NEW NOVELS
Meditations
NEVILLE BRAYBROOKE
The Music School John Updike (Deutsch 25s) The Day That We Got Drunk on Cake William Trevor (Bodley Head 21s) Towards the End of the Morning Michael Frayn (Collins 21s) The Taste of Power Ladislav Mnacko (Weiden- feld and Nicolson 25s) Katie Mulholland Catherine Cookson (Mac- donald 30s) The Music School is John Updike's third book of short stories, The Day That We Got Drunk on Cake William Trevor's first. Moreover, whereas Trevor's stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, Updike's are much more often in the nature of 'mood pieces'—a form much favoured in the New Yorker in whose pages everything in the present collection originally appeared. In the time of Beerbohm and Belloc, these 'mood pieces' would have been known as essays, and in a very funny autobiographical piece included here about being an American student at Oxford, he pays a passing tribute to Beerbohm's art.
Some of Updike's essays, such as one about an Indian in the town of Tarbox who sits in a paperback store politely waving to any passer- by who happens to glance his way, are character sketches. Others, about football and the fragrance that schoolgirls acquire in autumn, are skilled evocations of his boyhood. But undoubtedly the most haunting pieces prove to be 'dispersed meditations,' which is how Bacon defined essays in the sixteenth century. 'Our lives submit to archaeology,' Updike begins one called 'Hary is Plowing Now'; others have as their starting-points the shapes of leaves, or the varied textures of darkness.
Or, in the title-piece itself, Alfred Schweigen, its narrator, sits meditating in a music school, while his daughter finishes her piano lesson. He reflects on the word 'eat' with regard to the Eucharistic wafer and the fact that Christ did not say 'Take and melt this in your mouth' but 'Take and eat'; and from there his thoughts move on to a computer expert whom he once met and whose murder at the dinner table by an unknown assassin is reported in the morn- ing newspapers: `I do not understand the connection.... 1 am trying to locate it. . . . I perceive in the two incidents a common element of nourishment, of eating transfigured by a strange irruption, and there is a parallel movement, a flight immaculately direct and elegant, from an im- material phenomenon (an exegetical nicety, a maniac hatred) to a material one (a bulky wafer, a bullet in the temple).'
The more conventional pieces deal with mar- riages on the point of break-up and make excel- lent magazine reading on a glossy level. It is only the more meditative pieces that demand constant rereading, so full of unexpected gifts are they. For as Updike has said on a previous occasion : 'An expected gift is not worth giving.'
Drunken misunderstandings are often the stuff
of comedy. In The Day That We Got Drunk on Cake, Trevor makes them the subject of revela- tions as well. Frequently in these stories his characters become the better for drink, because it releases their inhibitions. There is Raymond Bamber, a timid bachelor in his forties, who finds himself buttonholed at a cocktail party by Adelaide Fitch, a rapidly ageing dipso- maniac. As the hostess of the party remarks: 'She ladles it into herself and then tells you what she thinks of you. It can be disconcerting.' Trevor's dialogue is full of such understate- ments. Or, there is Morgan, the porter of a block of flats who, when tanked up with whisky, gin and Cinzano, lets fly about what he really thinks of the couple who are having their penthouse apartment photographed by a monthly: 'They're jumped-up tramps.' Or, there is the seedy J. J. Powers, ex-au F and now a driving instructor, who, four pints up on a Sunday, sits in his Austin outside the Saracen's Head, relaxing in the hot afternoon sun: 'An awareness stirred.. ..' Alas! before it has clari- fied into words, he has switched on the ignition.
_Trevor's people are desperately trying to communicate; children no less than their elders. Sometimes it is a case of in vino veritas, but for much of the time they remain locked within themselves. Occasionally a few muffled shouts come through—and when they do, a reader is offered a rewarding series of abrupt, frag- mentary moments of illumination. This is the best first collection of stories that I have read since the war.
'A journalist's finished at forty.' In Towards the End of the Morning, Michael Frayn's central character works on a national news- paper—and is thirty-seven. John Dyson is in charge of running three columns: 'Medita- tions,' 'The Country Day by Day,' and 'The Years Gone By.' He broadcasts regularly and 'is getting quite a following in West Africa.' So, when an opportunity comes to take part in a TV discussion on race relations, he thinks that the time has come to liberate himself from the BBC Overseas Service—and possibly Fleet Street. The prospects ahead seem golden. The TV warm-up dinner that precedes the programme, shows Frayn at his wittiest. It also shoWs pre- cisely where his strength lies—namely, in his tolerance of human vanities.
'Kicks had been the reward of everyone who had known him.' In Bratislava, the head of the government lies on a black-draped catafalque, while the people file by to pay their last respects. A press photographer who has known the great man well, recalls each chapter of his life in The Taste of Power. They had been schoolboys together, they had loved the same woman, they had served together as partisans. But power corrupts, and ambition had led his friend to pursue a ruthless course which could be summed up in the phrase—Exterminate all opposition. In this translation by Paul Steven- son, the photographer tells the story of the great man unabridged and uncensored. In Czechoslovakia, Ladislav Mnacko's hard-hit- ting, outspoken novel has been abridged and censored, because it is feared that, if it was pub- lished in its entirety, it might unleash a major political scandal.
When Catherine Cookson's novel opens in the 1860s, Katie Mulholland is a scullery-maid in the north of England, earning a shilling a week; when it closes, she is a hundred years old and the proud owner of three houses. The book includes rape, bastardy, murder and in- cest,. and the social and economic changes of a century are recounted with authority. Tyneside can be proud to have such a chronicler,
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