NEW NOVELS •
Aspects of love
MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH
The First Summer Duncan Crow (Hart-Davis 42s) The Keep Jillian Becker (Chatto and Windus 25s) The Outcasts Stephen Becker (Hamish Hamil- ton 25s) Tamburas Karlheinz Grosser translated by Kathleen Szasz (Heinemann 30s) Novels about the transition from adolescence to manhood—the years of sexual initiation and spiritual change—are by no means rare. They are often spoiled by mawkishness, and are rarely distinguished by psychological accuracy. One tends to look at them askance. Mr Duncan Crow's The First Summer, which begins a tetralogy to be called Simon Ire, is a triumphant- exception. This is not because of any innovations of technique or style—his method of presenting his story is wholly con- ventional and his writing is admirably plain —but because of Mr Crow's painstaking atten- tion to detail, his determination to get every- thing as exactly right as memory and imagination will allow.
His material is 'ordinary' enough. Simon Ire, not quite eighteen, arrives in July 1938 at Grenoble to spend three months as a foreign student at the university. Fiercely ambitious, normally shy, he wants to experience the first pleasures of freedom: boon companionship, sex, perhaps love. By the end of his three months in France he has learned much, but is still only dimly aware of the international situation that threatens to destroy him. He has fallen in love and recovered from it—in the arms of an older woman—with surprising alacrity. His only really unusual experience— it is so vivid that one suspects Mr Crow may have resorted to autobiography—has been a 'psychic' one. Hiking with a friend in the country, he takes refuge for the night in the back of a car in a barn. Here time and events go crazy for both boys; no explanation is offered—unless it is contained in J. W. Dunne's Theory of Time (is this a mistake?), which Simon borrows from a middle-aged writer with whom he becomes acquainted and with whose wife he later goes to bed.
Mr Crow's novel contains no 'message' and has no plot; he is not interested in drawing conclusions (or not at this stage) but in record- ing experience. He has done this supremely well, often with great humour and always with absolute faithfulness. The next instalment (to appear next year) will be eagerly awaited.
Jillian Becker's The Keep also begins a series of novels, this time a trilogy. It is mainly con- cerned with the two children of a Russian- Jewish family living in Johannesburg in the 'thirties. The father, a lawyer, is a milk-and- water liberal with political ambitions; his wife, ,Freda, despises him and has vain ambitions of her own—to a culture higher than Johannesburg society can offer. The daughter, Josephine, is a quiet and plain child; but her brother Simon is one of the holiest terrors of recent fiction. Wise and rampant beyond his years, he could become an arch-criminal or a revolutionary leader. Sent to a sadistic woman psychoanalyst to be cured of his terrifying out- breaks of violence, he seduces and destroYs her. ) The Keep alternates, sometimes uneasily, between social satire and near-Dickensian grotesquerie; however, its portrait of a decay- ing and spoiled, inferior European society has great power and depth (especially in view of what followed it after the war, at the end of which this first volume stops), and the per- sonality of Simon—which this society pro- duced—begins, as it emerges, to assume large proportions. One must reserve judgment until the work is completed. Mrs Becker is not at all without sympathy for her characters, as she shows by carefully explaining as well as de- scribing their feelings; but she writes with a coldness (or is it a restraint?) that may repel as well as fascinate some readers.
After A Covenant with Death, Stephen Becker's The Outcasts is something of a dis- appointment. The theme is a promising one, but the treatment leaves much to be desired. When Morrison, an engineer, arrives in a Latin American country to build a bridge, he is supposed to be a 'burnt-out case,' his two marriages having failed within the last four years. But his state of mind is not very con- vincingly presented: Mr Becker relies on familiar facts of masculine disillusionment rather than on imagination.
Morrison finds comradeship with the proud men who are building the bridge under his direction, and it is in his descriptions of this that Mr Becker is most successful. On the other side of the chasm that he must bridge he dis- covers a village of Indians, a primitive and uncomplicated people. He begins (rightly) to doubt the wisdom and propriety of what he is doing, and these doubts are strengthened when he finds that a squadron of tanks is drawn up ready to cross the bridge when he has com- pleted it. He has experienced (again uncon- vincingly) sexual fulfilment across the chasm, and now fights against the decision of the government, who wish to map the area and move the Indians 'for their own benefit.' He loses his battle and his self-delusion.
This is a well-put-together and expertly told story, but its real theme seems to lie in the exploration of the nature of male companion- ship rather than in the—in this case—wholly factitious one of 'civilised' versus primitive values.
Tamburas (which has been brilliantly trans- lated) is a big-screen historical novel about the age of Cambyses, the sixth century BC ruler of Persia. Tamburas is the bastard son of the Tyrant of Athens; as skilled in both love and battle as any Kirk Douglas or Burt Lancaster, he has to leave his home because of threats against his life by the Tyrant's legitimate sons. He joins forces with Olov the seafarer, and together they adventure through Egypt, Ethiopia and Libya in the service of Cambyses. The author has allowed his imagination a very free rein, but in its genre Tamburas could not have been better done. Those who like a tale of adventure that is not too silly and whose style has some distinction will not be dis- appointed.
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