Tough is not enough
Peter Ackroyd
Flight One Charles Carpentier (Eyre Methuen
£2.40) •
The Thing He Loves Brian Glanville (Seeker and Warburg £2.10) The Polygamist Ndabaningi Sithole (Hodder and Stoughton £1.90) I have never been a great admirer of machismo. The tough guy is generally a bore in the flesh but he is more so in what, for the purposes of this review, I shall call art. This is Mr Carpentier's first novel, and he has begun with a bang. Flight One has more tough guys than Lex Barker had muscles and, like muscles, they appear in the most familiar places. The action — if that is not too effeminate a word — is set in California, the land of the dream machine. And, for Mr Carpentier, the land of 'walk-in bars' and rumpus rooms.' Where cocktails are being continually mixed, and where the saunas are tastefully decorated with Degas reproductions.
Our hero is Stan Sears, a Vietnam veteran, who is to become the first pilot of a new supersonic jet. Stan has a loving and, yes, " almost doll-like" wife whose name is Nancy. They have two children — Karen, the one who likes horses, and Keith, the one who likes planes. Middle America has never been more fully described, but there are cracks beneath the cardboard. Stan mistakenly believes that his co-pilot, Dave, who is a compulsive womaniser, is having an affair with Nancy. The groundsman, Pete, is an alcoholic who has a grudge against Stan. He is a coward to boot, and Stan had had him grounded in Vietnam. Put these three upon the first public flight of the supersonic jet, add a little sabotage, and you have a rare emotional and technical mess. At two and a half times the speed of sound, and thirteen miles above the earth, it's enough to keep anyone's muscles in trim.
The writing is, predictably, of the staccato variety. And to match the hardness and the shortness of the style, lesser characters are introduced rather like signals from a novelist's morse code. Scientists are always dotty and wear thick glasses; nurses are firm but cheerful; weather-forecasters are bright and easy-going; old ladies are little old ladies who are scared to death of planes. And did I mention that wives were "doll-like "? Mr Carpentier does not seem to be aware of the particular paralysis that these ancient jokes induce, for he enters their ethic with something like abandon. In his prose, people admit things "dryly," they smile "woodenly," they toss their heads and "toy fitfully" with their respective hairs. This naturally cannot be avoided, since people are " doomed " to behave in certain ways. And at those moments which sway between the tragic and the breathless, Mr Carpentier has thoughtfully added dots to indicate the silent wrestling with fate: "It's just that I have to . . . I don't even know how to say it." Guys, as opposed to broads, are bound to be laconic and these protagonists are no exception. Comments tend to be confined to the strong-but-silent variety: "Hang in there, kid" and " Thanks, baby, see you again sometime, huh?" as the steam is wiped off the Degas. That final " huh " speaks volumes, of course, in the apotheosis of a hero.
And talking of heroes, there's a good adventure film writhing somewhere within this book. The broad, not to say startling simplicity of pace and character would look better in celluloid than it does here in cold pulp. In fact, I have a suspicion that Mr Carpentier decided to write the book of the film before the film. He parcels his narrative up quite neatly into segments of one minute, and employs montage with a swiftness that would startle the most dedicated cineaste. The camera is, in this case, mightier than the pen. But only just. Since Mr Carpentier has decided to write a novel,' he has gone to great lengths to see what he should include: motive, character, surprise, reversal and so on. And he has unfortunately arranged matters so that the denouement, in a manner of speaking, depends upon our suspending our disbelief and identifying with the heartbeat behind the muscle. The mawkish relations between Stan, Dave and Pete take on a central role and the thrills a million feet up are simply a consequence. This is a technical mistake, which I'm sure Mr Carpentier will rectify when he comes to write the definitive script.
