Asphalt Jungle
Let Us Prey. By George Bowlby. (Heinemann, 25s.) The Novel Computer. By Robert Escarpit. Trans- lated by Peter Green. iSecker and Warburg, 25s.) With Closed Eyes. 13y Marie Susini. Translated by Frances Partridge. (Blond, 21s.) Properjohn. By Terence Kelly. (Macmillan, I8s.) A Horseman Riding By. By R. F. Delderfield. (Hodder, 42s.)
Hard Rain Falling is a first novel, from America, of remarkable quality, written with authority, detachment and an almost uncanny, deadpan intelligence. 1 have seldom come across a new novel in which such compelling readability co- exists with such absolute seriousness of purpose and keenness of psychological insight.
The story is of two unusually gifted and in- telligent victims of sexual irresponsibility and social injustice: Jack Levitt. foundling, and Billy Lancing, negro. At sixteen both are dan- gerous hoodlums, willing to do anything to obtain money. Jack is formidably tough; Billy is a brilliant pool-hall hustler who can take money off most experts without trying. Desperate as they both are, however, neither is without conscience or love; Mr Carpenter ironically traces their histories as they half drift, half will themselves, through gangsterdom, prison, marriage, divorce, self-sacrifice and a strange and painful sort of reformation.
The first part discovers the two in Portland, Oregon, as adolescents busily pursuing the en- grossing business of getting money by any means possible. In the second part they meet, some years later, in San Quentin prison, in which both are incarcerated for crimes they did not commit. Here their relationship with each other, and their understanding of life, deepens, and an event occurs that is crucial for both of them. The final section of the novel is an ironic and tragic tailpiece, the full and shocking significance of which is unlikely to strike the reader until some time after he has put the book down.
With his first book Mr Carpenter has estab- lished himself as an ironist of immediate stature who knows how to hold the reader's attention without making concessions. The plight of his heroes is always the plight of criminals---but at the same time his skill lets us feel it as the plight of all intelligent and sensitive beings. This is an impressive achievement, and an important contribution to modern fiction. It has all the narrative expertise of a best-seller and all the
fiercely rebellious sophistication of the articulate avant-garde, but by its acute psychological and sociological know-how it asserts itself as a wholly original creatiNe work in its own right.
Let Us Prey, another good first novel, this time English. tells -vividly of financial collapse, reluc- tant adultery and the pains of a living but unstable marriage. Michael Brinton is driven by his reckless and thoughtlessly ambitious wife into setting up a chicken-broiler business bigger than he can handle. As he dizzyingly spins to failure and bankruptcy, he feels he has lost his wife's admiration, and therefore turns to a masochistic and half-psychopathic, if 'respect- able; tart for uneasy physical and mental comfort. Mr Bowlby (who has had his own chicken-broiler business) is at his best when de- scribing the nightmare that precedes bankruptcy, and how it causes those involved to prey upon one another •without being aware of it; he is convincing, too, in his account of how Brinton is driven into adultery with a weak and vicious creature without wishing to be, or even really knowing what he is doing. The passages dealing with sexual relations are somewhat maw kish or, alternatively, mechanical; but the novel is re- deemed from these and occasional other failings of style and technique by the extreme and unusual sincerity w ith which Brinton's state of mind is treated. The result is a realistic and rewarding book.
The Novel Computer, excellently translated by Peter Green, is a knowing satire, by a lead- ing. French humorist and academic, on French politics and diplomacy and on the modern pre- occupation with machines, particularly elec- tronic computers. Meriadec Le Guern. a humorous and unprincipled rogue, cast in a picaresque mould, invents a machine, the I.iteraton. which can produce winning election manifestoes ('If we strung a few people up, the world would be a better place'), perfect comic- strips and best-sellers such as The Virgin Typist, The Bastard Aims for Your Groin and an 'objectivo-phenomenological' novel consisting of nothing but 'a series of phrases in the second person plural, present indicative, and devoid of commas and full stops.' called What Boots It. This satire manages to be irreverent and con- tinuously funny, and represents Gallic noncon- formity and conscientiousness at its most active and ebullient.
- With Clo.ved Eyes depends entirely on atmo- sphere and evocation of mood for its effect. Sefarad waits for her estranged brother on the Mediterranean island where they have grown up together. Both before his arrival and in his eventual presence her impressions of adult life are fragmentary and confused. She feels that her life has come to an end, and that nothing remains for her but the sweet bitterness of tragic memories of mystery, despair and death. As a threnody oil the death of romance, against a sometimes vividly evoked paradisian background, With Closed Eyes has its moments; as a novel it is too diffuse, despite its frequently heavy and perhaps over-laboured symbolism, to be fully satisfying.
Mr Terence Kelly's fourth novel, Properjohn, aims at pastoral lightness, but often descends into facetious bathos. Mr Properjohn and his wife have lived in Highbury all their lives, but on coming into money they buy a somewhat cloyingly idyllic old riverside cottage. This book recounts Mr Properiohn's struggle to maintain his privacy in the countryside he loves but does -not -fully understand. Unhappily, some of the characters---:such as Mr Chickle, the Vicar of Little Cricketing (the name alone speaks volumes)—recall nothing so much as 'the English village' as depicted in -conventional detective stories, whimsical pub and all. Mr Kelly is clearly much less happy in this very difficult genre than he was in The Developers, where he successfully anatomised the world of contemporary town-planning.
R. F. Deldertield. a worthy popular writer. has produced an immense saga (1151 pages) about a Devonshire estate that looks rather more forbidding than it actually is. A Horseman Riding By is the story of Paul Craddock and how he brought his farming estate, Shallowfield, back to prosperity over the first four decades of this century. Mr Deldertield is not a psychologi- cally penetrating writer, but he is an expert storyteller, and this readable novel never lapses into unreality or vulgarity. It can safely be recommended for the return (rail) trip to Omsk.
MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH
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