NEW NOVELS 1

Narrator's eye

HENRY TUBE

The Worldwide Machine Paolo Volponi trans- lated by Belen Sevareid (Calder and Boyars 35s) The Faithful Nancy E. Kline (Peter Owen 32s) The Tunnel Maureen Lawrence (Gollancz 30s) The Bliss Body Philip Callow (MacGibbon and Kee 30s) Drowning Eva Tucker (Calder and Boyars 30s) Broom Stephen Lister (Peter Davies 30s) In Paolo Volponi's remarkable first novel, The Memorandum, published here just over a year ago, there is a passage which one might sub- title 'The Love of Two Steam Shovels': 'As the motor of the first steam shovel throbbed faintly, the other machine arrested its shovel in mid-air and turned around. It had under- stood immediately; and it went towards its companion. Its yellow body drew near the other. When they were side by side they stopped their motors. Then the first machine began to vibrate at regular intervals as if it were singing; the other followed suit at a slower pace. The combined noise of the motors grew in volume, the machines drew closer and closer as if they were hugging each other. I realised that one was helping the other and that together they were pushing in the same direction.' Of itself, the passage would not (Nis- grace a piece of Soviet or Chinese social real- ism; equally it might serve to display the frail poetic sensitivity of some recent fictional hero

of the West, pale surrogate of his palely loiter- ing author. But Signor Volponi's narrator is a madman, whose clarity of observation only emphasises his hopelessly clouded mind, his obsessive mistrust of his fellow men, particu- Aarly those who try to help him.

The narrator of Signor Volponi's second, - more powerful novel, The Worldwide Machine, again beautifully translated by Beier) Sevareid,

has raised the love of machines to a philo- sophy: 'I have to state—and this is the pur- pose of my treatise . . . that men have been built in the likeness of a machine by other human beings who, I am certain, are also machines, and that man's true destiny is to build other machines which will be better than man, and perhaps these-machines will suc- ceed in raising man to their level. . . .' Signor Volponi's cunning lies in creating an atmo- sphere of such total mistrust—the narrator mistrusts everyone but himself, while the reader mistrusts the narrator—as to induce a strange feeling of almost complete trust. Not that one is made to see human beings as less shabby, less deluded than before, rather that one accepts them more readily as they are: Because the narrator is so obviously observing the world in a distorting mirror, we become aware that everyone else is doing the same, and that the mirror, though not separable from the man, is not the whole of him. Human nature, which the narrator's philosophy—in common with other more respectable philo-

sophies, ideologies, religions, moral codes—

hopes to alter out of all recognition, appears by contrast, if not reliable, at least fairly con- stant; and the narrator's insane treatise proves to be Signor Volponi's sane one: better knaves and fools than fanatics.

I alluded earlier to 'some recent fictional hero of the West' with malice aforethought,

for what distinguishes The Worldwide Machine

from the rest of this week's novels is not so much its sensitive passages of observation, as the driving force of its argument, of which

the passages are all essential elements. Nancy E. Kline's first novel, The Faithful—the confron-

tation of a nun with a somewhat Jamesian young heroine, an atheist who offers to 'live for' the nun—comes nearekt to being fiction on this level, though neither Miss Kline's imagination nor her technique quite measures up to her theme. The effect is that of chil- dren with sticks pretending to be men with swords; the protagonists are too immature to be dangerous to one another, and their con- flict is more dreamed of than charted.

Perhaps more wisely, though at some cost to the reader, Maureen Lawrence sets very

narrow limits to her first novel, The Tunnel,

undertaking to convey the unhappy life -of a simple-minded canteen cleaner, not exactly as she would tell it herself, but as she would experience it. Miss Lawrence's strictly un- emotional style works well when the events themselves—the death of a baby, the loss of foster-parents—carty their own charge, but makes for considerable tedium when used to describe, household chores or to reproduce casual dialogue. The book finally seems more of a lesson than a work of fiction : one cares that there should be such people in real life, but hardly at all for this particular character.

Philip Callow's The Bliss Body is a com- pendium of sensitive passages of observation which wilt, like flowers no sooner picked than thrown away, from the curious absence of the sensitive observer, True, there is a kind of melancholy cloud floating through the book

which from time to time assumes a vaguely human shape, visits friends and even makes love to a married woman, but it does not seem seriously aware of being at the centre of a piece of fiction and, in fine, I suspect it of being the ghost of a Georgian poet.

Eva Tucker's Drowning studies closely and intelligently a tight web of relationships be- tween two married couples and a homosexual reviewer of novels. Miss Tucker has developed a clipped, telegraphic style ('Coughed, held hand over v-neck of nightdress') which goes some way to curing a fault endemic to this kind of book, that one has read it all before a thousand times and can scarcely bear to have it all spelled out at the ..slow pace of syntax. It does not, of course, amount to a new treat- ment, but it lends a temporary and grateful lustre.

The eponymous hero of Stephen Lister's Broom is a kind of latter-day Raffles, a public- school-educated Latin American who, to gain filthy , lucre to support himself and estate, embarks on a life of crime. Broom and his adventures are not more than moderately en- thralling. The novel's interest lies in its nar- rator, a cantankerous old hermit who lives in the south of France and to whom Mr Lister lends his own name. This character holds savage views on a range of subjects—long hair, schools, wine-snobs, food, and above all guests and their use of his telephone. Had Watson treated Holmes as this character treats Broom; I feel sure that many crimes would have gone undetected and Holmes might even have aban-

• doped himself entirely to the violin. The brutal truth is that Broom is the feed and the narrator his own hero. There is no other point of comparison with Signor Volponi's novel, but across the gulf narrator seems to eye narrator.