Living Bristol fashion

Auberon Waugh

The Breast Philip Roth Jonathan Cape £1.50) In the Bunker Constantine FitzGibbon Macmillan £2.50) There is a certain nobility in the spectacle of a man who finds himself stuck with a really bad joke and ploughs on with it regardless, adding a wealth of grimace and comic accent, changing the story half way through and laughing heartily himself in the embarrassed silence. I am not sure at what stage Mr Roth decided that his new novel, about a man who changes into a woman's breast, was really a satire on Kafka and Gogol, and the solemnity with which these absurd men are studied in university departments of literature. Perhaps it was his intention from the very beginning, but if so, it would have been as well to let us know and in fact he only reveals it as an afterthought towards the end. For three-quarters of this admittedly short book one has the impression that he is merely labouring away at an extremely bad joke.

Having said that, one must also admit that he makes an exceptionally good job of it. Some time ago I reviewed a first novel — I forget who it was by — about a young man whose sexual peculiarity was dendrophilia and who satisfied this strange urge regardless of the damage he did to the various trees which caught his errant fancy and regardless, too, of the damage to himself from splinters. The book was not universally acclaimed, but I thought there was a definite nobility in the author's determination to remain loyal to his original, extremely bad idea for a first novel. Mr Roth goes into all the problems of a man who finds himself changed into a vast human breast — both practical and psychological — with an admirable thoroughness.

His hero, David Kepesh, is a university lecturer in England, which might have provided a clue to his transformation if Mr Roth did not also lay plenty of false clues — about his broken marriage, his love affair and loss of libido, and his occasional fantasies of wishing to be a woman — breast envy being the inverse of the more fashionable penis-envy from which so many women apparently suffer, A huge red-herring is introduced at quite an early stage — although I feel one should be careful of one's metaphors here — when Mr Kepesh reveals that he once envied the breasts of his girl friend, Claire, and suggests as a moral for his own story: " Beware fanciful desires; you may get lucky."

Most of the book, however, is taken up with exploring the practical implications of the sort of metamorphoses which, when described by Kafka and Gogol, are received reverently and with total seriousness — from the point of view of the deadpan black humorist. One would like to think that nobody would ever be able to read Kafka or Gogol seriously again, but since the Doctor George Steiners of this world have managed to read them seriously up to now I see no reason why they should not continue. It only remains to thank Mr Roth for an hour-and-a-half's civilised entertainment at the expense of all the humourless buffoons who aspire to sit in judgement on the English novel.

At one stage in Mr FitzGibbon's new novel a character — it is Goering, as it happens, but that is immaterial — remarks to another: "Global politics are too serious to be left to the politicians."

Perhaps he is right, but having read the whole book in an agony of goodwill towards any political opinion Mr FitzGibbon expresses or might be going to express, I can only decide that global politics is too boring to be a proper subject for novelists. Too much global politics spoils a novel thus diminishing the novel's chances of having any very profound effect on global politics. Far

better leave these things if not to the politicians at any rate to the saloon bar Napoleons, the shop-floor Demostheneses, the students and the Editors of weekly newspapers.

In the Bunker treats of an attempt to recreate Hitler's last days on the stage. This narrative is broken up — interleaved, I think, is the acceptable term — with flashbacks to what really did happen, recreated by Mr FitzGibbon himself. Occasionally we see an actual incident in both forms, but for the most part the two narratives are not connected except by the force of Mr FitzGibbon's proselytising intentions.

Any novelist, or orator, or communicator of any sort who introduces the Nazi phenomenon with its extermination camps, etc, invariably has a very serious intention. Perhaps it is to discourage the building of an international airport at Foulness; to protest against the culling of seal cubs or the shortage of opportunities for women train drivers or the abominable proposal for a golf course on the Quantocks. A book could be written about the use of genocide in this respect. Mr FitzGibbon's purpose is to warn us that all sexual permissiveness, free abortion, liberal penology, etc is leading to a totalitarian communist state.

Yes, well, it is easy to sneer at that.

Perhaps he is right. At any rate, it is a point of view. The question is — what should one do about it? Try to admire our politicians more, as Lord Hailsham suggests, and give them even greater power over our daily lives? Stay around and watch? Or retire to Ireland and write corny, apocalyptic novels about Hitler?

The great message of In the Bunker — to me, at any rate — is "Constantine, come home." The narrative descriptions of Germany's collapse are quite excellent, and reveal all the powers which Mr FitzGibbon has deployed in his nonfiction work heightened by a strong dramatic imagination. When the German episodes degenerate into political harangues, they become a trifle puzzling. This is Hitler, discussing his plans for the British people:

"I shall therefore degenerate them, using their own chosen methods . . . I shall make drugs easily available to them, give them free abortions, encourage every form of sexual perversion and decadent art, industrial strife, of hooliganism. It will not take long to disgust the British with their own moral degeneracy. Then we and the Russians can decide what to do with such of these people as are of use to us ... That chocolate cake looks quite delicious, Eva. Pass me a slice."

"Allow me Frau Hitler," said Goebbels, jumping to his feet.

One is tempted to say "Oh, Pooh" — but nothing worse than that. One can forgive him a certain amount of heavy handedness, and even the phony despair which occasionally visits his disillusioned, left-wing hero, the play producer:

"Did you know there are more rats than people in England?"

"I'm not surprised, though I wonder how they can always tell which is which. At least in the theatre."

One could even forgive him the occasional wildly irrelevant visits to the Pacific theatre — presumably for the benefit of the American market, so that In the Bunker will be chosen by the American ex-Serviceman's Book Club — and even the deplorably false note of optimism at the very end, when world war has been narrowly averted: "Our dark age will not last forever. Even if there is another war."

All novelists are prone to the delusion that they are prophets new inspired, especially if they live cut off from the society of their more intelligent and sophisticated peers. What is not forgiveable is that Mr FitzGibbon should clothe what is intended as a serious political tract with such abysmal caricatures from the contemporary scene — skinheads, half-witted Marxist actors, philistine American businessmen, etc etc.

I am not sure that humour is ever effective as a vehicle for political evangelism unless it springs from a genuinely comic perception. But even if In the Bunker did not lack this particular dimension it lacks any recent or particular observation of the follies it attempts to deride. The moral is that the writer should either come back to England or confine himself to writing about it as it was when he knew it. Second and third hand caricatures won't wash. But as I say, there is some beautiful narrative writing in the book, and there is no reason to suppose that the present dark age of FitzGibbon need last for ever.