Tantrums
Harriet Waugh
Wanting Angela Huth (Harvill Press £8.95) Strange Loop Amanda Prantera (Cape £8.50) The Garden of Earthly Delights Lawson Davies (Michael Joseph £8.95)
Iii her fifth novel, Wanting, Angela Huth sets up an intriguing situation. An Eng- lish theatre and film director, notorious for his sadistic bullying of actors and those in his employ, develops a passion for a conventional, upper-class actress and brings to bear all his bullying tactics to woo her. He sends her 200 roses in one fell swoop, and sits for hours in his car keeping watch outside her London residence, He also pursues her to the country. When she shows indifference to his company, he loses his temper and threatens her with a broken bottle. Love, to Harry Antlers, is a tantrum, and a dangerous one at that.
This is all potentially very good stuff, but the excitement that should follow never materialises. The central tension is under- mined because Antlers is presented as a grotesquely unattractive and ludicrous fig- ure. In fact, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand why anyone puts up with him – he is not even credited with being a good or successful director. The novel does not explore why such men often succeed in this kind of bullying and degrading courtship, nor is it a frightening tale of terror and pursuit. The unmemorable heroine treats Antlers and everybody else with such good manners that excitement or curiosity is impossible. In fact, the novel, which has a couple of weak sub-plots, seems strangely unfocused. This is a pity, because Miss Huth's previous ones are gripped by strong feeling and under- standing.
Though Angela Huth avoids any gothic overtones in her tale of violent pursuit, Amanda Prantera has no such inhibitions in her promising first novel, Strange Loop. Her hero, Ludwig, an Austrian emigre professor of philosophy, revisits in old age the English convent in which, as a post-war student, he had a devastating experience that marked him for life. In the hope of exorcism, he relives in his mind the sum- mer he spent cataloguing the convent library.
The reader soon comes to dislike the hero. He is a humourless, rationalist bigot, contemptuous of the nuns, to whom he gives unattractive nicknames such as Popeye, Frog Face, Simper and Pinhead. But he is startled out of his smug superior- ity when he finds that someone is making inroads into the philosophy section of the library. This leads him to a strange girl with long red hair living in one of the towers of the convent. To begin with, he thinks that she is a prisoner of the nuns – she appears to be locked up and has a silk bag over her head with slits for the eyes. Soon the bag is removed, and Martina, an Eastern Euro- pean waif, and Ludwig are discussing philosophy, and making love in the nuns' flower beds. In his arrogant conceit, Lud- wig asks none of the questions that he should – for instance, about the fate of the last man who took an interest in Martina and whose grave is in the convent church- yard. Instead, he concentrates on trying to get her pregnant, which he thinks will cure her of her weird obsession. Love, and meddling, lead to some terrific gothic horrors, but the author succeeds in sus- pending disbelief in a maze of folk witch- ery, Catholic diabolism, psychiatry and philosophy. It is excellent fun.
The same cannot quite be said for The Garden of Earthly Delights by Lawson Davies. This tale concerns a girl's chilly quest for sexual excitement and adventure in England during the Civil War. Her father, a scientist and alchemist, moves his family from Bristol to the country after his wife, a successful woman of business, is hacked to death by rioting slaves on a ship. He hopes, by doing this, to conduct his experiments without interfering mutterings of sorcery.
Rosemary, the heroine, bored by the country, contrives to be invited back to Bristol by friends. The household that she joins contains a rabble of freaks and hangers-on who cavort about and tell stories. She soon becomes the mistress of a grotesquely fat merchant and, without pleasure, learns the arts of whoredom as she travels the country with him buying and selling gold. Meanwhile, the Civil War gets off to a slow start.
All the characters without exception are charmless, cold and calculating, with indis- tinct personalities. Decay, sweat, smells and general discomfort are described from Rosemary's point of view as she performs her disagreeable duty of satisfying the bloated old man whose teeth fall out as she kisses him. Although a great deal happens, the novel contrives to be curiously static, the action overhung by a pall of elaborately dry, adjectival phrases. Mr Davies is in love with words, which in itself is no bad thing. But they do need a bit of shaking and loosening up. When this has happened, the strength of his vision and his undoubted intelligence will make him a strong and enjoyable novelist.
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