Take a Wound, Take a Bow
A World Elsewhere. By John Bowen. (Faber, 18s.)
The Monkey Watcher. By Robert Towers.
' (Faber, 21s.) ' (Faber, 21s.)
The Satyr and the Saint. By Leonardo Bercovici, (Seeker and Warburg, 18s.)
Across the Sea Wall. By Christopher Koch. (Heinemann, 21s.)
AN age without faith is always hungry for myth. Pop art makes its own; serious literature goes back to the Greeks, encouraged by the depth- psychologists. Mythological parallels provide a dimension that faith (not necessarily in religion) used to supply. The big question for the novelist is a technical one—how to do it. Joyce wove the mythical and the actual into a single fabric, then let it unravel : hence the name of his Penelope— Madam Tweedy. John Bowen alternates the two, making the modern counterpart re-tell the old tale, unifying with a common landscape.
A World Elsewhere is set on Lemnos, which is Where the Greeks, on their way to Troy, set down Philoctetes, the bowman with the stinking unheal- able wound. Edmund Wilson saw in Philoctetes a Symbol of the artist; John Bowen sees him rather as the possessor of an inimitable gift which must sooner or later ensure his recall from exile. The Greeks needed Proto-Philoctetes to help end the Trojan War; the party needs Deutero-Philoctetes because he is the only honest man in British Politics. Honesty is a fine political tool. And so Roger Turner, a young and ambitious MP, is sent to Lemnos to bring back Gareth Payne.
Mr. Bowen's.' technique of alternation is a legitimate one, and he manages it well. But there is something in all of us that makes us resent dropping one strand to pick up another. As with John Dos Passos's U.S.A., we're tempted to go on 'leafing through to the continuation of the story that interests us the most, or the more—in this case, the contemporary one. This is gloriously done: Roger in Greece for the first time, meeting an old girl-friend, Agatha; the retsina, the unin- telligible non-Sophoclean language, the little boys shouting ficky-ficky. The other story is very nobly and movingly told, and one can see how integral its denouement is to that of the parallel tale, but one still resents the need to re-focus. Still, Mr. Bowen's achievement justifies the reorientation of our reading habits: it is a bold, and very success- ful, attempt to bring two chronicles, separated by an intolerable deal of time, into an era where they can react on each other. The composite myth that results has the force of a new myth.
The myth in The Monkey Watcher is very much on the margin. Relish the word 'psychopomp.' Dr. Koch, the psychoanalyst called in to help Olivia Brubeck face death from cancer, sees him- self as Hermes Psychopompos, conductor of souls to the nether world. But we're more concerned With the prospective widower, Arthur Brubeck, director of a New York art gallery, and his attempts, in his early fifties, to re-adjust. He visits the zoo and its monkey house not—like somebody in Samuel Butler—to drink in healing draughts of mammal, but because the ambivalence of the Primates provides the right, instinctively sought, correlative to his state of mind. They stand for a return to life, and are a catalyst in the develop- Ment of the relationship with his secretary, Mary Brennan. At the same time they stand for the mess of his wife's disease (he sees a monkey defecate, then spread the faeces round with a loving paw): they are the reality hidden beneath his wife's patrician-British refinement. The poisoning of some of the monkeys by a crank chimes in with her death. This death, his guilt are the book's only resolutions, and of course they resolve nothing. Despite its rather precious use of the historic present, The Monkey Watcher has skill, observes well, and is—to say the least of it—disturbing without being sensational.
Love from Venus is froth, but wholesome froth —one of those acts of self-indulgence that a writer as good as Max Catto may sometimes, though not too often, be permitted. Venus O'Toole is a beautiful girl with a pet cheetah. She lives in Paris, dances at Le Sex Hot, drives men mad. She is everyone's dream of the ravish- ing unattainable, a Venus Pandemos who is also the Virgin Mary, emerging cool—as though from blossoms of sea-spray—from the hot winds of the passion of rich and exotic men. Even a psychia- trist finds his id cracking under the strain of his sessions with her. This is a bit of light-hearted myth-making. Such a woman has, I think, no counterpart in real life. It is the novelist's privi- lege to dream her up or, better, animate her from the tarot pack—a virgin leading a wild beast tamed, emblem of the dreadful primal innocence.
Virginity is the prey of Eduardo Virgili, the Sicilian writer who is one of the eponyms of The Satyr and the Saint. He seeks a virgin with chivalric dedication, though with marriage in view. Ragdolfo Urbani, the film director, is no such idealist : he is the autumnal hero of a Leporello catalogue of conquests. The setting is Rome, along with its enclave Cinecitta, a great permissive Vatican. The men are brought together through a film; one personality strikes off the other, a mild and not unamusing percussion. Rossellini likes this book and thinks that Leonardo Bercovici, its author, has caught the true tones of modern Roman living, by which he probably means the film-world. It's the virginity theme that sticks in the craw : we purged all that in our great age of the drama. British readers will be disarmed but quite possibly bored.
Across the Sea Wall has a minor distinction of style and a density of texture quite exciting when not betrayed into over-intensity. This love story of a young Australian and a Latvian refugee girl ranges very wide in space—Sydney, Java, India—and the scene-changes are expertly man- aged. There are few themes for a love novel and this one—the incompatibility of the ideal (the big dream of everlasting love) and the actual (the limitations imposed by one's own nature)—is treated with honesty and freshness.
ANTHONY BURGESS
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