NO VELY
Big Ideas
The Embezzler. By Louis Auchincloss. (Victor Gollancz, 25s.) My Sweet Charlie. By David Westheimer. (Michael Joseph, 25s.) An Ancient Enemy. By Pierre Moinot. (Mac- millan, 25s.)
OF the six works listed above, all but those of Jane Bowles and Louis Auchincloss might be loosely grouped under the heading :novel of ideas,' and taken together they suggest some of the limitations inherent in the form. In con- structing a novel to advance a particular thesis, the novelist is in danger of subordinating the creative faculty to the demands of argu.nent; in this case the novel itself ceases to be the embodiment of ideas or attitudes, and instead merely provides the somewhat arbitrary con- tainer into which ideas are poured.
In this most extreme form, ideas do not grow organically out of action or character; instead, action and character exist for the sake of ad- vancing the argument—as points of reference rather than as means of inference. The novel of ideas can, of course, overcome these pitfalls —as, in our time, Huxley, Camus and Golding have demonstrated—but when it fails to do so it suggests a further weakness in the form: in converting fiction to a tool, it not only fails to realise the sense of amplified and enriched ex- perience which the novel can offer, but has the reciprocal effect of vitiating the idea itself.
Jim Hunter's apocalyptic novel The Flame demonstrates both flaws: it describes the in- sidious way in which a right-wing movement, feeding on nationalism, racial prejudice and frus- trated religiosity, becomes a major political force in Britain. Mr Hunter constructs his novel with a great deal of technical facility (if too little irony), and he writes with impressive conviction; but his characters are so meticulously tailored to advance his thesis that few have any claim to a life of their own. Lacking any convincing form, but adopting instead the rudiments of a borrowed one, the message itself is dissipated, and neither sincerity nor right-mindedness can redeem The Flame as a work of creative literature.
The hero of Jim Hunter's novel is a victim of his own myopic idealism, which permits him to be corrupted by the press and by political opportunists; by focusing more consistently on the character of this latter-day Messiah, the author might have given the novel more dramatic unity as well as more human depth. Such is the technique which John Sherlock has adopted in The Instant Saint, which, like The Flame, is concerned with the exploitation of a young idealist by a hero-hungry world. In the no-man's- land between India and Red China, Dr Stephen Quinn operates a hospital for refugees, to whom he seems a god sent by Vishnu.
To the professional fund-raiser—at least Initially—Dr Quinn is only a prime commodity; to the cynical reporter who accompanies him to Chushul, he is a neurotic egotist; to the Ameri- can public, an 'instant saint'; and to the young ‘koman who accompanies him on his fund- raising tour, he is all of these things—but ulti- mately- a sign that the gesture of a single indi-
vidual retains the power to relieve in some measure 'the suffering cif the world. Though he cannot avoid the occasional melodramatic touch, John Sherlock presents his story with a forceful, often violent, authenticity; and though he has some oft-repeated things to say about the modern world's resources for trivialising the self, he rarely allows his thesis to dictate the form of the novel.
Other novelists might have seen the self- justifying confession of The Embezzler—plus rebuttals from his ex-wife and his best friend (now his wife's second husband)—as a chance to probe the iniquities of high-finance spiced with low fidelity : both ingredients are present in Louis Auchincloss's current novel, but neither is permitted to cause much more than a ripple on the novel's urbane surface. The Embezzler is a less ambitious work than The Rector of Justin, and the narrative focus less consistent—not simply because we receive a three-sided portrait of the modern robber baron, but because Auchin- doss himself never seems certain whether he is making more of Guy Prime than there really is, or decidedly less, or, indeed, whether it matters after all. There are moments of vintage Auchincloss, but on the whole The Embezzler is like slightly flat champagne; still, no one could mistake it for stale beer.
In the best of Jane Bowles's fiction her waspish style is not only illuminating but bizarrely enter- taining, and leaves no doubt of her originality. In Plain Pleasures she appears at her best--in the title story and in the weird half-light of 'A Guatemalan Idyll': but also at her worst--in a deplorably bad playlet and in the contrived con- clusion of 'Camp Cataract,' a story of spinsterly frustration and hallucination. Even at her best, Jane Bowles is usually making a masterly fuss over nothing at all, but she embroiders the in- consequential with a rich sardonic insight.
In David Westheimer's My Sweet Charlie, an improbable pair of social outcasts take refuge in a deserted summer-house. Marlene is a poor- white Southern farm girl, driven from home when her father learns that she is pregnant, and she has no sooner begun to take some comfort from her well-equipped `adopted' home than it is in- vaded by another trespasser—a young Negro intellectual who had lost his temper in a civil rights demonstration and unintentionally killed a vicious white heckler. Marlene and Charlie enact the old drama of Southern bigotry and misapprehension, but drawn unwittingly together by common needs and dangers, they reach an uneasy truce which, as the months pass, yields to a generous, at moments comical, and ultimately fatal friendship. David Westheimer has created two moving and entirely believable characters who manage to steal a little time and happiness from the society which has shaped and is eventually to destroy them.
During a tranquil holiday in Corsica, two men discover An Ancient Enemy—the former Gestapo officer who had brutally tortured one of them and murdered their mutual friend. They temporarily surrender the peace and the am- bitions they have built in the post-war years in order to pursue their enemy, but even before he unintentionally eludes them, they have begun to lose their violent determination—just as, in the novel's opening scene, both men had become distracted by the Corsican landscape and failed to play their parts in a boar hunt. The novel's depth, intensity and richness of vision are unde- niable, but some of its symbolic innuendo seems redundant—the unnecessary underscoring of what is essentially a starkly simple and dramati-
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