New Novels
Mr. Twining and the God Pan. By Timothy Angus Jones. (James Barrie. 12s. 6d.) THE Innocent Abroad is the Bedser of the English novel. His two most recent performances make it clear that he has been overbowled. Workmanlike still, but getting very little lift from the pitch. What- ever happened to Irony, anyway ? Was that just the shine on the new ball ?
Messrs. Jones and Boothroyd know their dissimilar innocents well. Mr. Twining is a compound of chastity, angularity, humility and a pipe, a middle-aged private schoolmaster who looks—a lost ginger- sportscoated Cortes—with a stolid, wild surmise towards a Mediter- ranean of millionaires and nudists. His first real glimpse is exciting enough : " He took a deep breath and lowered his head again, and this time the world turned over. For a moment he could not tell whether he was standing on his head or his heels : he seemed to be looking upward, upwards through water towards the floor of the ocean. The water was as clear as glass. There within arm's length was the encrusted wall of the shore stretching to the distance on either hand, descending through forests of Waving seaweed to the mountainous country at the bottom. All round him as far as the eye could see lay a strangeness and an unimaginable detail of shelves and crannies,
crevices and escarpments, a pathway over a ridge, a colony of mol- luscs, a miniature sand storm in a hollow between two cliffs, a sunlit bank of ferns—and all gently in motion with the water and peopled by little creatures. It had a microscopic reality ; it seemed far more real than the world he had left above him."
This is well observed. But the more Mr. Jones deals with people the happier he is with fish. None of the characters that his hero meets (a jovial Dutch nudist, an eccentric millionaire, his difficult adolescent daughter, young lovers, an unpleasant old American woman and so on) are as real as the• little striped fish he sees : "browsing in the sun like a bumble bee from flower to flower." Pan remains invisible behind a screen of dialogue. Mr. Twining retains his wide-eyed decency to the end and, strangely, this trans- mutes the extraordinary into the ordinary. The flatness is bred by the writing. The signs are there in the underwater passage : " on his head or his heels," " as clear as glass," " within arm's length," "as far as the eye could see." Mr. Twining is an unconscious bore and no matter how lively the people he meets may be when he meets them, they too become bores as soon as they open their mouths.
Let's be fair. Neither Mr. Twining and the God Pan nor Mr. Boothroyd's Value for Money is intended to be more than entertain- ment, light holiday reading. Perhaps because Mr. Boothroyd'is less pretentious, he brings it off, better. For his Innocent--Chayley Broadbent—Abroad is London. For fifteen years Chayley has been cautiously walking out with Ethel Atkinson ; his first trip to London (for the Rugby League Cup Final) throws him on to the admirable bosom of a showgirl in a nude revue called Ruthine. The rest of the book is spent in the Innocent's first becoming worthy of Ruthine (by joining the Town Council) and then of returning to Ethel once his eyes are opened. There is an excellent description of a Council meeting, rather too much information about rag and shoddy, and a good minor character or two (particularly Councillor Joe Wardell whose deafness precludes him from following what goes on in meet- ings as closely as he might and who is only interested" if it's owt to do wi' dustbins"). Chayley himself, a kind of poor man's Wilfred Pickles, is rendered less boring than Mr. Twining by virtue of his cunning. Even so Value for Money never gets to the "I-laughed- out-loud " stage. It tries. But the life just isn't there.
What did happen to Irony ? From Cervantes to the early Evelyn Waugh, from Voltaire to The Apes of God, the Innocent has done fine. Distorting mirrors are held up to society, the wide eyes of Innocents have been revealing fresh grotesqueries for centuries.. Now all they show us are themselves ; the eyes are turned inward. And Innocence looking at itself, instead of at other people, wicked and vain, vicious and worldly (like us), is a bore.
Mr. Thomas is a Trueman to Messrs. Jones' and Boothroyd's weary Bedsers. Applause from the critics, a good action, lots of natural talent but very little control of length or direction at this stage in his development.
The Gollancz margarine-yellow dust jacket of A Frost on My Frolic is thickly spread with superlatives from reviews of Mr. Thomas's earlier novels, and names like Rabelais and Chaucer and Bunyan shout blackly from it. Well, there's no doubt about one thing : Mr. Thomas has talent. What there is doubt about is whether he knows what he's doing with it. For, to have no dpubt again, this is not a good book.
Whole passages certainly, in this fairly detailed glimpse of a chunk of Welsh adolescence, are deeply felt and finely written, once the turgid, sharp-elbowed style becomes readable. The comic sense is • strong and real. Some of the characters, particularly the central Wilfie and Mr. Rawlins, the headmaster, are brilliantly developed. The town of Mynydd Coch and the lives of the people who live and work and praise God there in their multiform ways, are deafly seen. And yet this is not a good book.
Chiefly because Mr. Thomas can't leave enough out. The words stamp and straddle across the pages, oft-n without quite knowing where they are or where they're going. The rhetoric is as bad at times (and the passage from pages 147 to 156 is a fair example) as Henry Miller—to whom Mr. Thomas bears affinity—at his word- drunk worst. (That's another name to put on the jacket.) This Welsh Gothic, all sects and singing and corrugated iron, is a difficult shape to control at best. At this stage it is quite beyond Mr. Thomas.
Albeit I would still recommend you, if you haven't read his earlier books, to read A Frost on My Frolic. There is a genuine and well- rooted Welsh writer growing here whose verbal ability—when the words aren't getting away from him—is startling. There's richness here of a blessed kind ;' and every prospect of Mr. Thomas becoming a very good writer indeed. But will he please not shout and wave his arms and laugh and cry and wink and belch at Me all at once ?
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