NEW NOVELS
A Dog's Life
I'm Not Stiller. By Max Frisch. (Abelard-Schuman, 18s.) The Birth of a Grandfather. By May Sarton. (Gollancz, I 5s.) UNLIKE Animal Farm, which is nothing to do With the real animal world, Tibor Dery's Niki is, on the surface, exactly what the author calls it, the story of a dog : a real dog, a fox-terrier bitch, Whose every marking, every ingratiating canine quiver, is recorded with appreciative accuracy. But the function of that story is to make out a case—which it does the more persuasively for its restraint—against the arbitrary restrictions, from direction of labour and leisure to actual imprison- ment, placed upon human life in a Communist Police State. It's the story, in every sense, of a dog's life.
Niki comes into the story by way of the Anscas, a childless, middle-aged couple, he an expert but obscure mining engineer, both of them a-political Conformists, who have come to live in an outer suburb of Budapest. Here the dog calls on them, accepts their food and prances attendance until the day comes when they feel themselves com- promised and bound to adopt it. Now, in some hands this might have deteriorated into senti- mental, doggy nonsense. Here it does not. Dery is well aware of the inadequacy of such a relation- ship: the man feeling guilty about fostering a dog instead of a child; the dog appearing to trade upon its own weakness and dumbness. And be- tween human and canine behaviour he draws a Clear line which he will not allow the dog to cross however human-seeming its actions. Yet certain things the man and dog do share by virtue of the fact that their lives run parallel.
Ansca gets promotion, plus the chance of a new Party flat in the centre of the city; but before Moving they all spend one memorable afternoon in the country. In all its unleashed exuberance, the dog runs wild and Ansca sees reflected in this display his own newly developed energy and optimism. But for both this is one of their last days of complete freedom. Ansca's importance makes him vulnerable; and he is foolish enough to dismiss for fraud a man who has good connections in the Party. He in turn is dismissed; he loses status; one day he fails to return from work, #nd his wife cannot find out Whether he is dead or imprisoned. The dog in its oWn way is just as much involved in Ansca's fate : by the move, it has lost its freedom; by its owner's removal, the companionship of a man. But there is one thing even more frightening that they have in common : to Ansca and his wife, it is just as incomprehensible as if is to the dog, why those in authority over them have treated them in this Way. This is a touching book, full of kindness and delight, but utterly pessimistic about the chance of either kindness or happiness remaining alive for long in a Communist country. Dery, once a Communist and now the senior Hungarian writer, is serving a nine-year term of imprisonment for his part in the Hungarian rising.
In The Intruder, an engaging and intelligent novel by Adriaan van der Veen, the hero is a self- centred, rather priggish but ultimately, the author makes you' feel, quite tolerable young Dutchman, who is exiled in New York during the last war. His first, innocent step is to begin an affair with a young Jewish girl from his home country. In no time the burdens of her whole race are being placed on his slim shoulders. The confronting of the • hero with people v, ho represent various attitudes—the dear old pals whose anti-Semitism he has previously been able to ignore: the pipe- pulling intellectual who, while pro-Jewish, of course, feels he must draw the line at marriage; the girl friend's self-hating Jewish cousin who takes his sympathy for condescension—is well enough contrived not to seem contrived at all. But while the author makes the hero do the right thing, he allows the girl friend to disappear from sight for a long period in the middle of the book. She conveniently falls ill when she might have been more gainfully employed building up the central relationship.
Raju, the hero of The Guide, by R. K. Narayan, takes no steps at all, he just sits on them because he has nowhere to go after coming out of prison. But as they are temple steps, and as he, out of politeness, offers a few words of trite advice to a passer-by, he finds himself overnight a holy man with a following who bring him gifts of food each day. Only once before has he ever had it so good. But when the drought comes he is expected to earn his living; and through a misunderstanding, he is thought to have agreed to undertake a twelve-day fast. In a panic he confides in his original disciple the story of his affair with a dancer that has brought him to prison. But the disciple generously insists upon overlooking it. Raju must act the Swami that in everyone's mind he has become. This is a thoroughly professional novel, adroitly alternating Raju's past and present to exploit their ironic and comic possibilities.
In brief: I'm Not Stiller, by Max Frisch, is a heavyweight with an almost mesmeric slowness in the ring. It concerns the arrest of a man who is Stiller, and reveals, in a series of notebooks kept by the prisoner, and in a PS by the Public Prosecu- tor, why, and in what sense, he denies it. May Sarton's The Birth'of a Grandfather is a piece of cultured whimsy about a family so nasty that one would not have thought that even their creator could love them. But, apart from a little wry criticism, she apparently does. The coarse, the ignoble, the sadistic . . . have had a good run,' the dust jacket states. If this is the alternative, they should be given an extension.
GEOFFREY NICHOLSON
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