Fiction
A opop formula for making novels sell nowadays seems to be: Violence, plus Sex, equals Success. Mr. Glemser has his own way of tackling this formula. Unlike some others he spares the reader's blushes; and he writes very well. Strangers in Florida has about it the flavour of the early Aldous Huxley, the Huxley of Antic Hay. It never achieves the roundness of the Huxley novel, but it is distinguished by the same ability to portray the sensory ridiculousness of the human machine in a world of shifting values. Robert Crane, an impoverished writer, is in danger of becoming an embarrassment to his friends. He is ill, introspec- tive, underweight and written out. Rescued from a Sunset Boulevard-ending through the intervention of a wealthy patron who pays for a trip to Florida, he is immediately plunged into a series of fantastic events ; the contemplated recuperation degenerates into a struggle, not for new health, but for life itself. Mr. Glemser assumes that as long as people are human they will continue to behave unwisely and live by sensations. Crane is never allowed breathing-space; his fellow-sufferers include a nymphomaniac, a Balkan sea-captain and his erudite mistress, an elderly art-collector (reverently based on the late Hans van Meegeren) and a Cockney expatriate. The plot is difficult to analyse; but here is a writer who can entertain.
In The Long Love, which has as its setting a small Massa- chusetts town, the characters never resort to violent means, but the conflicts are there just the same. Edward Haslatt started life in his father's printing works; he loved books and respected women, in that order. He married young and transformed the printing shop into a distinguished publishing house. The novel covers the forty-year span of this happy marriage. Mr. Sedges's variation on an old theme is likely to win many admirers; he skilfully avoids bathos and keeps his story-telling clear and dry. This is not a story designed to shock; an atmosphere of tran- quillity pervades it, and it leaves one with a feeling, if not of exultation, at least of well-being.
BRYAN FORBES.
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