New Novels
NOT least among the horrors of modern war are the 'fearless indictments' of it that come along in the form of fiction. These, it is said, are devoured by the young. Soldiers who saw active service must read them with amazement and amusement. How different a war was theirs! All that misery, all that incompetence, all that booze, all that sex, all that abject terror of the enemy —they saw little or none of it. Useless for a war novelist to imply, 'Pends-toi, brave Crillon; nous avons combattu a Argues et tu n'y Otais pas.' They just can't reconcile cold fact with superheated fiction.
War novelists have now caught up with Korea. The ostensible concern of The Dead, the Dying and the Damned, by D. J. Hollands (Cassell, 16s.), is with the comparatively small number of young National Servicemen who got as far as the front line. It may have been a shame to send them out, but few can have had such bad luck as Able Company of the Rockinghamshire Regiment. As far as the action can be followed, it might have occurred during a quiet spell in the Ypres Salient, the difference being that these moaning warriors were equipped with bullet- proof vests and their officers were the poorest types imaginable. In a novel of this conventional kind there must be a generous ration of brothelry and one more or less idyllic affair. That has been seen to. Some of the men get VD. The officer called Peter has three weeks with a Japanese girl called Jackie: 'He paused and saw her smiling bravely. There were tears in her eyes. He watched her plunge her face into her pillow. He shifted his weight about uncertainly and then left.' In 450 pages, therefore, we have a war novel on familiar lines with all standardised characters present—no, not all: we are spared the one who quotes or writes poetry.
The war before last comes into Guthrie Wilson's Sweet White Wine (Hale, 12s. 6d.), but not for long, merely as an inconvenient episode (Italy; POW Camp, Germany) in the career of the nar- rator, Simon Greeg, novelist. Novels with novelists in them are usually tedious. This one just gets by because it is so like the kind of novel Simon himself must have written. 'I suppose,' he observes, 'one could say that most of my novels, to a lesser or larger degree, have pointed to my belief that no man is wholly evil, that even the worst of us has much that is redeeming.' (He can do better than that : 'The lives of most of us flow over shallow bottoms.') His New Zealand story tells of the influence upon him of his brilliant friend Paul who, outshining him in everything, ends by taking his wife away from him : 'Sir Paul Mundy has come a long way from 231 Main Street, Palmerston North. I can think of no one more deserving of the high honours he has attained to. The same goes for dear Jean, Lady Mundy.' Steer- forths should be drowned, not forgiven, but no doubt this novel is just the job for the New Zealand family circle.
In Perimeter West, by Maurice Rowdon (Heinemann, 16s.), a war has happened, and a devastated city is being rebuilt, but is still surrounded by a wide belt of ruins, beyond which are the occupying forces keeping an eye on the inhabitants. The mayor, who has a Three-Year Plan, receives (though how it's difficult to see) 'an immense amount of money from Foreign Powers.' But before we have time to sort out the economic situation we are drawn into a number of joyless love affairs —Theiler and Jeanie, Greta and Roquande, Tom and Maryan, all somehow involved with the cinema, have paired off for reasons best known to themselves. They are rather shadowy people, and the story itself is hellish dark and smells of allegory.
Only the fear of war enters Warren Miller's The Sleep of Reason (Seeker and Warburg, 10s. 6d.)—a brightly satirical but a little too locally allusive novel about McCarthyism and the Committee on un-American Activities. The proceedings are pushed into farce when an old man named Tom Paine is arraigned as the author of The Rights of Man. All the jokes here are not good but enough are to make this short novel an agreeable entertain- ment.
Another American novel—The Prisoners, by Evans Harrington (Gollancz, 13s. 6d.)—has no laughter in it. What's expected of us here is sympathy for a man serving a five-year sentence and denied by a brutal 'sergeant' his right to be paroled after three years. The Assistant Warden has made the case his own but all his efforts are thwarted. When the man escapes it is he who induces him to surrender. This is a harsh story, compelling interest less in its theme than in its setting, the series of camps where over 2,000 prisoners are employed in gangs on agricultural work.
Anyone repelled by the facetiousness of both the 'Author's Foreword' and the 'Pro- logue' to Joyous Errand, by Denis B. Wylie (Hodder and Stoughton, 12s. 6d.), will miss a tolerable Secret Service novel of considerable ingenuity, though one mystery is left unsolved; why a quotation from the earliest version of Omar Khayyam (in a little green book) is described as 'the Moon of My Delight song,' set like a lyric, and made nonsense of by a dash in place of a hyphen.
A novel that is certain to be popular with the easily pleased is Beyond Desire, by Pierre La Mure (Collins, 15s.). Based on the life of Felix Mendelssohn and his passion for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, it brings in everybody—Queen Victoria, Chopin, Schu- mann, Wagner. . . . If love were the food of his music, he got plenty of it, 'He felt him- self sinking into a quicksand of warm flesh' (Anna Skrumpnagel's); 'She drew herself closer to him and he felt the tender resilience of his new friend's flesh' (The Marchioness of Dorsythe's); 'Suddenly her mouth was upon his—full, soft and loving' (Maria. Salla's); 'He felt her mouth soft and moist, her body turn limp' (Cecile Jeanrenaud's). The dialogue is dreadful too.
DANIEL GEORGE
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