Faithful
Benny Green
Found, Lost, Found J. B. Priestley (Heinemann E2.90) There is a simplicity of design about J. B. Priestley's new novel which smacks of sheer Cheek . Had he not been such an old hand at Spinning a yarn, I suspect he might have bowed to prevailing fashions and cloaked the rib-cage of his plot with all sorts of gaudy literary lingerie; instead, with a kind of defiant professionalism, he has written a book so elementary in its conception as to look very much like impudence. It is not the fact that his hero is a tippler waiting to be redeemed by the love of a good woman, nor even that the pair of them stay chaste even unto the final paragraph. What takes the breath away is the baldness with which Priestley deploys that most venerable of fictional devices, the Quest. He wants to give US one of those romantic tales about a Young man trying to find the love of his life, the girl who has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. A sport like Wilkie Collins would have erected a dizzying superstructure of gothic intrigue before revealing his hand. Not Priestley. Instead of clanking the cumbersome machinery of plot and subplot, this is how his heroine announces her creator's intentions to the reader: Listen, Tom, this is serious. Tomorrow I go down into the country to work on my Play. Nobody knows where I'm going— except one person. And I'll only tell you this: I'm not leaving England. And that's all. And if you want to see any more of me, you'll have to find me. If you do find me, I promise you a beautiful welcome. If You don't, if you just go soaking and sozzling around, you'll never see me again.
Crude but effective. Chase me till I catch you. Of course Priestley is experienced enough to know that, provided he makes the two lovers reasonably attractive, the reader will itch to know how the hero succeeds in catching up with his own future.
As it happens, after starting off in promising style, Priestley rather feebly falls back on coincidence instead of allowing his hero the pleasures of deductive reasoning. But it matters hardly at all, because long before then, his true intention has been revealed. In sending his young man on his wild goose Chase, Priestley has given himself the chance tO slosh the custard pies of his derision smack in the face of pretence and posture and venality and ignoble lack of charity. "is tipsy lothario, setting off on his obstacle course, encounters in quick succession a neurotic psychiatrist, a bogus Italian waiter from 'an Eastern Mediterranean island to which he would return at once as soon as he had had a free operation for hernia', a halfwitted bureaucrat, a nymphomaniac divoicee, and an amateur dramatic society incorporating into its production a Pop group whose leader looks like 'a ruined vegetable'. Knowing the magnificent extent of Priestley's misanthropy these days, the targets are predictable enough, but what I object to is not their predictability but the brevity of the onslaught.
For Priestley has here returned to the device he has used so effectively in the picaresque fictions of his prime, the hero who wanders up and down England on some plausible quest, whether it be the destiny of the Dinky Doos or his own future as a painter, and who, in the course of his travels, discloses the compounded lunacies of modern life. The possibilities are so extensive in these idiotic times that a book at least three times as long as Angel Pavement was called for, with the heroine accidentally changing location and the hero always being two moves behind her, and the lash of Priestley's contempt extending upon everything between Scillies and Hebrides. He might even have used the groundplan of English Journey as a structure. But all we get is a slim volume and a final clinch which comes too easily for comfort. However, the book is not so short that its author does not find time to give a thick ear to politics: He wondered, not for the first time, how the politicians, including his own ass of a Minister, had the brass impudence to show their faces and harangue the public, after making such a hash of the nation's affairs. Would anybody have done any worse ? Anybody ?
Pornography is spat upon, improvers of Shakespeare trampled underfoot and left for dead, extremist politics contemptuously dismissed; there are even moments of nostalgia for the bad old days, as when the hero 'travels along lost lanes and past dwindling remnants of an ancient rural England'. When the great social revolution has gone awry, what else is there for an idealist to say ?
Found, Lost, Found is only a slight book after all, and it would be foolish to draw any portentous conclusions from its modest text, in which case I intend being foolish. I have never read novels in order to make a better man of myself, or to increase my word-power, or to provide myself with conversational pellets, or to get a sense of this and that. I read fiction in the hope of losing myself in the pursuit of pleasure, and I have to report that Priestley's squib kept me awake the other night, turning over just one more page, to find out what happened next. I used to have the same trouble, halt a lifetime ago, with Smeeth and Terry Riley and Gregory Dawson, and put it down to the excesses of youth; I had it again not so long ago with Richard Her,ncastle and chided myself for being nostalgic. I did not antici
pate having it again the other night, and this time I am clean out of excuses. Any book, no matter how trivial, which leaves me regretting it was not five times as long, ten times as cantankerous, fifty times as romantic, probably has more substance than meets the eye.
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