Neurasia
Duncan Fallowell
The Hospital Ship Martin Bax (Jonathan Cape £3.95) Games of Love and War Dinah Brooke (Jonathan Cape £3.50) Both these novels involve South-East Asia, lest we forget. The Hospital Ship by Martin Bax is uncomfortable and masculine, an unpleasant print-out on the future folded into a dossier of authentic reports from the present. What the Ship is exactly, where it comes from, we never know—presumably a kind of non-aligned Red Cross enterprise which floats round the world picking up survivors from what ? Not a nuclear war, a global nervous breakdown perhaps, giving rise to such phenomena as the Crucifixion Disease (picture Belsen out on the bash in a fleet of armoured cars): grey-suited men looking like Summit refugees have realised that the only hitch in computer systems is 'people', and their repressed bestiality takes over from there.
On board meanwhile a host of devoted medics, more or less sane, mop up human detritus as best they can. Love affairs struggle for air—Dr Bax explores the world of genital fixation. Bizarre case histories dominate the conversation of reasonable men and women—the Bax Pathology Tapes frantically split hairs. At each landfall reality is in a state of mania—the author invokes Vietnam, the Story of 0, Aristotle, modern research back-up in a paroxysm of faculty parlance.
Dr Bax is issuing a warning: End of World is Nigh. The process is one of slogging implication, his method is to splice extracts from genuine documents into a bleak futuristic tale about a hospital ship with as much disregard for aesthetics as he can muster. The result is a good old calamity film with news flashes every few minutes to inform you of the current state of play in the outside world, an irritant at first, increasingly part of the programme.
No special effort is made to integrate these long flashes into the narrative. As 'experimental writing' the operation is a crude one. Dr Bax assumes that the importance of his message can only be enhanced, his purpose made to appear more profound. if his text too is carcinogenically out of control. In practice this just kills the impact of much of what he has to say. Unlike William Burroughs, his literary instinct is too weak, his invention too predictable to sustain outside interest across several hundred pages. Being a Western doctor he expects us to do as we are told and swallow crudites whole, oblivious to the element of subversion, or seduction if you like, in pushing oneself forward at the ego level. And the abundance of sexual scenery disconcerts in the way people brought up on Ambrose do, when they try to rock 'n' roll.
All the same, as a cumulative experience, if you can urge your attention through a lot of grey matter, the effect is chilling and probably desirable. Towards the end he gives us a shot of humourless optimism: we can avoid destruction if etcetera. Short of the species rapidly mutating into its higher forms at a time when greed and the climatic shift are everywhere turning societies into mobs, this kind of pious nonsense is no help at all Hope for the future does not lie in waking UP society but in the individual's latent power to wake himself.
Dinah Brooke's Games of Love and War brings a more intimate nose to the recent goings-on in South-East Asia. How's this for openers? 'Elspeth Waterhouse, twenty-two years old, lying in a deckchair, beside the swimming pool, in a blue-and-white gingham bikini.' After which the only place to go is—' Alfred knows also her breasts, quite full, but with flat nipples, and her pubic hair, sparse and soft and golden-brown, just covering the Mount of Venus.' Two pages on from this and the ungrateful Elspeth is trying to kill herself. It's all Dad's fault—and just another afternoon in Bangkok. And Vientiane and Pnom Penh and Saigon, all of them backdrops to lives of twisted lechery. You should realise by the end how desperate most people are. If not, Elspeth gives Dad the full massage in the terminal tableau. Creeping to his bedside, she begins to work him over while he sleeps. 'saliva spurts from her mouth ... she is Eve in the Garden of Eden.' On the point of orgasm the old tycoon looks up, sees it's his daughter, ejaculates and dies of shock simultaneously.,Elspeth is complete.
On the principle of home movies, one assumes that the book would have been more wearing had I not known this part of the world fairly well myself—in fact Dinah Brooke and I seem to have been in Vientiane at the same time, so I have captive interest. Nor can you fault her ethics—she is very concerned about what people do to each Other. But that guff about the Mount of Venus and the Garden of Eden, well, maybe a certain prudishness forces out this dated Prurient bunting, a need to cover the facts With purple patches. It is a pity that, in liberating herself, the new woman feels Obliged to return first to adolescence and go through the ghastly business all over again. Mind you, she's right about one thing, those Places—they're very sexy, they get to you.
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