Fugue
Brigid Brophy Summer Overtures Clive Murphy (Dobson £3.50)
'The judge exonerated Marcus.' It must be the most condensed account of an arrest and trial for murder in the corpus of English literature. Clive Murphy has the Firbankian gift of syncopation. The emphases of his narrative fall in extremely surprising places. You are not so much led as tilted and ricocheted through his novel, an experience of high excitement and deep funniness.
As a matter of fact, his theme is inno-• cence and guilt, though weighed in subtler scales than the Old Bailey's. 'Which was the predator, which the innocent ?' his -narrative innocently (or predatorily) inquires as the eighteen-year-old Marcus moves in with the middle-aged, successful and bad painter who has picked him up in the bathing enclosure beside the Serpentine.
The painter is only the first of Marcus's victims or predators, and Marcus himself is only one of four waves of Irish immigration. The four young men successively loosed on London come from different socio-geographic milieux but they all possess the Irish faculty that so baffles the British of taking culture seriously. In erotic disposition they range from almost wholly heterosexual to not quite entirely homosexual, and the niches they temporarily occupy in London's social ecology vary in accordance. In structure the book is a double fugue, elegantly and ingeniously interleaved. Impinging on one another by chance, like collapsing cards, the 'protectors' unwittingly pass the victims or parasites from hand to hand, while the parasitevictims dance in the opposite direction, in pursuit not only of hosts and niches but (with motives of vengeance, exploitation and lust) of each other.
In what sense the four are, as one of them finally put it, 'aspects of the one character' is any reader's guess. Perhaps Marcus invents the other three no doubt at the moment when the disclosure that he is a bastard is 'unhinging his unhappy mind' and he takes refuge in the British Museum, where he 'moved among broken stones depicting twisted limbs, the hideous gods, the snakes, the savage battle-grounds of ancient days. He mounted a staircase whose jagged balustrade and images of dogs in bloodthirsty sport led to coffins, arrowheads and daggers, the elements of man's corroded nature.' At the end the four meet together and agree to live in future as 'a symbiosis'. Miss Peach, the arthritic Pimlico landlady whose door was, to begin with, guarded by the motto 'No Irish', becomes their common victim and their common
exploiter. She, flirtatious in magenta velvet, wants love, they free drink and cheap lodging. It is an inspired and absurd metaphor of the inevitable though baffled reciprocal parasitism of John Bull's two islands.
Last year Clive Murphy published two short novels, Freedom for Mr Mildew and Nigel Someone, in one volume. Summer Overtures is both more elaborate and, to my mind, even better. It makes angelic use of words (and sentences and paragraphs). It is lucid, cool, sly and inventive. To indicate in shorthand in what mode it is those things is difficult, since one can liken an original artist to other original artists only on the point of originality. One can't even count on a reader to have self-consistent taste. (I am still rocking, a decade after, from a party conversation with someone whose favourite writer was Proust and whose second favourite was Daphne du Maurier.) My guess is that you will like Summer Overtures if you like any two of these: Vainglory, The Dalkey Archive, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Decline and Fall, Cashel Byron's Profession. Certainly, now is the moment to read Clive Murphy for pleasure. In twenty years' time, he may well be required reading, having become a classic.
Previous page
