Army Week
The Feathers of Death. By Simon Raven. (Blond, 15s.)
The Sergeant. By Dennis Murphy. (Muller, 15s.) The Breaking of Bumbo. By Andrew Sinclair. (Faber, 15s.) The Best of Everything. By Rona Jaffe. (Cape, 16s.)
THE two novels most worth talking about this week are both first books by young men, both set in the Army, and both pivot around homosexual depredations; but they have, in fact, nothing much in common beyond the unusual assurance with which they are written. Mr. Raven's novel takes us• to mythical Pepromene, whither Martock's, Foot under the command of Colonel Sanvoisin has been posted to keep down the Oxford-educated rebel, Karioukeya. The bare bones are these. Lieu- tenant Alastair Lynch falls in love with Drummer Harley and takes him under his wing and into his bed. Reports come in of threatening movements by Karioukeya and two detachments are sent, one of them under Alastair, into the hill country. His troop is attacked and repels the enemy, but Har- ley, wishing to prove himself, disobeys an order and Alastair shoots him. The book then moves, through the subsequent court-martial, into further analysis of the realities of their relationship.
Mr. Raven handles the development of his com- plex plot with considerable mastery. He has a cool, balanced style, as precise and unlyrical as Waugh's, that serves him equally well in the amusing potted history of Martock's Foot and the harsher moments of suspense and action. The court-martial is too drawn-out for my liking, but the overall rhythm of the book is admirably judged. What I am doubtful about is. Alastair's 'weight' : one is not convinced enough of his importance as a central figure. His background is supplied, down to the cosy master at Harrow who taught him that 'literature, conversation and wine' were 'the staples of civilised existence,' but there is no solid indication anywhere in the book that such values might be taken with a grain of salt. If anything, they are reinforced by the narrator's apparently similar prejudices and the various men-of-the-world exchanges, sometimes over carefully described dinners, that are broad- cast throughout the narrative. Nor could I be- lieve that Alastair's homosexuality would have been viewed with such dream-like tolerance by almost all the officers and men around him. More things are mythical than Pepromene in this clever, exciting, eccentric book.
Mr. Murphy writes about a young American private, Tom Swanson, stationed in a maintenance camp outside Bordeaux. The boy is an excep- tion among the men, who sit about in 'a familiar idle sadness' : he takes regular passes into town, has found a nice French girl and is learning the language. The camp has been laxly run by a drunken captain, but one day Master Sergeant Callan, a sinisterly quiet old soldier, arrives and proceeds to transform it. His eye falls on Swan- son : 'What are you so proud about?' he asks : the boy becomes his company clerk.
The rest of the book is devoted to his efforts to wean the boy away from his girl, by stopping his passes, by inviting him out night after night to make insensate tours of the neighbouring bistros in an old car he has specially bought; to his efforts, to put it crudely, to 'make' the boy. But Mr. Murphy's achievement is that he doesn't allow it to be put crudely. What might have been a simple report of the stages in a purely physical seduction becomes something more : incidents give off an echo: the smoky, tipsy, rambling con- versations of the sergeant and the boy are lead- ing to something more important than the laying down of a body. I suppose one is bound to invoke Melville if one wants to convey how nearly Mr. Murphy has brought off his parable of innocence and corruption. I think he fails on two counts : the arbitrariness with which the.boy is allowed to escape, and the occasional lapses into a false simplicity of language (he has a kind of nervous tic of apposition, 'a smile, a flash of good humour,' 'a kindness, a looseness with the boy') that remind one, all too jarringly, of bad Hemingway.
Mr. Sinclair, splicing two worlds, has come up with the worst of both in his Angry Young Gentle- man, Bumbo, whom he trundles at hysterical speed through officers' training school, duty at Welling- ton Barracks, deb balls, Chelsea parties and an attempted mutiny over Suez, towards a nervous breakdown and a dismal marriage. Recurrent wafts of overheated imagery infect the few comic passages, and the ghost of a talent which some may detect in this inconsequential tale was finally exorcised, for me, by the author's fine, blind devotion to its tiresome hero.
Brian Glanville has gone to Calabria for his latest book, an 'entertainment' with enough over- tones to recall Graham Greene rather than Ambler. His journalist-hero, full of 'impulsive dis- gust,' is sent to write up the romantic kidnapping of a schoolmistress by the village mayor. He is warned off; the girl is being held against her will by the Mafia; a Communist taxi-driver and a Fascist newspaperman offer help. I was so mesmerised by the consequent aggregation of events, moving to a tough catastrophe, ending on a fashionably dying fall, that I hardly noticed the core of the book remains a mystery : just what did happen to the maestra up there in the mountains? Mr. Glanville writes with laconic force and a knowing eye to his minor characters.
The trumpets have been sounding on the other side for The Best of Everything, a semi- documentary about the fortunes of working-gals • in New York which might best be described as a book they would be likely to have on their bed- side tables. By being both hot on authenticity (dates, restaurants, details of dress) and long on wish-fulfilment (Caroline's trip to Las Vegas with a film-star stallion), it invests dull lives with glamour; and it offers, by implication, worldly guidance to bewildered girls, an Emily Post of the inner life. I would spoil the plot by giving an outline if I could, but I got lost quite early on.
JOHN COLEMAN
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