PROBATION
the second chance
JOHN ST. JOHN For the first time, an authentic, comprehensive account of the use of probation against crime. The case histories provide absorbing insight into current human and social problems.
"Mr. St. John's book on the probation problem is the first and long likely to be the best of its kind."—c. ti. ROLPH, New Statesman. 4'. . this is a valuable book for the general reader."—T. R. FYVEI., Sunday Telegraph. 25s.
THE TOWN
GEOFFREY MARTIN
This record of the growth and development of the town in Britain is exceptionally well illus- trated. Many of the illustrations are taken from little-known sources and will be of special interest to the student.
"This new series offers us something fresh and exciting towards the interpretation of our country. The visual approach is a revelation. The first volume on The Town combines scholarship with perceptive imagination, while the illustrations are fascinating."—A. L. ROWSE, ". . . a lively and lucid summary which will delight everyone with a lay enthusiasm for architecture or social history."—IAN PARK, Sunday Times. 233 illustrations. 25s.
VISTA BOOKS
randy and unscrupulous Mrs. Drayford, with her bitterly ambitious Left-wing lover; the student rabble with its sweaters and wispy beards; Gerald Ormston, Chancellor of the Ex- chequer, greedy but oddly obtuse; Melville's loyal and loving wife, who, it eventually turns out, once enjoyed a jolly afternoon of lust with Melville's own brother—all of them are tainted except possibly Melville's daughter, who is meant, one must suppose, to be nice, but suffers from Mr. Edelman's incapacity to write well about anything pleasant.
It would be unkind to reveal the outcome of this intriguing and cautionary tale, so instead I shall just touch up the moral: two unpremedi- tated acts, two entirely incidental failures, come to threaten utter destruction to a distin- guished career and a long and happy marriage. Is this the gods' revenge for pride or complacency? Is it just bad luck? Or did the protagonists really want to destroy themselves all the time, their seemingly gratuitous actions being in fact the results of subconscious deliberation? Mr. Edel- man doesn't tell; he hangs out the danger signs, but leaves us to work out what the danger is.
So does Ignazio Silone. The Fox and the Camellias is a short but impressive fable about a Swiss farmer who lives a stone's throw from the border of Fascist Italy and has a passion for trying to subvert the Italian dictatorship. At first things work out in a comprehensible if rather vague manner : we all understand, more or less, the motives of the Blackshirts and their op- ponents. But then, in the middle of a careful piece of intrigue, the senseless act comes sweep- ing up out of the abyss, and ruin and misery, of a kind unconnected with Fascism or the planned resistance to it, is disturbed all around. Once again, rational issues have been obscured by sheer human ineptitude; and once again we are left trying to guess why.
It is left to Robert Towers and Michael Hor- bach to supply some sort of an answer. Mr. Towers's The Necklace of Kali, in which the American author writes with pleasing sympathy of the last days of the British Raj in India, might be passed off merely as a meaty romance decorated with riots and rich homosexuals, were it not for its attention to one very serious idea. This idea is expressed by the image of the goddess Kali, who, as Mr. Towers sees her, stands not only for death but also for the kind of feckless and destructive idiocy which we have been dis- cussing above and which is always making such a Mockery of civilised existence. As I understand him, Mr. Towers sees this Kali-menace as an element which has been built into all human beings by God or fate, in order to remind them, from time to time, of the absurdity, brevity and filth of their condition. (Significantly, the hero of this novel undoes the painful achievement of months with ten • seconds' worth of drunken fornication.) What we are left with, then, is a religious notion : subconsciously at least, we all make fools of ourselves in order not to appear to be challenging God. It is typical that such an idea should crop up in a novel about India, and it goes far to explain why the place is to all intents ungovernable.
Michael Horbach, in The Reckoning, reaches much the same answer as Mr. Towers, but he states it in psychological rather than in religious terms. Writing about contemporary Germany (West), he paints a garish picture of corruption in high places—indeed in all places—and also gives several portentous flashbacks, from which we are to infer that the Germany of 1945, being reduced to nothing at all, had been given a splendid chance of purification and atonement.
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