Recent fiction

Miranda Seymour

The Prodigal Child David Storey (Jonathan Cape £7.50) rr he ability of Carlos Fuentes t°

fascinate, baffle and provoke puts him alongside Nabokov and Calvino as one of the mandarin magicians of literature. Of the three, he is the most adventurous. After two remarkable experiments in the genres of the historical novel and the spy thriller, Terra Nostra and The Hydra Head, Fuentes has taken Proust for his model in Distant Relations, an intriguing and complicated book about the nature of time and memory• Two men are lunching together at the Automobile Club de France. The elder, the Comte de Branly, unfolds his story to the novel's unnamed narrator — Fuentes himself, as we learn without much surprise in the final pages. De Branly's tale concerns his long friendship with a Mexican father and son called Heredia, a name which lawn" ches a flotilla of suggestive puns on heredity'

and inheritance. The Heredias' favourite game is tracking down other Heredias wherever they go. De Branly's readiness to be involved leads him with them to the mysterious Clos des Renards, the Parisian home of the Caribbean Heredias, another father and sort. 'All things are related, nothing is isolated,' the Mexican Heredia observes as the past and present of the superficially dissimilar families cunningly interlock. The tenuous connection is expos- ed as a mirror-image: in each other, the Heredia families perceive themselves.

For de Branly, the passive observer, the experience is a journey into self-awareness through a memory which is triggered by Cameo-scenes, half-lines of poetry, snatches of song. When 'Fuentes' asks him if he wishes he had never known the Heredias, de Branly answers that he never has known them. 'The person I came to know was Myself, have you not realised?'

The second and more elaborate inter- pretation of the title has to do with the rela- tions between fiction and life. On this sub- ject Fuentes produces a dazzling display of literary pyrotechnics which sent me skurry- ing for shelter among my reference books. De Bra*, his story and its characters are exposed as a brilliant patchwork of deriva- tions from the works — the most obscure works, maddeningly — of Balzac, Dumas, Supervieille and, inevitably, Jose Maria de Heredia. Eliot is not on the list, but the garden of the Clos des Renards where the Young Heredias play is Burnt Norton's par- ched Eden of lost innocence, the place to which de Branly endlessly returns in his search for himself.

The ingenuity of the book is remarkable,

• but its peculiar charm is the melancholy Nineties sweetness and decay of its at- mosphere. The games pall; what remains in My mind is Fuentes' haunting evocation of the Heredia house and the children's garden of nightingales, madrigal fragments and distant laughter.

Bodily Harm is a departure from Margaret Atwood's usual terrain into the world of political violence. While not quite in the class of Graham Greene, as the blurb suggests, it is an absorbing novel, as full of verbal felicities and acute perceptions as Miss Atwood's admirers might expect.

Rennie Wilson, a young Canadian jour- nalist, has just undergone a partial mastec- tomy. Her lover has left her, her love for the doctor who operated on her is hopeless- ly misplaced. Haunted by thoughts of death and physical decay, poor Rennie is in need of a break. Offered the chance to write a travel piece about the island of St Antoine, site gladly accepts, anticipating the therapeutic mindlessness of a holiday resort. But St Antoine is not that sort of Place. Atwood is at her best in pinpointing Its dreary 'seediness, with such niceties of detail as a mermaid lampholder in a harem Jacket, a poinsettia hedge `like kleenex flowers at a high school dance.' It is an island that most tourists would pay to leave, but Rennie, the conscientious hack with no Place to go, decides to see the job through. Gradually, inexorably, she is drawn into a web of intrigue by Lora, a bleached and battered drop-out, and Paul, an ubiquitous and mysterious character with whom Ren- nie becomes involved in what she cynically perceives as a `no-hooks, no strings vaca- tion romance with a mysterious stranger.' The island's new president is murdered and Rennie, the innocent bystander, is arrested and imprisoned as a political journalist with Lora. A frightening and very unsanitary in- ternment, most graphically described, ends when Rennie signs an agreement to go home and .say nothing. The brief encounter with more violent kind of bodily harm has turned her thoughts from death to the knowledge that she is lucky to be alive.

If Miss Atwood was a writer of lower calibre, Bodily Harm would klisappoint less. It is a good, gripping and interesting novel, but a long way from being her best. I look and hope for, a return to the Canadian set- ting in which she excels.

Comedy has a nasty habit of disappear- ing when it is described or, more dangerous still, analysed. It may be safer to approach Ruth Thomas Ellis from a tangent and say that she brings the malicious observation of Muriel Spark to the farcical situations of Saki. Her first two novels were delectable; The 27th Kingdom is better still. Short, sharp and sparklingly malicious, it is cer- tainly the wittiest novel of the month, perhaps of the year.

Aunt Irene, a large Russian lady whose zestful imagination makes miracles from mundanity, resides in Dancing Master House with her handsome and amoral nephew Kyril, and Focus, a cat of alarming intelligence. When I tell you that Miss Ellis adds to this household a black and beautiful levitating nun, a fiercely racist cleaning lady and a homely fence who hides her loot in the local church, you may begin to see why The 27th Kingdom is such a mad and merry book. The fantasies which drift into Aunt Irene:s mind — mayonnaise pro- mpts her to wonder if Genesis satisfactorily explains whether an angel first descended with a squawking hen or, more pleasingly, a silent passive egg? — are complemented by a fairy-story plot which is resolved in a very properly improbable way. But I leave you to discover how that is done.

I wish I could feel the same enthusiasm for The Prodigal Child, David Storey's new novel. A Yorkshire bildungsroman, it describes Bryan Morley's progress frorr‘i vic- timised schoolboy to successful young artist. Bryan's emancipation begins when he is adopted by the childless Corrigans and given the chance of a fairly privileged life. Storey concentrates on Bryan's ambiguous relationship with the restless and rapacious Mrs Corrigan, and with her neice, Margaret Spencer, a sweet and awkward tomboy whose expressions of love mature from shared sweets in the cinema to jolly slaps on the back.

The women are beautifully characterised. The school-scenes are superb -- Storey has always excelled in them. The problems are in the grimly laconic dialogue which,

deprived of the bite and undercurrent it car- ries in Storey's plays, seems stale and flat, and in Bryan himself. An unsympathetic character, his prodigal talent is insufficient- ly conveyed to make his success seem either credible or desirable.