26 NOVEMBER 1977, Page 25

The trap

Peter Ackroyd

Tornado Pratt Paul Ableman (Gollanoz £4.95) People always want to discover 'the truth' about things; but if they were to find it, what would they do with it? The question is Meaningless only because 'the truth' does not exist, and cannot be imagined.

And so to Tornado Pratt, the monologue of a man who dominates his own words with the same ruthless self-sufficiency and determination that he put into mastering his own life: 'Anything I could understand I could dominate and, if I set my mind to it, I could understand anything. These were the tornado years, Horace, and I sucked in everything.' And since these are his memoirs, they are hardly likely to be afflicted by any of the hesitations and selfdoubts that send puling novelists into rhetoric and hysterical modernism. The truth is myself, and the words arc myself, and so these words will have the robustness and the directness of that truth. Tornado Pratt is likely to be furious, fast, entertaming — with all the stubbornness of an Item that refuses to be budged from its antique stance. Paul Ableman even completes this Illusion (for illusion it necessarily turns nut to be) by adopting the Edwardian habit of punctuating the narrative with verbose and generally pious sub-titles: 'Pratt's Search For Ultimate Wisdom' vies with 'All Scheduled Airline Routes Lead To Rome'.

It would all be too much if Tornado Pratt didn't turn out to be quite unlike other recent, and not so recent, heroes who have turned language into a red carpet down which they strut. He has, for example, a neurotically acute sense of the past: if he stares at it for too long, it mesmerises him. He slowly learns the limitations of his power as a millionaire, industrialist, philanthropist, poor-boy-made-good. His life turns into a number of incidents which don't 'add up' in any definite way: he makes money, marries, loses both his wife and his fortune, goes on the road, gets mixed up with crooks, revives his fortunes, becomes a crypto-Nazi, goes to war 4gainst the Germans, cracks up in a stupendous way, opens a dousing estate called Paradise, and eventually comes very close to death. All of this leads him quite properly to reflect on the darkness that surrounds him: 'And he wove his life-weave all the years that I did somewhere in the darkness behind my vision. There Austin played and suffered and there too played and suffered all those others who curved in on my track but once and then flashed out into the wastes of time.' Despite the sonority of his monologue, and despite all the credence we willingly give to what he has to say, Tornado has never been the same person (he has never been 'truthful') from one moment to the next: 'We think we're made of granite or steel and we're like quicksilver, flowing helplessly into new shapes. When the context of our lives changes, we change too.' And so the only sense which remains to him is one of transience: 'This means that everything is something else. Nothing is what it is but includes other things that are different. If you call something one thing, it will begin to swirl into a different thing before your eyes. .

The truth then, lies in recognising this. The narrator and the narrative swirl, too, into a number of different scenes affirming one kind of life pr another, and into a number of different passions which are carefully and successfully evoked. That is why books of this kind are such a pleasure to read— they convince us of the importance of our feelings. But even 'the truth' itself drifts. Tornado Pratt at the end of his life mingles recollections with fantasy, memory with desire. There was a time when any narrator could march right on to the end of his story with hardly a pause for breath. The spell of the `I' was so strong that no one ever paused to consider it's motives or its veracity; society itself could be laid out as though it were a geological stratum, invincibly preserved and ready for inspection at all times. Now that has all changed. The 'I' — or Tornado Pratt, at least — has no immutable context in which he can rest as if he were in an armchair. And the narrator himself has become part of a fluid pattern which he, and the rest of us while reading the book, are struggling to understand. Tor nado Pratt repeats things from films he has seen, and books he has read, as though they had emerged from his own life. Names slip and slide away from him: Becky becomes Betty, becomes Letty.

'Reality' is always pretty thin, and so Tornado Pratt — for want of anything better to do — begins to create hiMself as he goes along. That, of course, is why novels are written in the first place and why, in this one, Tornado has to scheme and fantasise, using both artifice and emotion to bring together everything he has felt and known. This is what 'the truth' comes down to, but it becomes clear by the end of the book that even this 'truth' is a shallow, little thing compared with everything that he, and Paul Ableman, have left out. The is dwarfed by processes that it cannot understand. The historical and social orders, which supported the novelist's quest, have broken up. And the novel itself has become selective and fragmentary: `To isolate is to lie and yet without isolating nothing can be said. This is the trap and the anguish of our state'. The fact that the novel can get this far, without losing any of its vivacity or readability, is a tribute to Paul Able man's great ability to say the virtually unsayable and to pick up the pieces elegantly.