Child's Play

The Custard Boys. By John Rae. (Hart-Davis, The Chinese Love Pavilion. By Paul Scott. (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 18s.) The Blinding Light. By Heinrich Schirmbeck. (Collins, 21s.) Saturday Lunch with the Brownings. By Penelope Mortimer. (Hutchinson, 16s.)

I THINK The Custard Boys a novel which weighs a good deal. If I say it is about children and is by a child (or by a child who has pupated into an adult), don't be put off. It is as much and as little about children as Mr. Golding's Lord of the rum But it is a novel, not an allegory. No don

With simple-minded paraphrastical or reductive tastes will be able to snatch the hat away and

Point to the rabbit of its 'meaning,' very white, With ears back and nose twitching. The boys are a gang in and out of a mediocre grammar school In flat and droopy East Anglia during the war. In restlessness they parody the war life andwar virtues of their elders. They hunt cats. At the beginning the dead cat on the sand has a power like the rat on the landing, in Camus's La Peste, that first rat soft under the doctor's foot. They fight a village gang (who call them the Custard Boys after their defeat). They half accept, half

hunt an Austrian Jewish boy. John Curlew 'falls into a first love with this boy : as himself treating him with love, as himself-in-the-gang betraying and denying him, and so leading the novel to its terror, to its parody of a court-martial for

Cowardice, the Jewish boy having deserted in face of the gang of 'herps' from the village. „ Many admirable things demand celebration.

une is the observed ambivalence, the distaste for author's

absolutes or verdicts. 'You're just a bloody great sniffing conscience,' roars the Nor- Wich solicitor (not all bad) to the missionary uncle (not all good), . . your nose is always up the tail of some injustice or other.' But then ambivalence is the matter of this book, of the society it depicts, which js our society, our life. Two more admirable things are the acknowledge- ment, severely controlled, of the beautiful, and the writing which avoids with fastidiousness the nccid, the smoothed and the shabby. Less .aodmirable (I think) is an occasional heightening book some person or clement to caricature. But this °00k is unequivocal.

The other members of the gang will smile when they read that I am now a schoolmaster. Life is neither so, poor that I do not fear its ending nor so rich that each day brings new hope of happiness. As I advance towards death I meet the escaping years, time's refugees, who are seeking safety in the past. I acknowledge

their greeting, but do not remember their faces. If I mention William Golding again, it is because Mr. Rae (but without the aid of special situations) sustains the same opposite of humbug. With respect, though, I would sooner have written this novel than Mr. Golding's allegories, much as I would rather have written a lesser play of Shake- speare's than Gulliver's Travels or Pilgrim's Progress.

'They found that Saxby had become something of a legend.' Where? In Malaya, in the jungle. The quotation may not be fair to The Chinese Love Pavilion, a novel adding up to more—in- cluding Saxby—than the lacquered pavilion in which Mr. Paul Scott's narrator makes love to the exquisite Eurasian prostitute, whom he loves and by whom he is loved. He has to save her from that legendary man he admires. Prostitute to the English, she had been prostitute also to the Japanese, which puts her on the list of those the legendary man has to kill. This Saxby is the jungle solitary. He hunted rare orchids (some- what symbolical). He 'liked to run his own show.' He has ideas about God, the Superior Man who believes in a panpsychic nature, and is at last mad; a figure, in other words, from stock, whom we have had at various depths of sweat, violence and tension since Conrad's Mr. Kurz or Mal- raux's jungle hero in La Voie royale. The Chinese Love Pavilion is parasitical (and about thirty years out of date). It offers only a sketch for a vision which wouldn't amount to much if it were more than sketched. All the same, Mr. Scott popularises adroitly. He doesn't overcook. The tension of the search for Saxby works well, and he is good at situation and the curtest dialogue.

One can bear with Saxby's orchids, with symbolism, either very precise or imprecise and not too obviously insistent, but not with symbolic novels of pseudo-philosophy—such as The Blind- ing Light—which are now and again smuggled into our pragmatic Anglo-Saxony, to flatter, be- muse and deceive the innocent. The protagonist, bred in the ancient town of Antares, frequenting the livelier town named Sybaris, wishes to be- come 'the poet of the stupendous revelation of modern physics.' A beautiful pale blind girl is led by a dog through the streets of Sybaris, selling The Awakener. Her father read Moby Dick, in- vented an electric harpoon, and beat his daughter, petticoats up, into blindness. He leads a sect condemning Light and Sight. The poet of modern physics loves her, and the vast novel develops into a late-night importation on ITV in which a power man is about to procure a brain opera- tion upon a towering physicist, who will not

allow his science to be the whore of politics. The cultural references extend innumerably from Grtinewald to Wittgenstein, and the publishers think this 'may well be a great novel.'

The stories in Saturday Lunch with the Brown- ings are not at all pretentious, but that is nearly

the limit of their virtue. To be catty, I was reminded of the Brains Trust on a bad evening when questions which come up about nagging, apathy, lying to the children, losing one's youth, and making the best of things get the bright camera-conscious replies they deserve, uncle

Norman Fisher's grin widening all the while. Every such reply could expand into one of these storyettes, which are mildly tender, mildly tart, mildly condemnatory, mildly observant, mildly a la mode, and mildly undistinguished.

GEOFFREY GRIGSON