A modern

romance

peter Ackroyd

9,0 With Me What You Will Joyce Carol ‘rdtes (Gollancz £2.90) rite Spider And The Fly Graham Lord (Ramish Hamilton £2.25) In May 1950 Leo Ross kidnapped his young (laughter, Elena. So beginning the rags-tod,ches saga of a blonde bombshell. Do With 'le What You Will is, as the title suggests, a niodern romance; but it is a romance by 4e„ fault. Elena Ross is, in the best tradition of 'nese things, more sinned against than sinning and the novel centres around her awkward attempts to live in a world in which she is uoject and portrait rather than woman. She is

only seen and touched — in all senses, a living • doll. From her first forced exit at the hands of a mad father, she moves through the world as if it were a coat that had grown too large. She cannot tell whether it is rain or her own tears that she feels on her cheeks, and this little irony sets the romantic but appropriate tone of the novel. When she is eventually returned to her mother (like a parcel that had gone astray), the pair start a forced wandering from Cleveland to New York to Detroit. This might be called a busman's holiday, the mother in question being an ex-model with a garden-wall philosophy and an eye on the main ehance: "Oh go ahead and cry and ruin your face." But the face is a marketable commodity, and Elena is eventually married to one Marvin Howe, attorney, all mouth and money. After this happy event, Elena's life is seen to progress from confusion to controlled hysteria, and then to entire blankness. Enter Jack Morrissey, Legal Aid lawyer and friend of the oppressed.

This may sound suspiciously like a continuing series from My Favourite Knitting Patterns Weekly, but this is only my own

sentimentality. There is a hint of coyness in the weaving and interweaving of plot and sub-plot, but the complete novel rises above all that fiddle. I don't want to murder the theme with synopsis, and I will only mention at this point the liaison between Jack and Elena, the awful presence of Jack's wife who is the conventional bleeding-vein liberal, the slow decay of the villians into loneliness and mania as they go into the dark, and the eventual happy ending for the heroes which I will not, of course, reveal.

This may seem the stuff from which cardboard is made, but reading is believing. Miss Oates has a powerful lyricism which has been yoked with a stron_g attention to detail. Her perceptions are fastidious in the extreme, even with soppy girl's stuff about love. "She believed it was a perfect balance, a perfect reflection as in a mirror: the Elena lying beside him, the Elena in his brain" — and the novel manages to convey a human scale. Miss Oates can enter the inflections of dialogue and the fabric of an event without any overt com mentary, and the relations between people are caught to the life. It is strange that in so long a novel (some 600 pages at the last count) it should be the interior moment at which she excels: ". . . she breathed slowly, as it teartul of disturbing the balance between them, and something drew itself up in her, suddenly, effortless and concise as the raising of a hand in an intimate gesture, a motion so graceful she experienced it in utter disbelief." Which is rather my reaction to writing of this kind: breathless it may be, but it is the apotheosis of romantic fiction. This may seem less than kind since her stars, although highly wrought and occasionally overwrought, are more awkward and complex than their conventional stereotypes would allow. The Legal Aid lawyer could be an obvious figure of fun, but Miss Oates does not commit herself to his ends and means. Even the wealthy husband and lawyer has his moments, and no one is transparent, predictable or innocent. Miss Oates is very good at suggesting certain marginal states of consciousness, and it is the occasional discreet oddity which sustains this fable of the little girl lost.

Miss Oates has a neutral style, rather like the bland centrality of life itself. It can become too easy or over-lyrical, but it can also be sharp and to the point. It is not every romantic novel that can include a couple of unpleasant killings, and can use such facts as the 690 deaths in Detroit, 1971, without

blushing. Do With Me What You Will conveys by indirection the volume of a whole

society. It has taken the themes and characters of pulp-romance to a fine art, and has turned them into a new thing. At least we should be grateful for that.

There is very little to be grateful for in

Graham Lord's The Spider And The Fly. The book reads as if it were a practical joke against its ostensible hero, Richard Brooke, an MP and publisher aspiring to better things. I can sympathise with that, but I was immediately put off by the clumsiness of Mr Lord's writing. On the first page, Brooke glances up at Big Ben (that gaunt giant!) "soothing his ego with its symbolism." And then, on the first line of the second page, we come across Ten Downing Street guarded "by one bearded policeman and a sense of dignity." I have been doing this column long enough to know journalese when I see it. It is enough to make any critic do what Lord's landlord did when he "flashed a gold tooth and withdrew." To point to these solecisms would be mere quibbling were it not that clumsy writing invariably leads to clumsy characterisation. So it is that Mr Lord can have a French taxi-driver say "With such a lady who needs Pigalle?", and that Richard Brooke can have a wife named Sarah and three lovely children named Damian, Rupert and Emma. I won't swear that these names were invented especially for middle-class fiction, but I strongly suspect it.

But this is to veer from the plot which, in an adventure story, is completely the wrong thing to do. Richard Brooke first comes into his own at an interminable political cocktail party, where the women look like toads and talk like parrots and the men look like bores and talk like bores. Mr Lord has caught this particular hell to the life, and I wish he had left it there. Although this might have complicated the action, since it is at one such party that Richard comes to grips with Alex Johnson: "Her eyes were bright, her voice softly American" and, yes, she is a journalist. It does, of course, take a bold journalist to conceive of, let alone write down sentences such as — "Miss you" she said

"Miss you" "Kiss" "Kiss"

and equally bold to launch upon the reading public protagonists as predictable and as unlovable as Richard and Alex. "Flattery will get you anywhere," from him to her. "I know," from her to him. Or was it the other way round?

But The Spider And The Fly is no common-or-garden romance; the plot eventually thickens, and dialogues become so slick and abrupt that I could have sworn I last heard them from the thin lips of Gene Barry. Mr Lord has also spiked his adventure with the elements c,f documentary, with references to William Whitelaw, Panorama that well known middle-aged spread, and James Jones (author of that ancient joke, From Here To Eternity). With high politics just around the corner, Richard travels to Dublin, France and Mozambique. It is at this last stop that Brooke meets his Waterloo, with consequences that involve the attempted assasination of the Prime Minister, and the fate of his American 'friend.' I can only put the matter obliquely, since the climax does not bear repeating in cold print. Let it just be said that although Mr Lord is weak on motive and character, he writes with a certain dogged concentration when faced with a plot. The last chapters are fast if not furious, and I was too interested to put the book down. If only the secret were not given away in the title of this novel, I would have become even more involved.