Depression Session
THIS has been a depressing week's reading, not because the quality of the four books under re- view is poor—on the contrary, all are good—
but the mood engendered by them is one of gloom, Even Susan Chitty's Mitford-esque ac- count of Hons in Africa didn't help. It seemed so remdte from the real, urgent, pressing Africa that it just aggravated one's despair. Her novel
is written in the first person by eighteen-year-old Flavia, whose father is a Lord. 'I'm not bad,' 'she says, 'in a fluffy sort of way but not good enough for a' model and I'm quite good at English but not good enough for an advertising agency.' She is off to find a husband in Nandiland with cousin Griselda, complete with real pigskin bags because Mummy believes you can get away with glass pearls, but not with imitation pigskin luggage. There she stays with her. countess Aunt Dora, who wears crackling yellow oilskins during the day and dresses which expose, a terri- fying talcum-caked cleavage at night. The de- scriptions—like that of the ghastly house of a local inhabitant, with its multi-coloured walls and pictures of African game arranged like Peter Scott ducks and looking as 'if they had been painted by numbers'—are cruel and funny, and, I suppose, since Mrs. Chitty spent two years in Africa, accurate too.
Pig on a Lead is truly original. Derek Ingrey has a vision as personal and remarkable as William Golding, although there is absolutely nothing derivative about this strange and beauti- fully written novel. The story is told by a sixteen-year-old boy after, one imagines, the bomb has fallen. In any event, a terrible disaster has occurred, the countryside is barren, there is almost no life or vegetation, only four people and• a pig. Three of these people are men and they are searching for the fourth, a woman. The boy, Danker, was taken from his dead mother's breast by Jinkins, an ex-stoker, who has brought him up with stern love and taught him to read and write. Their books are the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress and Fanny Hill, which the boy is under oath never to read. Consequently when he writes, he writes a travesty of the Biblical style, mixed with the distorted crude English he and Jinkins speak. Mr. Ingrey has created a tour de force with his narrative. The third man, Nutter, is mad, first violently, then religiously, and he and Jinkins fight over the boy because Nutter desires him and Jinkins considers he is Danker's master. Jinkins is shot in the leg and is lifted by Danker into an old pram, in which he remains until he dies. The boy pushes the pram along the roads from Birmingham to the South, taking food from the desolated inns—tins of Kit-E-Kat and best pork sausages. And with them goes the pig which Danker found on the sea shore. He has never seen a pig before.
And it came even to his feet and smelled him about the loins, and this was not a man nor a woman, but was a beast that went upon four legs, yet made the sound of a man in distress—And he called to the beast saying, 'You come along us beast, us got grub, bloody lot grub us got here, ever things.'
The book ends with .a horrifying rejection of the values which have sustained Danker all his life.
David Storey's new novel is concerned with a terrifying and overpowering relationship be- tween two men, Leonard Radcliffe, who is highly intelligent and introverted, and Victor Tolson, huge, handsome, animal-like, who feeds on the spiritual qualities of the other. There is an immense amount of minute detail in this sombre, passionate, almost melodramatic novel; emo- tional details of the complex relationships which are the substance of the book, and visual details of the oppressive architecture and bleak land- scapes which are its background. At times it is not easy to read; the style becomes complicated and I found it necessary to go back and reread for the full impact and meaning. For instance, in describing the mental processes of Radcliffe, he writes : . he tended to see things in separate camera-like impressions . . the differ- ence was, however, that whereas a film ran at a predetermined speed, animating each individual picture by its sustained momentum, in him the feelings that normally might have provided this motor force, uniting several sensations in a single image, were frequently absent or func- tioned only intermittently.' Yet some scenes re- main haunting one's memory, and the tormented homosexual—and not merely homosexual—re- lationship which develops to a violent climax of murder is harrowingly conceived. 'Vic was my body,' Radcliffe says, 'and I was his soul.'
. . . Of Street and Stars is both bleakly de- spairing and terribly funny. There is no real story, the novel is set in Hollywood, mainly in one of the big studios and the characters are people who work there, or who are involved, however tenuously, with people who work there. The head of the company is J. C., whose image in jade-green sherbet ice is consumed at the annual banquet with which the book opens. J. C. i3 surrounded by loathing sycophants who know on which side their bread is buttered. When he dies a sickening sentimentality seizes them. Self- deception and hypocrisy, loneliness and frustra- tion are the forces which motivate everyone— Mr. Perry, ready to step into J. C.'s shoes, who is suckled by his wife in times of emotional stress; Dora Robinson and Herbert Flower, who correspond with one another, she in the guise of a film star, he a handsome farmer but who has, in reality, a hair-lip; refugee Peter Millar, who retreats from life and builds an ark in the back garden and collects the livestock to go in it. Mr. Marcus seems to conclude that life is empty and all relationships are void, fashioned to suit the needs of the moment.
As I said, it's been a depressing week.
GILLIAN rairmAN
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