Snake in the Garden
Chinese Garden. By Rosemary Manning. The ( .7ape,15s.) A Da 1 In H
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Rose of Tibet. By Lionel Davidson.
Gollancz, 18s.)
se to Deceive. By George Bradshaw. Hart-Davis, 21s.) Compromisers. By Ernest Borneman. Deutsch, 21s.) CONNOLLY complained, in Enemies of se, that life at Eton was so dramatic and )ing that anything which came after could )e in the nature of anti-climax. This, of , holds good for any public school; for gh some thirteen-year-olds arrive already a and a few eighteen-year-olds have been to leave still innocent, it is during those ears, for most of us who go there, that ake enters our individual Edens and gives ; low-down. If you have some hundreds is or girls living at close quarters and all yerent stages of digesting the apple, then the stage is set for every kind of passion etrayal in the book. Small wonder that Eton Mr. Connolly found Oxford, and even a bore.
reflections are prompted by. Rosemary ng's The Chinese Garden. Here is a girls' lovingly and precisely described in every of its moral and material foulness. It is, onnolly's Eton, at once odious and ador- ['here is the same intellectual excitement y rate for Miss Manning's heroine, who Latin), the same hideous cruelty, the
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holm absork only course althou corrur knowr five y the sn us the of bo3 in cliff clearly and b after I Paris, Sucl Manni school facet like C able. - (at an enjoys same sexual ambiguity—whereby 'all that' is rigidly discountenanced by mistresses who revel in the most shameless and preposterous favourit- isms. Plainly such a set-up must destroy all but the very strong or the totally insensitive; and yet, as the heroine explains, even knowing this as she did she came to love the place and almost to worship it. It was forever bringing forth new things. (A schoolmaster once told me how lit continued for years at a certain school only in order to see what would happen next, each event being more appalling than the last.) Eventually it brings forth a secret Chinese garden, a copy of The Well of Loneliness in the summer house and a sumptuous display of female treachery. This is a shrewd, elegant and thoroughly disagreeable book.
Peter Everett's first novel, A Day of Dwarfs, is a shrill and even hysterical performance, en- tirely without humour, but containing some impressive imagery and one rather fine passage of sexual description. A young man is telling his mistress, in the intervals of lovemaking, of the life he once led in London as a teenage and self-styled poet. The pattern is dreary and familiar : a youth too lazy and conceited to benefit from a formal education, who drifts about seeking an outlet for his 'talent,' rejects honest work and takes to stealing in order to get his own back on a world which has refused him the money and attention he thinks his 'talent' deserves. Although the young narrator's approval of himself is almost unqualified, he appeals, when the need for excuse is apparent even to him, to the authority of Genet. On the not infrequent occasions when he is sorry for himself, he refers us without a blink to Kierke- gaard and Dostoievsky. The total effect, though 1 very much doubt whether this is what Mr. Everett intended, is to arouse our contempt for a commonplace and boring little crook. Then why mention the book at all? I do so because Mr. Everett's writing has a definite and discon- certing impact, and because he shows a canny control of atmosphere. It will be a pity if he continues to waste his gifts on the inflated pre- tensions of 'fringe people' and layabouts, no matter whether he is trying to castigate or defend them.
In High Places is an ingenious exercise in near- SF. The Prime Minister of Canada wants an act of union with the US in order to make possible new methods of nuclear defence. Poli- tically the issue is delicate, and the more delicate as the popularity of the government has been endangered by some recent blunders in the Im- migration Department which have offended the sentimental. Arthur Hailey is a bit shaky in dealing with his top people; but when he is writing of a rather lower stratum—of the officials and intrigues of the Immigration Department— he has that quickness and competence in handling professional processes which we relish in Balchin or Beaty.
Recommended. Lionel Davidson's The Rose of Tibet is an adventure story told with intelli- gence, energy and adult humour : out of Rider Haggard by Ian Fleming, with brother Peter to umpire the union. In Practise to Deceive, George Bradshaw tells some slick and often very funny anecdotes, most of which are about forgeries and misunderstandings in the world of art dealers. Mr. Bradshaw sometimes turns fey; when this happens, turn straight to the beginning of the next story. As for The Compromisers, while Ernest Borneman lacks the Balzacian amplitude implied by the blurb, he covers a wide range of people (dons, gamblers, Lesbians, heroes) with brash and cheerful versatility.
SIMON RAVEN
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