Symbols on his sleeve
Peter Ackroyd The Fort John Hale (Quartet £3.25) Bull Fire MacDonald Harris (Gollancz £2.50) I Come As A Thief Louis Auchincloss (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £2.25) Frankenstein Unbound Brian Aldiss (Cape £2.25).
There is nothing more tedious than a selfconsciously experimental novel, it is the literary equivalent of a French poodle, but there is little writing which is better than the courageous but unpretentious work of some recent English novelists. John Hale's new novel, The Fort, is innovative without desperately trying to be 'different' and as such enlarges the boundaries of fiction in more immediate ways than a Joyce or a RobbeGrillet. His narrative is esconced on 'Dragut's Island' which, in the best traditions of fiction, is anywhere and everywhere. The protagonists journey there like lemmings — William, the central figure, who spends his time there in different forms of pointless activity. His brother, Stephen, who arrives with both son and other woman — the lady in question being a tourist and ex-innocent who has been to the island before. Already in residence are Gerald. an elderly homosexual with the usual passion for house-guests, and midshipman Sid, the tame commie. But this is not a novel of expatriate jinks, since at its centre is an unpleasant albeit oppressed commursity.
This is the community of the 'Turks,' who
bear all the opprobrium of that name without its Orict geographic origin, They exist on the islzsind muttering 'rhubarb' in a desperate chorus until Andreas arrives. Andreas is the hero and Quebec-trained rebel who prompts the action into eventual carnage. But it would be wrong to emphasise his strictly personal role, since the fashionable conventions of 'time' and 'history' play the major role in the denouement. They are the Fort of the title. Which embodies, as critics say, eras of violence and resentment. It is the place where William and Stephen spent their childhood under the eye, or rather baton of their father. the Sarn't-Major. It is also the place which harboured a mutiny in 1807 and some brutal goings-on in 1930. The 'Turks' bore the brunt of this history, and it is now the 'Turks' who claim vengeance. Andreas's gang capture Stephen, having mistaken him for the British consul, and this is just the prelude to headier and bloodier stuff which suffuses the last portions of the narrative. This may remind you of the plot of the latest Greene novel, but let us charitably put that down to the zeitgeist.
In any case, Hale's is not a novel of sin and conscience. It is a novel of prose, and what critics call 'sinewy' prose at that. It has a capacity for both detail and generality; William's childhood memories and his present narrative are couched in an elaborate style which, like the setting itself, is distant yet heated. For the subject of the novel is not 'action' or 'character,' but the resources of a language which over-rides the familiarcachets of fiction. This is no naive forward narrative, but the continual spinning of past and present into what, if I were not fighting a lone and desperate struggle against clichd, I would call a web. There are no characters with obvious motives and responses, but a collection of names and faces which are afflicted with history. There is no 'plot,' but a continuing exploration of the roots of violence. Or so we are led to believe, and Mr Hale managed to suspend my critical faculties until I finished the book.
'Which was not the case with MacDonald Harris's Bull Fire. It is a Baedekker of symbolic history. Where in Hale's novel the fort, despite its historical and fantastic ramifications, remained actual and menacing, the images in Bull Fire run riot until they cloak the narrative in a gauze as heavy as a classical dictionary. I had begun the novel with great expectations. The language has great power, and I was immediately drawn into the promise and texture of the child's life which opens the book. The child is Torino, but the narrative wanders back in time — to the heyday of Fay, Torino's mother and a bullfancier to boot. She roams into a field dressed as such and waits for copulation, but in fact enters a bizarre union with her real spouse and the eventual father of Torino. Classical scholars may recall here the conjunction of Minos and Pasiphae, and the classical allusions don't stop here. We soon realise that we are in Crete, and that the family villa is none other than you-know-who's ancient palace.
