The Wholesome Lotus
Fausto and Anna. By Carlo Cassola. Translated by Isabel Quigly. (Collins, 16s.) Insufficient Poppy might initially appear as an exotic Durrellesque flower in that it is set in
Bangkok and narrated by Roderick, an English businessman whose cultural terms of reference are broad enough to include Mahler, Edward Thomas and the classical myths and whose chosen relaxation is an evening with opium. But Mr. Enright's roots are firmly in the real world: the businessman had wanted to be an author and the pipes of opium are not only infrequent but even beneficial, wholesome, in fact. Roderick's
significant life moves round three people: Harry Walters, an irascible English teacher and poet; the
Colorao Kid, a huge cowboy film star who has seen better days; and, incidentally, Orapin, ex- taxi-dancer and paid companion. Harry and that cowboy provide the bones of such plot as there is: events slowly move towards an unintentional murder that turns out to be suicide on the part of the victim, and the hitherto aloof narrator is left to ask himself the contorted questions that lead to reinvolvement in the world about him.
Creating this world in depth is a large part of Mr. Enright's achievement. The first-person stratagem allows him not only to confront and worry through the mess of human problems that arises, but to give—through disquisitions and excursions away from the main action (a holiday with Orapin; some notes on cultural attaches)— 'the feel of living in a particular place at a par- ticular time. Particular is the key-word; the exact, laconic poet in Mr. Enright engages with present realities. Harry's irritation—'that's the trouble with poems . . . they may be merely symbolic and mean nothing'—is reflected in the fresh particularisations of Roderick's commen- tary. Some characters, perhaps, come off more strongly than others: the bumbling Kid is bril- liantly alive and funny, while Harry remains shadowy; but the display of an honest, sardonic intelligence at work on contemporary experience is something not to be missed. The proper study of mankind is not Man but men, suggests Mr. Enright, and he finds them here in a sharply evoked Eastern landscape, even if he deserts them at moments for a tour of the alien scenery: lively, witty details of opium, Thai politics and festivals.
Fausto and Anna, a prize-winning Italian novel, has its moments of insight, but suffers for much of its length from some sort of imaginative anemia. Anna, a dull, pretty bourgeois girl, falls in love with intellectual, high-flown Fausto. His torments of jealousy lead to a broken engage- ment; she marries someone else. The war inter- venes. Fausto becomes a partisan, meets Anna again just before the Americans arrive, and they enjoy a quick unconsummated happiness. The dryness with which all this is told is oddly effec- tive in conveying the adolescent indecisions of first love and works later for some scenes of battle and ambush that recall Stendhal in their presentment of the brutal fortuitousness of war. But people are so consistently shown acting out of spiritual inertia, moving inevitably but un- • intelligently from one station of life to the next, that distinctions of will and desire are fogged. It becomes the sort of puppet-play to which, in polite conversation, one so often reduces a friend's activities.
Equal Partners has an irony in its title. A provincial journalist needs the deputy editorship of his paper to put himself on a footing with his wife, a rising playwright. He is meanwhile having an affair with the wife of his competitor for the job. The chance of a scoop offers itself in the political firing of a local VIP scientist. Why the amorous journalist protects rather than exposes him is Mr. Tucker's subject, and there are some deep implausibilities in all this. I mostly enjoyed it as a lid-lifting adventure story: it's brought off in a dead-pan, toughish way, with streaks of humour and what sounds like good reporting of how Fleet Street at its seamiest fights for an exclusive. Wilder Stone sympathetically chron- icles the fall and rise of a nondescript, stoical American estate agent who is asked to take a salary cut at the age of forty. Dreadful humans often read more plausibly than lovely ones and it's no surprise that Wilder's wonderful dead wife seems to belong to a lower stratum of fiction than his awful sapping mother and sister: their scenes come bitingly alive. But Wilder's efforts to make friends with his son are engaging enough, and these, in fact, become the motive for his slow progress towards rehabilitation. With its charac- teristically American mixture of sentimentality and alert documentation, the dreamy ease with which the hero is reinvested with power and glamour, it reads a little as if the late John P. Marquand had been commissioned to write copy extolling some more sophisticated brand of Horlicks, elixir for depressed souls.
JOHN COLEMAN
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