Freedom, and the lack of it

Celestria Noel

REDEMPTION by Tariq All

Chatto & Windus, £13.99, pp. 281

TEACHING LITTLE FANG by Mark Swallow

Macmillan, f12.99, pp. 256

LIVES OF THE SAINTS by Nino Ricci

Alison & Busby, £12.99, pp. 239

A CLOUD ON SAND by Gabriella di Ferrari

Chapmans, £13.95, pp. 330

HONOUR THY FATHER by Lesley Glaister

Secker & Warburg, £13.99, pp. 182

What is an old Trot to do when faced with the collapse of Communism in East- ern Europe? Ezra Einstein calls a confer- ence in Paris. (Tariq Ali meets David Lodge.) He sees that the old religions have outlasted Communism, so the only way forward is to use religion and the churches for the revolution. His own life has been revolutionised by the news that his beauti- ful Brazilian wife, 50 years his junior, is expecting a baby. Ezra invites all his old friends and enemies and much of the book deals with bringing them together, a la Magnificent Seven. From the fact that they are described physically very fully I deduce that what we have here is a roman a clef, or at least a novel which depends on the reader getting a lot of in jokes: fine for Tariq Ali's friends, but dull for the rest of us. Towards the end the book becomes somewhat fantastical, with talking metal penises on corpses, lactating men and Ho Einstein, Ezra's baby girl, prophesying from her cot. In spite of these sudden leaps away from realism, what the book lacks is real imaginative writing to breathe some life into it.

Tariq Ali's book begins with the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Mark Swallow, in Teaching Little Fang, shows us provincial China, where a tiny amount of new freedom began to be felt before being utterly crushed in Tiananmen Square. Lit- tle Fang is a young student of English, greatly excited by the advent of Jake, an American English teacher. Through Jake and a scholarship to an American Universi- ty Fang hopes to escape from his wildly eccentric family, who, he feels, hold him back. His snooty elder sister, his mercan- tile mother and his late father, destroyed during the Cultural Revoltion, are bad enough but his grandfather is the real menace. Instead of staying at home he wanders off, waving his sword, and bring- ing death and destruction to all the ducks meant for the VIPS at a dinner to welcome Jake. It is bold and clever to create an eccentric Chinese family. Most young Westerners are too awestruck by what they find in China or too busy showing they understand the political situation there. Their books have a solemn 'What I did in the holidays' quality, whereas this book is a romp, really funny. There are some wonderful scenes, like that in the public , baths when Fang wants to rub Jake's unappealingly spotty back but Jake mis- understands the gesture. The mutual mis- understandings pile on one another but the author never pokes fun at the Chinese or even the Americans, or not much. This is gentle, affectionate humour, with terrible events in faraway Peking casting a cold shadow, but lots of warmth in the portrayal of Fang, his great rival Qiao and their chum, Podgy Peng, the Billy Bunter of the Middle Kingdom.

Both Nino Ricci and Gabriella di Ferrari are North Americans of Italian extraction and both have found it necessary to go to Italy and the past to write novels which tell stories. Nino Ricci sets his traditional tale of tragic inevitability in a tiny village in the Appenines, after the war, when half the men, including Vittorio's father, have gone to Canada. Vittorio tells of his mother's expulsion from a tight-knit and ignorant society, not so much for what she got up to in the stable with the German deserter as for the fact that she was always too proud and brought bad luck. Lives of the Saints is simple, moving and compelling.

A Cloud on Sand is set before the war on the Italian Riviera and in South America, where many Italians from the Genoa area settled at that time. It is the story of Antonia and her escape from her sacred monster of a mother, Dora. Dora came from a poor peasant background but turned herself into a famous beauty and married a man who had made money in Argentina. She refused to live with him there and made him build her a grand villa right on top of her poor family, in their little village. Antonia and her brother both end up in South America but find death there as well as love. This is a rich, solid novel, full of the gentle rhythms of South America. It takes its time but tells an, excellent story. It is a superior family saga, with a strong background and some memorable characters.

The background, or rather the land- scape, should play a larger part in Lesley Glaister's grisly tale of family life in the Fens before the first world war. Milly, the narrator, now an old woman, tells of the lives of four sisters, ruined by a tyrannical father who drove their mother to madness and suicide and who, even after his own death, at their hands, prevents them ever being able to escape by making sure that Milly's only friend and lover is killed and getting Agatha, the eldest, pregnant. What saves this book from being a mere cata- logue of horrors — there are many more than I have outlined — is humour and the fact that Milly is, against the odds, a sympathetic character. Even so, like many books by British authors, which are painted on a tiny canvas, it is a bit claustrophobic.