The plot thickens as Torino comes of age and builds for himself a gigantic library in his father's ' Lab' (labyrinth,' see?), He finds two-headed snake for good measure, appropriately known as Emily, which occasionally appears as a leit-motif. Torino, in the meantime, has become a tourist attraction — not simply because of the bizarre rumours about his conception, but because he takes a perverse fancy to all sexes. The brochures, not to mention the hotels, have never been so full. But this pagan idyll comes to an end when a certain Thester (perhaps better known to us as Theseus) arrives by ship and an earthquake fortuitously razes the villa.
All of this would have been perfectly proper in the straight and well-told story which lies somewhere beneath all of this mythology, but there are too many portentous overtones as it exists now. The villa, unlike the fort, exists only in the sunshine of historical reminiscence; it is often too good to be true. Mr Harris follows the outline of myth, and has produced only a sketch. This is a great pity, since his prose can be both lyrical and effective. He captures moods and landscapes with great finesse, but they remain only an adjunct to the well-heeled plot.
Mr Auchincloss's plot is no less mythic, although its time-scale is different. I Come As A Thief is set in the world of Manhattan and radical chic. Specifically, it is the story of one Tony Lowder and his fall from grace. Or at least from ambition, which is the same thing in New York. He is a nice, handsome Democrat politician who runs a boys' club, makes speeches about the plight of the blacks, and earns forty thousand dollars a year. He relates' to people a great deal, too. In short, an unctuous bore. His wife, Lee, is a model Modern woman. She is sensitive, unashamed and forthright. Their two children are "prehair and pre-pot," but this does not stop Lee from being terribly concerned about their future — she even goes so far as to be worried about her son's homework on the CounterReformation. Which she finds "irrelevant to all that's going on in the world today." I can 911ly assume that Mr Auchincloss is being ironic here, since the Counter-Reformation is only too painfully relevant to New York 1973. The fate of Tony is no better than that of Many former dignitaries.
For there is less in him than meets tne eye. He becomes involved in some shady business deals with the Mafia. He also pursues an odd little affair with a poor little rich girl who is Flying of cancer. But after becoming immersed In the shadows of Wall Street, he decides to make a clean but ruthless breast of it. For in So doing he almost destroys his family. Tony Is tried and sentenced to a year's impnsonMent, and that appears to be that. We are informea that there are "two Tonys," and his Past is dragged in as exculpation, but we never learn who or what or why. Tony remains an enigma, and the whole novel behaves like the proverbial sibyl.
Brian Aldiss's latest, Frankenstein Unbound, seemed to me to be too self-conscious to be anything but conventional. It concerns the strange fate of one Joe Bodenland, an American politician who has made it to the Year 2020. Fortunately for him, and for us, nuclear explosions have fractured the infrastructures of time and space in the universe, and Joe is shifted back into the Switzerland Of 1818. The novel is rather literary, and it ot>mes as no surprise when Joe meets up with Victor Frankenstein, of Roger Corman fame. I had expected Victor to be more surprised by Jpe than vice-versa, since Joe has neither the right clothes nor the right money. This last, as I know to my own cost, is a very important Point in Northern Europe. Joe also has a futurist car, which he manages to hide at convenient moments. But Frankenstein accepts all this and even goes so far as to bare his heart to Joe. This heart, of course, includes the legendary monster. This might seem a rather baroque plot for regular science-fiction, but. the intrusion of the monster lends Mr Aldiss — and Joe — a convenient analogy for future tinkerings with Mother Nature. But the novel is not a simple parable. Joe also bumps into Byron and Shelley and, Larnazingly, Mary Godwin. Miss Godwin oecame Mrs Shelley, of course, but more imPortantly she came to write Frankenstein. The confusions will be obvious even to the lflost untrained and unliterary eye, but Joe accepts the twists and turns in good faith. 'Which is more than I could do, especially When the Gothic fantasy takes on an aPocryphal vein in Joe's final pursuit of the LOu.nster. The writing follows the theme by
eing too elaborate by half, and I was left I onging for good old sci-fi.
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