The Nova Mob
The Savage State. By Georges Conchon. Trans- lated by Peter Fryer. (Collins, 21s.) The Freedom of the Cage. By David Lytton. (Bodley Head, 25s.) A Sane and Able Man. By Michael Standen. (Heinemann, 21s.) IN an interview recently given to the Paris Review, William Burroughs goes far towards ex- plaining his own literary techniques in his new novel, Nova Express; he explains, when asked why he makes use of interplanetary warfare in this novel, `The people who work with encephalo- grams and brain waves point out that it will some day be possible to install at birth a radio antenna in the brain which will control thought, feeling, and sensory perceptions. . . . One's ally today is an enemy tomorrow. I have postulated this power—the nova mob—which forces us to play musical chairs.'
`Musical chairs,' yes; but Mr. Burroughs is playing with desperate weapons, drugs amongst them. The conquest of man by man-discovered forces is no new concept in English or American fiction; we already have Huxley and Orwell. What is new, I think, in Mr. Burroughs's work is that while he is plainly satirising the many ways in which we can obtain `kicks' nowadays, he uses those very kicks to obtain his own best effects. Thus his work owes as much to advertis- ing, science and sex without love as it does to the stream of consciousness. He makes Virginia Woolf's `divine wool-gathering' (as it has been called) seem parochial and orderly. If Mr. Bur- roughs owes anything to any other writer at all, then it is to James Joyce. Like Joyce, he can produce evocative and luminous passages of prose, such as, 'There are areas of canals and lagoons where giant goldfish and salamanders with purple fungoid gills stir in clear black water and gondolas piloted by translucent green fish boys.'
Moreover, William Burroughs is not a pornographic writer; he does not employ the sexual activities of his characters in order to excite his readers. On the contrary, Ile is eager to divest sex of its modern artificiality and give it something of the spontaneity which we find among the unsophisticated peoples of the world. In our own times he sees sex as `a biologic weapon' which `has been degraded for control purposes, or really for anti-human purposes.' Burroughs's literary method arouses many ques- tions in the reader's mind; his use of scraps, cuttings, photographs gives the largest possible scope to the arbitrary and the haphazard. Yet. oddly enough, one feels a controlling presence behind these apparently random selections and
there can be no doubt at all that Burroughs himself is an important artist.
It is scarcely possible to review a bunch of novels nowadays without coming upon some- thing about Africa. Georges Conchon's Prix Goncourt prize-winner, The Savage State, de- scribes the interplay between a broken marriage and mixed racial relations in a republic in equatorial Africa which was once a French colony. Avit, the Unesco official and cuckolded husband, is unwittingly responsible for causing the sort of emotional and political explosion which we have come to expect from this type of novel. The book is carefully written, but sadly laboured; despite its subject-matter, the story seldom really holds the reader's attention.
David Lytton's The Freedom of the Cage is a very different matter. Written tersely and vividly in the dramatic present, it describes the state of mind of an Orange Free State shop- keeper who becomes keyed-up to near-assassina- tion. Ebon Prinsloo is a full, complete person; the unbalance of his mind draws our compas- sion, not our wish to alienate. In recent years I have read a number of novels set in various parts of Africa and I can state unhesitatingly that The Freedom of the Cage is easily one of the best written of them.
Two People, by Donald Windham, has been highly recommended by E. M. Forster. It is a delicate and reticent account of a married American's affair with a young Italian boy whom he meets on the top of the Spanish Steps. The author gives as much care to the portrayal of Forrest, the American, as he does to Marcello, and this novel is both a study of the subtleties of simpatia and of the city of Rome itself. Mr. Windham never becomes so obsessed with the closed world of lovers (something which too often happens in contemporary fiction) that he fails to catch the smells, sights and sounds of one of the most beautiful and baffling cities in Europe. Two People is full of feeling, but quite free of sentiment—an achievement in itself.
Jennifer Dawson's third novel, The Cold Country, is also a study in how to abolish one's loneliness. Miss Dawson's first novel, The Ha-ha, was about a schizophrenic in a mental hospital. While written in a realistic style, it had a bizarre quality, not wholly to be accounted for by the chief character's fantasy-life. The Cold Country also has the same quality and is, I think, mildly reminiscent, in this respect, of Muriel Spark's Memento Mori and The Bachelors.
This novel is about the illegitimate Dickie's attempt to escape from his own rootlessness. In London, with an equally lonely girl, who is a
fidget and a compulsive eater, he attempts to find warmth and companionship. Miss Dawson writes extremely well in a slightly off-beat manner. She has an acute eye for detail and, whatever she is depicting, she manages to trans- form into her own weird world. Despite its element of fantasy, this world is wholly con- vincing.
In an otherwise realistic setting, fantasy (in the form of a local dramatic company's produc- tion of Twelfth Night) also has a place in Michael Standen's A Sane and Able Man. The hero, Harry Fox, is an English teacher and it is he who is directing the play. Of Twelfth Night, Harry says, 'Illyria is a place where no one faces up to reality—they prefer to enjoy dream- ing before mirrors.' So he himself seeks 'reality' in an affair with Anne Kirkham, a married woman. I do not feel that there is any inevit- ability about the presence of Twelfth Night in this novel. It seems like a gimmick which the author employs to heighten an otherwise pedes- trian story. The difference between Miss Daw- son's handling of fantasy and Mr. Standen's is that, with Miss Dawson, one feels that it arises from the very nature of her characters themselves. With Mr. Standen, it seems super- imposed.
ELIZABETH JENNINGS
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