a study Of ti novels would be a very strange one in( is It is a world peopled almost entirelY n, drop-outs, dope fiends, nymphornan,!, le roadside philosophers and seo,, d parasites on the body politic. It SOP p takes a glance — even a hostile, satiri: c one — at the world inhabited by Mos' its readers, and the vast majority of Arli, c icans: a world of job opportunity, ill', tives, exciting recreation facilities wonderful refrigerators stuffed with f' The success of Portnoy's Complairl' often think, must largely have been dlisi the fact that its author was prepareu,, 1 take a look back at the world Arnell'; 1 novelists have left behind them. OnlY: I Jewish writers, with their famouS, breakable umbilical cords, are prepare°, look back. Perhaps a tiny grain of Ct/ mercial reckoning implanted at birth ', the well-known grain of sand in the 0,y9 of their mind, also helps. At any rate, /1 average American novelist has no tittle, looking back. He concentrates 00 ploring and establishing the frontiers the new Kingdom of Oz with the same9 neer spirit which launched, established finally realised the older American Dr! of colour television sets and gargant" refrigerators. Mr Stewart's novel takes as its main 5;, king a remote island off the New shire coast inhabited only by a widower, his two daughters, a 110,,Ij$ keeper, a dog and — later — by the of the novel, an orphaned Vietnam out of criminal tendencies. Such a set; makes one a little suspicious at first. 71 lish novels which rely too muCh $ imagination and fantastic settings j$ seldom worth a second glance noWau., — look at John le Carre's latest offer,/t or William Golding's or that of poor, Alan Sillitoe.
I need hardly say that one of ,c daughters on this island is a forty-year, nymphomaniac dope fiend, while other is a twenty-four-year-old 01 psychopath. The housekeeper is a PI nun who ran away from her convent a, stabbing one of the orphan babies trusted to her — she supposes, fatallY( when it tried to fondle her private The orphan concerned grows into the of the novel, Terence MacBane, WP :0 )st ;assionate affair with the nymphomaniac, ailed Baby, mysteriously ends when she °latches him masturbating. Terence's advances to the other daugher — he merely touches her nipple — lead ter to break his arm and murder the /ldousekeeper (by strangulation) and the i iymphomaniac (by beating her brains out) whereupon Terence accidentally kills her n self-defence and is charged with the linurder of all three. By now, however, the lather of the family, called Daddy, has af. formed a homosexual attachment to the pays for his defence, and gets him off, iwith the help of a daughter-in-law who 1,14mysteriously and rather unnecessarily s7urns up at the end as junior counsel and pretends to be helping the prosecution. ''Terence then charges off to do good in the 1Third World while Daddy sits down to eiwrite crazy, inconsequential letters to his 51 mysterious and unnecessary son. r There's more than this, much more, for your money's worth. It is a corker of a novel. The quality of the author's imagination rises to every occasion, the language i s alive as only the American language ..1/4 now is (and also, perhaps, the ' freak ' Ta language of our indigenous drop-outs and dope fiends, but this derives in very large part from the American model) and the characters possess a fairytale plausibility. Perhaps I ought to give the sub-plot, concerning the senior defence counsel's Wife. There seems to be room, and I doubt whether there will be anything else of such interest in The Spectator this week Very well then. After Terence is discharged from the army (for imperfect control of his bowels, of course) he looks up the girlfriend of a Negro buddy who blew himself up with a grenade under the influence of marijuana, but unfortunately approaches the wrong girl who stabs him and accuses him of rape. Escaping from hospital, Terence is fortunate to be picked up by the wife of a famous criminal lawyer, Kitty Hampton, who happens to be smashed out of her mind on alcohol and drugs, driving her Jaguar. As a curious touch, her home is on a golf course and always being struck by golf-balls, although it is hard to see the significance of this point, which is much emphasised in Mr Stewart's already complicated story. Terence and she go to a motel together, intending to enjoy some sexual intercourse, but she falls down in a stupor, obviously dead. Terence relieves her of her money before moving off to his next encounter, with the nymphomaniac Baby Caldwell. Her husband then goes to the morgue to identify her and in one of the few really unconvincing scenes in the book she comes alive again, to give evidence at Terence's trial and commits suicide immediately afterwards. Another is the opening scene which could have been completely cut without losing anything, and so could a later passage when we are given a flashback into the childhood and early struggles of Daddy. Even With these blemishes, Rock Rude provides an extremely enjoyable, well-written ten hours' read for anyone who can get over the appalling first chapter. After this January, at least one English revieweris happy to proclaim that the novel is alive and living quietly in North America.
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