Auberon Waugh on class fictions

Travels in Nihilon Alan Sillitoe (W. H. Allen £2.00) The Nerve Melvyn Bragg (Secker and Warburg £1.90) The Disinherited Peter Forster (Eyre and Spottiswoode £2.25) This week's choice of two novels by writers whose earlier work puts them unmistakably in the school of working class novelists, and one by a writer who concerns himself exclusively with the middle class — might well provide a peg on which to hang a few random thoughts on the class conflict in Britain, as it

manifests itself in contemporary fiction. If I reveal at this stage that the middle-class novel — by Peter Forster — is unmistakably a little bit better than the two working-class novels then the field. is Wide open for one of those stimulating discussions about the extent to which greater aptitude shown by persons of the middle class in almost every field of human endeavour is the result of heredity or of environment.

Angry passions may be aroused in this debate, so I must tread carefully. The only additional evidence I can offer dates from several years ago when I was conducting an inquiry into the sexual morality of the English people on behalf of the Sunday Mirror. My research took me to the office of the then General Secretary of the Marriage Guidance Council, who told me, In the course of our discussion, that one of the main characteristics of child adoption in England was that the babies came, generally speaking, from parents of the lower working class, while the adopting Parents were, by and large, of the upper / Working or middle classes. A recurrent coMplaint, he said, about such children was not so much that they were idler, dirtier, uglier, more brutal, lecherous or dishonest than equivalent middle-class Children born of middle-class parents; but, Much more surprisingly, that they were less .intelligent.

This suggestion is particularly disturbing since it has been pretty well agreed that Whatever else one might think about the working classes they are extremely intelligent — or would be, if they could be transplanted into middle-class environments. An entire educational, social and fiscal system has been geared to this Proposition. Its end-product, as we now pee, is that a large proportion of school

• leavers, and one which increases year by

TYear, is now unable to read. The prospect those who try to make a living by Writing has seldom been bleaker and many Writers may feel they should devise a second string to their bow, learning how tO perform conjuring tricks for children's Parties or drive an earth-shifter on Motorway construction. In the case of Mr Sillitoe, this might not !oe. such a bad idea, anyway. It is a terrible ,thIng to say of a fellow-writer, but his 000k is a mess. No doubt it represents a Conscious effort to break out of the clicluss and the stereotypes of the working-class novel, and this intention is praiseworthy

enough — Mr Bragg, for instance, has few such inhibitions — but by exposing his work to all the classic criteria of satirical fantasy — Gulliver and Alice through the Looking Glass are obvious parents — Sillitoe only reveals how threadbare is his own invention, how meagre his resources of ingenuity and paradox.

Nihilon is an imaginary country where nihilism holds sway, where order, decency, justice, logic, truth etc are highly subversive concepts. Five people — a poet, a historian, a woman, a geographer and a diplomat — undertake to compile a guidebook of this territory. Some of their adventures are extremely funny, others less so, but they are all too haphazard and episodic to provide any incentive for the reader to turn from one page to the next. Nonsense writing, to be successful, requires far more rigid logic and tighter discipline than straight narrative or description, and I am sorry to say that Mr Sillitoe fails to rise to the challenge. "Drink Nihilitz! Keep death on the roads? It's fun!" Drivers in Nihilon can go to prison for not being drunk — "It's our only way of holding the population down." The large photograph which his publishers thoughtfully provide on the dustcover reveals someone who looks dangerously under-nourished to me, I shall be haunted by it, and wish I could be nicer about his book.

I am afraid that Mr Bragg's book does not quite pass its eleven plus on this occasion, either, although it" gets much better as the story progresses. A writer, recollecting in the tranquillity first of a mental hospital where he is„ a voluntary patient, then of his mother's working-class home in Cumberland, tries to write a book about the day when he had a nervous breakdown. He discovers he is not a very good writer, constantly dashing backwards and forwards in time — to his childhood, to his breakdown, back to the bin, to his early manhood, first love affairs etc — and constantly apologizing in asides to the reader for being such a muggins.

But he bashes on with it, and ends the book having been tortured by all the familiar guilts and hesitations of the working-class lad from Cumberland made good in London, back at home with his dying Mum. The moral — if one can generalize from the particular case which Mr Bragg describes — would appear to be that it is a great mistake to educate members of the working class since the social, emotional and intellectual strain of carrying so much education is liable to prove too much for them and send them mad. It is a serious and thoughtfully argued book, and I hope Mrs Thatcher takes it seriously when next she is urged by her civil servants to press for vast increases in the education budget. I have no quarrel with what Mr Bragg has to say — although, to tell the truth, I was not aware of these dangers — only with the way he has chosen to say it.

Readers of this page throughout the last twelve months may have noticed the

formulation of certain elementary rules for novelists. These list temptations to be avoided, tricks which may seem literary and smart but which tend to lose a reader's concentration and interrupt the smooth passage of his narrative. Here they are, yet again: (1) Don't jump in and out of the first person singular, (2) When using the first person singular, stick to the same narrator. (3) Avoid 'asides' to the reader. (4) Keep to the chronological order of events as much as possible. Don't jump backwards and forwards in time for the sake of effect. (5) Avoid writing about authors or about the process of writing a book. (6) Never describe nervous breakdowns, especially in the first person singular.

Can it be accident that Bragg breaks every one of these rules, one after the other? When one realizes that his publishers have decided to decorate both sides of the dustcover with photographs of the author, in colour, my dears, then many people may well decide that The Nerve's only true function is as an elaborate and prolonged Waugh Bash. Certainly, it reads more as a collection of literary exercises than as a novel. The end just begins to tie it all together, to give some point and purpose to the sheer grinding waste of time, the unecessary and fatuous detail which has preceded it, but by then, I imagine most readers will have given up.

Probably a book reviewer in the Times will praise it. If anything should happen to me, a safe rule is to avoid any novel praised in the Times. That magnificent newspaper has an absolutely unfailing knack for picking duds. Between them, the reviewers are killing the novel. Mr Bragg could have written a first-class novel on this subject, but he preferred to be thought ' literary ' and to receive a good review in the Times. More's the pity.

After what has gone before, people may judge it small praise to say that Mr Forster's new book — the last in his trilogy about middle-class chaps — is slightly better, but I think that on this occasion it will suffice.

There are three main threads of narrative in the book, which is much too long. The first, and best, concerns the love of our middle-class hero for a French girl, whom he has to pinch from his best friend, the humorous character called Cadwallader Smith. The second concerns the whole question of French collaboration and resistance, and is rather dull, being given in conversation which has nothing to do with the main narrative. The third concerns the decline and collapse of British self-esteem, as seen through the eyes of ' typical ' middle-class Englishmen. This theme might be better in isolation; as written, it takes us on a tour of every main news headline between 1951 and 1964, merely padding out the love story and removing all suspense from it.

Incidentally, the dustcover reveals Mr Forster as being still most attractively plump. This must be one of the great mysteries of our literary England, how Mr Forster remains so attractively plump. It also warns us against his 'shocking and controversial' epilogue. I can assure readers that there is nothing there which is likely to offend them.