NEW NOVELS
At ease
Maurice CAPITANCHIK
A Single Summer with L.B. Derek Marlowe (Cape 30s) Big Bob Georges Simenon (Hamish Hamil- ton 18s) The Studhorse Man Robert Kroetsch (Macdonald 30s) Twice Born Rose Franken (W. H. Allen 30s) Fire Minutes, Sir Matthew T. C. Worsley (Allen Ross 30s) 'Easy writing's curst hard reading', wrote Pope, and so, very often, is easy living. This week's heroes are all self-indulgent, in a rich variety of ways; lacking the puritan's clarity, they demand exceptional skill from their creators in order to have conviction. Sadly, none of them quite manages to succeed, although A Single Summer with L.B. has the relative advantage of the most complex and colourful material.
Derek Marlowe has arranged a group portrait, in semi-fictional guise, of Byron, Shelley and entourage during the summer of 1816, when Byron left England for good pursued by his reputation as the wicked, incestuous lord and accompanied by a twenty year old doctor, John Polidori. By the side of Lake Leman, Shelley shared house with the ghoulish, seventeen year old Mary Godwin, and their child, while in the nearby Villa Deodati, Byron reluctantly made room in his bed for Mary's half-sister, Claire. The situation came to an end when Claire revealed her pregnant state and was banished by her lover.
The crux of the book is the mutually provoking relationship between Byron and Polidori, who is as much of a trial for the reader as he appears to have been for his master, and it is implied that the poet's natural advantages finally broke the younger man. The author has done his homework, compiling letters and comment to give accurate portraits of Mme de Stael, Beau Brummell, and other contemporary figures—accurate, but staged, for these are the biographers' views: we are given noth- ing new, except Polidori's thoughts and they are undistinguished. Byron was a highly intelligent man who foolishly followed each impulse, while Polidori seems a fatuous youth who wanted talents he didn't possess and their relationship, although stormy, was merely one of Byron's less worthy amusements. A poet who lacks the discipline to resist his own myth is, seen historically, pathetic. Still. Byron deserves a little better than this two- dimensional likeness—his vanity would have been flattered, but his insight would have disdained the lack of personality behind it.
Simenon's unmistakable personality is sometimes absent from his enormously prolific output, but his reported remark: 'The roof of happiness is very low', is born out by all of his more serious fiction.
Big Bob is an investigation into character. Bob Dandurand, an apparently happy-go- lucky Parisian, drowns himself during a
fishing weekend. His friend Charles, a doctor, uncovers the reason for the appar- ently motiveless suicide, discovering that many years earlier, having abandoned his law studies, Dandurand dedicated himself to the happiness of his ex-prostitute wife, and his death is consistent with his love.
Although this slight work is not one of Simenon's best, his almost incredible ability to create a milieu, and his psychological flair, redeem it from mawkishness. One feels he knows the seamy side of Parisian life as well as he knows his own language, and he is also subtly able to imply that a man may be a failure by the world's standards and a success by his own. But his deliberately restrictive method is, in this instance, also self-defeating—the characters are muted, the atmosphere claustrophobic, and Dandurand is seen only from the out- side. One is aware that the ceiling of experience, at least, is a little higher than this.
The Studhorse Man has little connection with anyone's experience: it is a far-fetched sexual fantasy, endlessly confusing. about the picaresque adventures of one Hazard Lepage, a Canadian who careers across Alberta trying to find mares with which to continue the breed of his stallion, Poseidon. Such meagre significance as this elaborate. unfunny. and sometimes sickening satire possesses comes from the fact that, at the end of the War, the men were away fighting and horses were not required, thus, but for the indiscriminate womaniser Lepage, man was depriving both women and horses of their rightful pleasures. But the animal has its revenge. Poseidon is finally required to sire endless mares to produce a substance used for contraception. So, due to the horse, we have the Pill. Well, one cheer for horses, and none at all for this stupendously silly novel.
There is silliness, too, in Twice Born, but it is not total. This is an early work by the American author of that whimsical, sugar- coated saga about a marriage, Claudia. which has not previously been published here because of its homosexual theme. It does not face the subject squarely—its hero, a violinist manqué, has crushes on young men rather than affairs, and ends up tentatively but definitely married—but it has some interesting features. There is a convincing analysis of the reactions to women of a sexually fearful youth, and an authentic portrayal of his acquaintances, conventional New York Jews, some of whom are generous and sympathetic towards a male of whom they cannot at first approve. But, lest there be any mistake, the author makes her point quite clear: that a good woman, especially if she is well-bred and beautiful, may cure a man even of his inborn vices. This is a brave effort for its time, but it is a time which seems far, far away.
T. C. Worsley's autobiography, Flannelled Fool, is a brilliant, brave and very funny book, but Fire Minutes, Sir Matthew is a sad disappointment. Sir Matthew Prior is an angry, ageing, successful actor who resents his replacement by the new, rebellious generation, in particular his son Luke. After both son and father, on separate occasions, are charged with drug offences, complicated in the latter's case by his having been dressed as a woman at the time, there is a reconciliation, and a denouement.
This series of dialogues and interpola- tions doesn't really work as a noveL Sir Matthew's rantings are repetitious, the characters are unreal, and it is impossible to care about a man who curses like a tenth- rate Lear. through page after page, because he cannot accept his years. Five minutes. Sir Matthew? He is not really worth one.
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