NEW NOVELS
Precious artifice
HENRY TUBE
The Green House Mario Vargas Llosa, trans- lated by Gregory Rabassa (Cape 42s) Calla Alberto Bevilacqua, translated by Harvey Fergusson II (Allen and Unwin 30s) Hue and Cry James Alan McPherson (Mac- millan 35s) The Two Chiefs of Dunboy J. A. Froude, edited and with a foreword by A. L. Rowse (Chatto and Windus 30s) The Magic Christian 'Perry Southern (Deutsch 30s) Reading Mario Vargas Llosa's The Green House for the first time is like visiting a strange town. The place and its inhabitants exist and have their own long-standing con- nections: this street leads into that square ; this person is walking beside that person because they both knew a third person who is now dead or living elsewhere. So that what is commonplace, reasonable and second- nature to those who live there, a mere back- ground to their more refined preoccupations, is for the visitor a source of intellectual diffi- culty, a looming foreground. Senor Vargas Llosa makes no attempt to usher his reader into his chosen piece of Peruvian territory, as, for instance, Dylan Thomas a touch too ingratiatingly ushers his listener under Milk- wood ; instead he offers chunks of action, now in the past, now in the present, threads of relationship, groups of characters, for all the world as if the reader were actually visiting the town of Piura, the vil- lage of Santa Maria•de Nieva or the jungle encampment of certain Aguarunan Indians.
The reader will naturally begin by trying to piece things together again, to re-assemble them in the 'correct' order, in other words to make a recognisable novel out of them. But as he gets further into the book, he will find himself, like the visitor to the strange town after his first few days, growing calmer, taking things as they come, and by the end he may even feel not so much that he has read yet another novel about an outlandish community as that he has become a kind of honorary citizen of the place. Of course this would be an illusion. Senor Vargas Llosa's method is no less of an artifice than the more conventional one, but it has the advantage of surprise. A writer does not try to be new for the sake of being new, as is sometimes naively supposed, but in order to trap the reality he is after, for which he must be up very early and full of cunning. The Green
House is an excellent example, even in its weaker moments which prove the point in reverse, of the fictional rule that the more imaginative artifice goes into the telling the less artificial will be what is told.
Alberto Bevilacqua's Califfa is a slight novel and in many ways a trite one. A gor- geous girl in a modern industrial Italian town crosses the bridge from the poor quar- ter to become the mistress of the richest industrialist ; squalor and poverty, as always on these occasions, spell warmheartedness and reality, while easy circumstances spell corruption and sterility. Nevertheless, at the edge of his well-worn path Signor Bevilacqua has left a few tracks of his own. For one thing, he is a blessedly spare writer and his quick imagination enables him to compress much that would otherwise be overblown and even sentimental into a few pithy sen- tences ; for another, though his settings are the staple diet of Italian fiction (a shooting expedition, a party at the mansion of a decayed nobleman and so on), they serve rather than dominate the characters ; for a third, because the tired old relationship at the centre of the story gradually turns into a unique one, a muted and momentary love affair which belongs to these two particular characters of Signor Bevilacqua's and no one else.
On the evidence of his first book of short stories, Hue and Cry, the young American James Alan McPherson is a 'natural' writer, which may well be his undoing if he also wishes to be a good one. One cannot but be impressed by his powers of observation, by his ear for different ways of speaking, by his readability, by his evident sympathy for his fellow human beings. Or can one? Isn't the very facility of these portions of young American experience, their easy digestibility, somehow suspicious, as if they had come wrapped in cellophane from a bottomless freezer? The truth is that the expected, the correct emotions come wrapped with them. Mr McPherson undoubtedly has flavours of his own to impart—a dislike of group think- ing is one—but the question is whether he can let them breathe.
We must be very grateful to A. L. Rowse for introducing to us afresh (in a tactfully abridged version) a splendid and neglected novel of the age, and in the spirit of, Steven- son. The Two Chiefs of Dunboy by the his- torian J. A. Froude is a thriller set in eighteenth century Ireland shortly after Culloden. As Mr Rowse points out, the novel is far from being a mere thriller. The characters are strongly and sensitively drawn, their confrontations are both dramatic and convincing, while the historical background is as lucid and integrated with the story as if it had been done by a novelist with a real sense of history, instead of the other way round. Nevertheless, since he was primarily a historian and potential readers may be doubtful of his credentials as a thriller- writer, it is worth insisting that when it comes to your Duel, your Sea-fight, your Escape over the Scree, your Riot in Dublin. Your Incident at the Turkish Bath, your Murder at the Forge, your man J. A. Froude has got what it takes and a great deal more. Terry Southern's The Magic Christian was first published in 1959 and is now issued in a new edition. This charmingly succinct account of the appalling billionaire Guy Grand, whose hobby is 'making it hot for people' at enormous expense to himself, is perhaps a shade disappointing. The idea of a man who plays practical jokes %oh society's most sacred ingredients—notably ne), so that, for instance, our hero gives man six thousand dollars to eat his park- e ticket—is brilliant, but somehow the actical jokes themselves are not quite up it, Anthony Powell's Lord Vowchurch, ho released six monkeys in full evening at a diplomatic function, makes Guy rand look somewhat crude. When it comes artifice, even a billion dollars are no sub- ute for imagination.
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