Excess and reticence

James Simmons

CIVIL TO STRANGERS by Barbara Pym

Macmillan, f11.95

CHANGES OF ADDRESS by Lee Langley

Collins, f9.95

THE UNDERBELLY by Duncan Fallowell

Macmillan, f10.95

CHINESE WHISPERS by Maurice Leitch

Hutchinson, f7.95

This last garnering of the posthumous papers of Barbara Pym contains one short novel, three novellas, some stories and a radio talk, 'Finding a Voice'. The title of the talk nicely describes the novel which seems trivial and uncertain at the begin- ning, the author mocking the limitations of her characters before she has properly delineated them. As the book procedes she grows to respect them and so does the reader. For instance, Mr Gay, who is at first presented as a stupid, vain man losing hope that his handsomeness will win him a rich wife, suddenly finds himself relishing cups of tea with a kindly widow, Mrs Gower. She takes him upstairs to examine a room devoted to her late husband's belongings and Mr Gay bursts out laughing at a stuffed parrot in a cage. This spon- taneous act relieves them both. Later he thinks:

Just because Mrs Gower had given away the stuffed parrot it didn't necessarily mean that she was willing to take a second husband.

'I think you and I agree on all subjects,' he said tentatively.

'Yes, we do,' said Mrs Gower. 'I have noticed it more and more lately.'

'Then I believe we could be happy together. Laura, will you marry me? 'Yes.'

This, thought Mr Gay, must be the most sensible and satisfactory proposal in the history of the world . .

The more complex coming together of the main characters, Cassandra and her husband the novelist, is on the same lines. It is a very happy novel without being sentimental. People improve, learning to accept limitations, finding a little more courage and generosity. The author has just enough vision to sustain her observa- tions and narrative skills. It is a dream of modest felicity.

Hazel Holt has radically edited Barbara Pym's material. Gervase and Flora is re- duced from 216 pages to 40. It is a very swift and delicate piece of writing. We must take Miss Holt's word for it that so many pages were expendable. I had great pleasure reading the stories. At least three of the pieces in this collection deal with unrequited love, of lives with little sexual excitement or social adventure. Like Olivia Manning's heroines Barbara Pym's hold back; but they observe with considerable intelligence. It is the opposite end of the spectrum from D. H. Lawrence's fiction which calls us to fulfillment, and yet the mind that created these stories seems fulfilled. Perhaps orgasms and adventures don't make the soul any riper than bridge and churchwork.

Though set mostly in India Lee Lang- ley's world is more what I'm used to. Here the days and nights are filled with booze and sex, risk, excitement and betrayal . . . the road of excess that finds no palace of wisdom. This novel is in the tradition of What Maisie Knew, a portrait of a brave selfish women seen through her daughter's eyes, only this child has few illusions. It is very vivid and poignant, the heat and smells of India, the atmosphere of English hotels, teeming bazaars and sordid lodg- ings. Tumultuous world events are in the background. Like a silver dollar Moti, the mother, moves from man to man, glamor- ous, stupid, imperious, drunk; but every now and then she comes out with a piece of information or an opinion that shows a sharp mind not intent on developing itself. Maggie, the daughter, is dragged in her mother's wake, deprived of all security and contact with people who would care for her. When Moti leaves her first husband she remarks to Maggie, 'Daddy and I have decided to live apart.'

The child waits to be told what this means. Moti hugs her cheerfully, 'Don't worry, you're staying with me.' `What about Daddy?'

`He'll be at Amaryllis.'

`Shan't I see him?'

`You chose to stay with me.'

I chose . . . .

To some extent this happens to most children, but this is a particularly sorry case. Lee Langley is very good at sugges- tive dialogue, little cameos that set up character and life-style. She writes lyrically without being self indulgent:

On Moti's bed the sheets were never white, blank, but marbled like the end-papers in an old book with swirls of subtle colour: a blend of semen and spilt tea, whisky and menstrual blood, hair-oil and face powder . . .

It could hardly be further from Barbara Pym's world.

These two books are notable for style; one has a strong sense of a talented author writing each of them. Duncan Fallowell is closer to the Zola tradition, with a sense of social pressures creating destiny, the writ- ing moulded to characters he is creating, giving us the flavour of their seedy lives. In a curious way he seems to force seediness on them by the roughness of his vocabul- ary. It is an easy book to put down because there is little sense of events leading anywhere, though each is plausible and vivid enough in itself. Occasional personal reflections on, for instance, the history of London stick out uneasily as though the author was being careless or self-indulgent. The story concerns a 17-year-old cockney orphan who goes to live with a middle-class aunt in the suburbs. Here is an account of Derek's thoughts:

And is family life something I want? Seems a bit of a minefield to me — back-stabbing, greed, machinations, mistaken motives, con- fusion, guilt, love and hate and the inability to recognise the difference between them and money of course, this often screws up families . . . .

That doesn't sound to me like this boy's thoughts. It is a difficult novel to judge. It is original and there are some remarkable characters. It is as though an intelligent and imaginative person had forced himself to write a novel without having a real subject. In his Sunday Times review Ber- nard Levin got a bit excited about the ugliness, much joyless sex and unredeemed experience and some gratuitously ugly metaphors, but there is also intelligence and compassion. Fallowell certainly has the eye and ear to cope with contemporary reality, but not the vision to put form on it.

Chinese Whispers, a novella by Maurice Leitch, a handsome volume with illustra- tions by Sam Hunter, also leaves me in a quandary. It seems to be about a male- nurse in a lunatic asylum who is a bit mad himself. It has all the neurotic bleakness of Poor Lazarus, but it makes no sense; strange events are not explained and lack resonance in themselves. The blurb sug- gests it is a metaphor for Northern Ireland, but that would merely compound the felony.