Auberon Waugh on new novels
A new novel by Edna O'Brien is something to which any regular novel reviewer looks forward with such eagerness that he must be careful to moderate his language on discov- ering that there is no new novel after all, that he has been made the victim of rather a cruel practical joke by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. As the author explains in an introductory note, Zee and Co was written as an original screenplay. She has edited slightly, she says, to take out the film technicalities and make it more readable as a book, but a screenplay (Newspeak for film script) is essentially what it remains. The dialogue is given as it is in dramatic scripts, or as it is given for some reason in the weightier Sunday Times inter- views. The connecting narrative cannot, with the best will in the world, be described as representing much more than stage instruc- tions.
If one judges it as a novel, one can only say, that it is abysmal; but then it was not written as a novel. There is an extremely good rea- son why novels are not written in this form, which is that they read much less well. It is harder work to write them in such a way that people want to read them, but that, after all, is what writing is all about. I hope that any impressionable young writer who might be tempted to think that Miss O'Brien has dis- covered some new, meaningful, switched-on, stark, functional labour-saving device will take my words to heart. The story of Miss O'Brien's screenplay is no more then that the thin, tired, anaemic old tale of the eternal triangle: husband takes mistress, wife seduces mistress, all three end thrashing around on the bed together. Perhaps the screening of this process makes cinematographical history. I don't know. Cer- tainly its commitment to paper for the thou- sandth time is no great literary milestone. Within the limits imposed by the story—the modern equivalent, perhaps, of the guilds- men's annual nativity play in the good old days—Miss O'Brien does very well. Her characters are pleasantly grotesque, she handles them with a nice, zany touch, and one wishes the film nothing but success. It would be churlish and ungrateful to rebuke Miss O'Brien after all the pleasure she has given with her earlier novels. Writers have to earn their living, somehow, and writing film scripts is no more disreputable a way than any other. But what on earth do Weid- enfeld and Nicolson think they are doing by publishing this as a novel?
I would not have reviewed the book at all if it had not been by Edna O'Brien. It is one of the functions of good publishers to try to preserve their authors', reputations and Miss O'Brien's reputation as a novelist is well deserved and founded—unlike those of other novelists—on two or more thoroughly good novels. Since it is on her reputation as a nov- elist that people ask her to write film scripts, nothing could be more shortsighted than to put it at risk by this sort of catchpenny strat- agem. Weidenfeld should have dissuaded her, or at any rate he should have refused to des- cribe it as a novel. To rub salt into the wound, I might also point out that whoever wrote the blurb and whoever passed it for publica- tion do not know the meaning of the English word 'vicarious'. I hope Miss O'Brien gives us another novel soon to make up for this disappointment. .
Recommended reading of the week is an American first novel which Macmillan pro- duce with a lavish—and deserved—testi- monial from J. B. Priestley. This might dis- courage younger readers, but they would be wrong. Thomas McMahon, writes about events which took place just as he was being born, in 1943. The story is not the main point of the book, and it is rather tiresomely -told in a succession of flashbacks, although they do not intrude very much.
It also goes to pieces a bit at the end, with a couple of phoney climaxes for which nothing has prepared us. As an idea the tell- ing of a story to a psychiatrist in order to acquaint us with the narrator's reasons for
being a screwed-up young man is a thorough- ly bad one. I hope it doesn't catch on more than it has already.
What makes Mr McMahon's novel so ex- ceptionally rewarding is its setting—within the closed world of the American scientists engaged in developing the first atom bomb, at Los Alamos, New Mexico, between 1943 and 1945. Cleverly, Mr McMahon gives us no more than a hint of how the research is going, although this clearly dominates their social lives, which is what the novel is about.
With spectacular restraint, he even denies himself the pleasure of describing the first test explosion. His setting is within the jerry- built huts of the scientists' living quarters in a military camp which is obsessed with secu- rity. The commandant has a well-rooted dis- like of scientists as, indeed, do most of the military. One cannot honestly say that their prejudices are ill-founded, having read the book, but anybody who shares this reviewer's taste for sociological vdyeurism to the ex- treme point of being curious to know how American scientists behaved at home in 1943 must surely get a copy of this novel.
One cannot, of course, know whether Mr McMahon's description is an authentic one or not. It reads as if it were authentic, and if
it is not authentic I can only say that he shows far greater powers of invention in de-
scribing the atmosphere at Los Alamos than he shows anywhere else in the book. Writers are forever being preached at to take a greater interest in science and scientists. If the preachers could make their characters half so interesting, their situations half so exciting, as Mr McMahon makes his, if they could even show half the natural talent for writing, we might indeed begin to take an interest in the dim and illiterate creatures. Mr McMahon warns us, however, that scien- tists nowadays are nothing like they were in those balmy, far-off months at Los Alamos, and 1 for one believe him.
Like Chesterton's donkey, their hour has passed. but at least Mr McMahon has caught the moment for us.
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