28 MAY 1977, Page 23

Acting out

Peter Ackroyd

The Ponsonby Post Bernice Rubens (W H. Allen E3.95)

When, in Bernice Rubens's latest novel, a plane is called 'Progress' and when that plane actually crashes on a peasant village, we know we're in for a bumpy ride. Novelists can sometimes conceal their plots until the last page, but they can never disguise their intentions. And The Ponsonby Post has intentions darting all over the place.

It has become a favourite trick of novelists these days to set their books in the Third World, or in the Far East, or in any place where nature is giving way to nurture on a permanent basis. Innocence defiled has always been the great stand-by of romantic writers, and the contemporary kind have simply turned from chastity to geography as a way of revealing it. Such plaqes are also a useful context for the other ingredients of romantic fiction: alcoholism, violence and illicit sex. The latter, of course, always appeals to the lady novelists; they can get their rocks off in the peace of fantasy.

So when Hugh and Belinda Brownlow fly off to Djakarta (Hugh has left the Arts Council to become a liaison officer for the United Nations), the first thing which Bernice Rubens mentions is the Javanese massage: 'Certainly the skill of the Javanese masseur was bruited over the Far East, and though stories abounded as to the nature of that skill, the husbands quickly turned a deaf and English ear.' I would have liked to hear more about this, but only pages later 'Progress' crashes upon some unsuspecting peasants in the middle of Java, and the whole narrative takes a turn for the worse. Centuries of peasant wisdom have been violated by this capsized air-machine, and everyone is going to know about it.

When that ancient dispute over who is really 'civilised' and who is really 'primitive' rears its head again, we know that any honest perceptiveness is likely to vanish as the jungle night draws in, the stage foreigners sip their gin-and-its on the verandah. and the loveable natives dream of freeing their country from a Westerninspired tyrannical yoke. And, as it happens, this is exactly what happens. But before we can receive the full blow of sentimentality, we need to have our defences broken by the exotic and the nasty: a young girl is murdered just after having sexual intercourse, 'Progress' has actually been sabotaged by the male lover of the pilot, a German United Nations official locks his 'cow-like' wife into the bedroom and forces her to submit to all kinds of sexual abuse, and there are dizzy tegration of the foreign community there.

In other words, The Ponsonby Post becomes a vehicle for fantasies and preoccupations which are slightly out of context, which jar; but when you turn a novel into a messenger which (to use the jargon) 'acts out' rather than creates, then all of its other elements will wither in the immense heat of simple wish-fulfillment. What actually happens is that the novel is remorselessly turned into a thriller. The characters are narrowed into stereotypes — we have the sinister homosexuals, the blessed guerrilla band, the loving wife, the otiose and ridiculous German, and Hugh Brownlow the man who changes through suffering — so Bernice Rubens can only inch forward one step at a 'time, event after event, chapter after chapter, since if she moved too fast the whole 'adventure' would fall apart at the seams. It turns out that the murder and the plane crash are sinisterly connected.. But why? What does Hugh know about Peter, and how?

And so a novel which relies upon external events for its main effects becomes more and more hollow. When the narrative depends upon a mystery which has to be resolved, or upon a denouement which is just delayed, then all of its other elements begin to crumble. Other kinds of perception — about motive, about character or even about the way people actually behave — become extraneous. Emotions are reduced to incidents, characters become extras and as a result The Ponsonby Post topples into absurdity, sentimentality — and eventually melodrama when the guerilla band liberate a large number of political prisoners. But even the grimmest incidents stay resolutely banal. A lot of things are clearly happening in the novel, with all of its screaming and shouting and dying, but none of them actually get off the pages and into the world.

It has now become a cliché that all realistic fiction aspires to the condition of the television serial. But if a novel does no more than sketch in a few characters, suggest a few motives and then send all of its characters careering toward each other, it becomes considerably inferior to even a mediocre film. And there is very little else in Bernice Rubens's new novel, except some ritualistic breast-beating about the underdeveloped nations. The book is full of such good intentions, but they never quite manage to cohere. The novel has its opportunities, but it blows them. The next time, Bernice Rubens ought to send Hugh Brownlow back to the Arts Council where he belongs and where gin, buggery and breast-beating are at least a way of life.