Farewell Blues
The Anti-Death League. By Kingsley Amis. (Gollancz, 30s.)
A Drop of Patience. By William Melvin Kelley. (Hutchinson, 25s.) WRITING about contemporary fiction seems to entail a constant act of reassessment; every book which comes under review is liable to be violently experimental, gently traditional or, very rarely, somewhere along the line between the two ex- tremes. Everything, in effect, seems to present some sort of challenge, to demand some kind of special attention. The critic has either to keep sharpening his critical tools or else to look about, rather desperately, for new ones altogether.
Certainly, the new Kingsley Amis novel forces us to revise our opinion of this writer's par- ticular gifts. Mr. Amis is nothing if not surpris- ing, and his new book has left the world of contemporary mores and addressed itself to one's moral duty when placed under orders to act abominably while threatened by the Chinese Communists. Though most of its properties are different, The Anti-Death League is slightly reminiscent of 1984; there is the same sense of imminent universal calamity, of man being almost overwhelmed by impersonal, or deper- sonalised, forces. Even the hero is called James Churchill, saved by a warm and profound love- affair with a girl called Catharine. As he says, . . if bad things can go together, so can good things. You and me ever meeting in the first place. Think what a good thing that was, and how unlikely.'
Spies, cancer, psychiatry, germ warfare and secret weapons all have their place in The Anti- Death League, yet they never overtopple the novel's human element and human urgency; it is with people that Mr. Amis is still essentially concerned. Where, then, has his new novel really led him since Take a Girl Like You and One Fat Englishman? Firstly—and this is a loss as well as a gain—Mr. Amis has abandoned the old acerbity and satire (you cannot, I suppose, be caustic merely when life itself is at stake). Again, now that Mr. Amis is probing the greater horrors, he has given up all his former ques- tioning of meaning, manners, and of language. Despite its subject, The Anti-Death League is, as a result, written with less force and originality than most of the earlier books; but if it is not a stylistic advance, it is certainly one in the matter of feeling for, and understanding of, human beings. In the past, Mr. Amis came closest to his characters in Take a Girl Like You, I think. Catharine, in the new novel, is rather reminiscent of Jenny Bunn, though she is much more experienced. Like Jenny, she has a directness and honesty which are very touch- ing. Perhaps these are the qualities which are most likely to save all of us in the end. Cer- tainly, in a book mercifully free from panaceas, this seems to be Mr. Amis's message.
Jean Larteguy's The Hounds of Hell illiih- trates the chaos three determined men can create in a politically inflammable country. In this case, the place is Katanga in 1961 and the men are mercenaries—Colonel La Ronciere, Thomas Fonts, a political agent, and the Ger- man, Karl Kreis. In private and public matters, these men make almost endless turmoil and, since Monsieur Larteguy's mind is so lively, I am puzzled to find out why his novel is fundamen- tally unsatisfactory. I think it is partly because the book's main action is divided among three men and so a certain amount of intensity is inevitably lost. But another reason is that the novel is too full, too all-embracing, and too long. Its effect would have been much sharper and much more forceful if M. Lartiguy had either confined himself to one main character or else been satisfied to leave much unsaid.
Leslie Fiedler's novel, The Second Stone, also has three main characters—Mark, Hilda, his wife, and Clem, a friend of his student days— though, in fact, most of the novel is devoted to the strange, sometimes tender, sometimes doubting, but always high-spirited affair between Hilda, who is pregnant, and Clem. Set in Rome, and containing the additional background of a ludicrous International Congress of Love, the story moves at tremendous speed; Hilda and Clem whirl through the city, discovering each other, looking at the sights and playing hide-and- seek with Mark. Mr. Fiedler is a distinguished literary critic, but there is nothing of the study about The Second Stone. The book satirises many things—the Vatican's attitude to sex among them—but basically it is a serious love. story written with bravura. Many recent novels have been set in Rome, but one never for a moment feels that Mr. Fiedler has chosen that city as his setting simply for the glamour which may rub off on his characters. There is nothing tawdry about The Second Stone, and, as in The Anti-Death League, personal relationships are considered to be the most important element in life—and in fiction.
So they are also in Nina Bawden's A Little Love, A Little Learning, though her novel is far removed in style and setting from The Second Stone. Domestic but not trivial, familiar yet never boring, A Little Love, A Little Learning, told in the first person by a twelve-year-old girl, is a minor moral tract. Its author's deep interest in people and their motives prevent it, however, from being a mere set of lay figures, or puppets, chosen to carry a message. I do think, though, that this fascinating story of a London doctor's household might profitably have been cut here and there.
The Bluebird is tu Home has pretensions to nothing but comedy and, on the whole, it fulfils its main purpose. Mrs. Brooke Astor is con- cerned with the- 1930s in smart America and with her protagonists, Jane Stowe and Jim Allstead, in particular. Mrs. Astor is no Scott Fitzgerald and she makes little attempt to do for the 'thirties in the US what Fitzgerald did for the 'twenties—namely, to evoke an era and also [Continued on page 336 Continued from page 3341 to criticise its values. Nor is she a satirist Ifte Mr. Fiedler; she is content to recount a tale about love and marriage set in an age which already has the glow of history around it. Mrs. Astor's characters may be three-dimensional, but her setting is pure pasteboard. History is some- where else.
Jill Neville's Fall-Girl is a ipalic, but its characters and milieux are fully presented. The narrator is an Australian girl who comes to work in London, does all the usual light-hearted things, gets married and has a baby. This is the merest sketch of a short, witty, perceptive novel. Simply because Miss Neville has not tried to be either clever or portentous, her novella, on its own modest terms, comes off completely; no particular moral is drawn and the writer is con- tent to remain simply an observer of contem- porary manners and habits.
William Melvin -Kelley's A Drop of Patience is a delicately told love-story of a blind coloured boy and a white girl. Ludlow Washington, the young Negro, is a trumpeter, and music and love are the two most important things in his life. He marries young, has a child, then, later, falls in love with and wants to marry a white girl, Ragan. Much unhappiness and doubt attend this relationship and Ludlow has several breakdowns. Mr. Kelley has no great racial arguments to put forward; he is concerned pri- marily with individuals and the way in which they treat each other. There are no cris de coeur in his novel and nothing in the least bit shrill or overwritten. ELIZABETH JENNINGS
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