NEW NOVELS

No matter

J. G. FARRELL

The Bodyguard Adrian Mitchell (Cape 25s) The Book of Numbers Robert Deane Pharr (alder and Boyars 40s) The Adventurer Naomi May (Calder and Boyars 35s) Diminishing Circles Barbara Rees (Seeker and Warburg 30s) Love Story Erich Segal (Hodder and Stough- ton 25s) 'C'est rare, un bon Byre!' Colette used to say and once again this week her statement is proved accurate. What is the reason for this strange dearth of good novels, given an abundance of reasonably competent writers? Can it be that life in Britain is so dull and comfortable that there are no exciting themes left for a good novelist to get his teeth into? If one turns from reading Sol- zhenitsyn to our own writers (as I did this week) one is immediately struck by the thought that, by comparison, we have simply nothing worth writing about. Anyone who has been a publisher's reader over the last ten years will have noticed how often an Aldermaston march makes its appearance m novel manuscripts (these Aldermaston novels invariably turn out to be worse than others for some reason). The fact is that Aldermaston seems to have provided the most heroic and inspiring event of the last

few years. If Solzhenitsyn had grown up in Britain would he have written about it too?

Of course, there are countless ways to write a novel. A magnificent book can be written from the scantiest material: prepara- tions for a dinner-party, for instance, or a voyeur taking a walk. But only the most in- spired stylist can attempt this sort of thing; anything short of genius rapidly approaches total indigestibility. The average serious nov- elist has attained the minimum self-know- ledge that tells him he is neither Virginia Woolf nor Robbe-Grillet. To stop writing is no solution since there is probably nothing else he knows how to do (perhaps the Arts Council should pay talented novelists to refrain from writing novels?). Writing is his function. But where on earth to find some- thing to write about? In this dilemma science fiction and books about the future (strenuous imagination plus low reality-content) have often proved effective. In some cases works of scatology (or dirty books, as they are sometimes called) have also given relief.

There are no dirty books this week. The most successful and entertaining of the batch is Adrian Mitchell's The Bodyguard which takes a look at Britain in the 1980s. Things are not quite as grim in the next decade as Orwell predicted but they are grim enough. Law and order has spawned gigantic, repres- sive police forces and agents provocateurs abound. Among other details the whites driven out of South Africa have formed a defensive enclave in Britain where they keep a few blaek men in a zoo. The best jokes in the book are derived from the fact that the narrator is a bodyguard (a a6) who takes his profession seriously. At one point he finds himself guarding a security-conscious arch- bishop who tells him: 'Remember that Jesus

Himself surrounded Himself with twelve tics,' and goes on to ask. 'Then where did He make His Big Mistake . . . ? First, He ap- pears to have operated no internal security

within his 136 team ...' and so on. As an im-

aginative portrayal of the future this book is too softly asserted to be convincing; more- over. the path is well trodden by now, in particular by the nimble boots of Pohl and Kornbluth. But for entertainment value it is well worth a read.

The only other book this week whose material contains a mileage ingredient (though not quite enough for its longueurs) is The Book of Numbers by an American Negro writer, Robert Deane Pharr. This con- cerns the setting up of a numbers racket (i.e. an illegal lottery) in an unnamed Southern city during the 1930s. The discussion of what it means, or meant at that time (assuming things have changed at all), to be a Negro in a white man's country is frequently enlight- ening and the description of the racket itself has an air of authenticity. The dialogue, too, is neatly transcribed: 'You gonna take a break for lunch, Eggy?"Wuffo you wanna know?'

If the portrayal of the characters seems too shadowy for them to be easily recognis- able on this side of the Atlantic, at least Mr Pharr is in the enviable position of having something worth writing about.

The Adventurer by Naomi May and Diminishing Circles by Barbara Rees are both novels by authors suffering from star- vation of material. Who needs another book of British gloom? 'The bus ground on its way past one Woolworth's after another, one plate glass shopping centre and then the next, the groups of intervening houses seeming to groan between the weight of so much commerce and becoming gradually meaner and meaner . . .' (Barbara Rees).

Who needs another laborious domestic drama? 'Bernard turned to her and saw at once that she knew all. His mouth was full, but he found he was unable to make his jaws continue chewing . . (Naomi May). Who needs another sensitive unmarried heroine whose sister is heading for the altar? (Both May and Rees.)

But I don't mean to be unkind. This is a serious predicament for us all. Whole tracts of literary territory have been written out and reduced to a dust-bowl of grey adjec- tives. The only place left for many of our thoughts and insights is the private diary. preferably one of those Victorian ones with a lock and key. To return to Solzhenitsyn. it seems to me that he is the sort of writer who derives all his power from great skill in mak- ing his material work for him, unassisted by any brilliant or unusual notions of style or presentation. What does this writer do when deprived of the material?

Last and least comes Love Story. a cold- hearted piece of fictioneering by Erich Segal. There is an archetypal low blow in the novel- ist's craft which may be demonstrated as follows: first describe a lonely orphan girl whose only friend in the world is a big woolly dog. Then liquidate the big woolly dog.

Mr Segal is not above milking his read- ers' emotions in similar style, having first stupefied him with phoney glamour, snob- bery and galloping materialism. I'm not sur- prised to learn that this book has been top of the best-seller lists in America for the past four months, nor do I grudge the author his success (he has earned it the hard way). What astonishes me is that he is, among other things, a teacher of Comparative Liter- ature at Yale. I ask myself what books he can be comparing.