I thought that my reflections on the awfulness of the tough guy, when transmuted into art, were going to be amplified by a reading of The Thing He Loved, It is a collection of short stories by Brian Glanville, who is a sports writer and therefore (I imagined in my ivory tower) another victim of locker-room fantasy. At first glance, the stories seem suitably sweaty: a lady athlete falls in love at the Mexico Olympics, the tribulations of a boy runner, the man who killed his football hero, the rise of a soccer manager. But they are not, in fact, hard core machismo. Mr Glanville has an instinctive grasp of what is private and perhaps most human, and his stories elicit the moods and the personal gestures which lie beneath the pursuit of action and the relentless vacuity of events.
The short story form is not an easy one. Characters can neither be simplistic nor overly complex, and the action should be lucid without being elaborate. Glanville manages this very well. He captures the oblique interiors of a character and a speech, a state of being that seems permanent or an invasive and extraordinary mood. His protagonists are generally enigmatic or lonely figures, and dilapidation. In The Mascot,' the central there is an air in the stories of weariness and there is an air in the stories of weariness and
figure of a man who is exactly that and II° more. He accompanies the English football team wherever it goes, and always runs .4 around the pitch in a John Bull uniform and flag. There is something so forlorn and pitia. ble about the man, but Glanville does not go in for easy generalities; the mood of depriva. tion is counterpointed by the determination and dogged optimism of the man himself, as Glanville illuminates it in his monologue.
Glanville has an ear for human speech. language captures the inflections and hesitancies of ordinary speech, in a manner beyond the hardness and sterility of Carpefl. tier's slang. It is a language that is often smallest and weakest within the toughest of frames, and it is one that can elicit the ob. vious but generally unexpressed atmospheres of daily life. In these stories, people do not triumph over events and action but they can be distinguished from them. The tough guy is a slight figure because he can only be identified with his actions (and thus the natural character for a straight thriller), but in Glan' ville's writing there is another dimension which you might call language or you might call life.
And finally, to labour my theme to a premature death, a novel about African machismo. Which goes under the other name of tribalism. The Polygamist is the storY, appropriately enough, of how polygamy can live beside monogamy. If there was any more rhyme there, the whole thing would sound like a poem from Dorothy Parker. But Ndabaningi Sithole takes an entirely different slant to this age-old problem of how many and how much. Sithole is now in prison in Rhodesia, not because of this book I hasten to add but because of his leadership of ZANU. The publishers have blazoned this fact up0.11 the cover of the book, as though it were in some way germane. Fortunately, it is not. . The polygamist of the title is chieftain Dube, and he has seven wives. Despite 615 bonus (or is it boni?) Dube is a continuallY, solemn and right-thinking man, and most of the narrative is devoted to his quips and sal. lies. The seven wives act throughout like a chorus from one of lonesco's less comic dramas, and the total effect is not dissimilar to those movie dialogues between Red Indians: "You speak wisely, mother of Matani " is a favourite of mine and "'You hear that, MY wives. You trouble me.' .' Yes, we hear,' cried the puzzled wives." This might be said te labour the obvious, and in so doing folloWs the general tenor of the book. The plot consists in the return to the tribe of Dube's son, Ndanda. Ndanda has become both a teacher and a Christian, two alarming moves which Dube seems to take rather casually in his stride. The sticking point 15 simply that Ndanda wants only one wife, as any Christian teacher would. The last chapters of the narrative are devoted to Ndanda's persuading Dube of the wisdom of this step. Dube is naturally persuaded and, a5 the apparently inevitable consequence, buys a car and a pair of shorts. Instead of the common-or-jungle loincloth. Sithole seems happy to have arranged this turn of events, but I have to admit that it came as something of a surprise to a poor westerner like me. For the largest part of the book had been given up to a description of the ancient tribes and rituals-loincloths. polygamy and all. It all seemed perfectlY proper to me, and the urban improvements of Ndanda are a difficult aspirin to swallow. Especially when they are recounted in a sin. gularly ponderous and graceless style. But if you are a politician, I suppose that these matters of style are beneath you.
Previous page
