NEW NOVELS

Over-exposed

MAURICE CAPITANCHIK

Why Are We in Vietnam? Norman Mailer (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 30s) Behold the Man Michael Moorcock (Allison and Busby 21s) Love to Vietnam Edita Morris (Calder and Boyars 25s) Natural Causes Nicholas Roland (Harvill 25s) The Play Room Olivia Manning (Heinemann 30s)

Hazlitt's remark : 'There is an unseemly ex- posure of the mind, as well as the body,' is an appropriate comment on current literary fashion, which, parading the limited and limit- , ing vocabulary of four-letter words, tends to reveal less about the human condition than about the authors' favourite obsessions. Only two out of six novels this week show sexual re- lationship in a meaningful context, and of these, Ldve to Vietnam and A Personal Matter, the second is the more powerful.

Mr Oe's book contains its share of obsceni- ties but it is not, in essence, sensationalist, rather an attempt to show the consequence of fear of responsibility. Bird, the morally vacillating cen- tral character, an ex-delinquent who had settled ' down to several years of marriage and prep- schOol teaching, cannot face his situation when his wife gives birth to a deformed child, crush- ing his dream of escape to Africa.

The baby is little more than a pathetic symbol of dependency, Bird's wife is merely a hostile- partner; it is his relationship with the girl* Himiko, a degenerate ex-fellow-student whom Bird unwittingly started on a downward sexual path and whose acquired skill at giving pleasure - now threatens to destroy him, which is the real centre of the book. After Himiko rids him of his hostility towards everything feminine, he comes to admire her despite her corruption: '. .. he found himself looking at Himiko as an old and tested warrior in the campaigns of daily life . . . Not only was she a sexual expert, her competence extended to a myriad other aspects of life in this real world.' But he knows that to . abandon everything for her would ruin his life..; The author is an important writer in his native country, where his heroes' dilemmas apparently typify the nihilistic consequences ofr the war. To one who has never seen Japan, this harsh picture of the seamy side of Tokyo life seems a convincing, if literal, piece of realism,

written with verve by a skilled professional. '

Mr Norman Mailer is a writer whom the war: in the Pacific convinced that the soldier's eartliy;,.

vocabulary amounts to a literary style, with- fatal results. Why Are We in Vietnam? is not about Vietnam, but is obviously intended as a is parable of the mentality which causes, war. tlar- rated by DJ., the eighteen year old disc jockey A son of executive Rusty Jethroe, the story centres' on a hunting trip to Alaska. Believing that the, prestige of the whole of the western world de-;

volves upon him, Jethroe is determined to make the prize kill. - Beneath the extraordinary scatophagous ver- bal mixture, the point, that sexual competitive- ness has replaced the call of the wild in the American male's psyche, seems a projection of this gifted author's infantilism, .made evident less by his rebarbative obsessions than by the unutterable hostility they contain. If, as the book claims, there is no such thing as a totally false perception, it provides evidence that there is such a thing as a totally distorted one.

Almost as distorted is Behold the Man, in which Karl Glogauer, a born victim given to agonised self-doubt, abortive relationships with unattractive women, and Jungian beliefs, is driven by self-hatred into a time-journey to Palestine at the time of Christ. At the insistence of John the Baptist that he (Glogauer) is a prophet, he gradually grows into the role.

This bizarre tale, which sets out to show that Christ could have been almost anyone who came from the future, might have made a remark- able novel, but this one, predictable in its pro- gression and uncongenial in technique, flags badly. The mixture of psychology and religion, and the tone, are slightly reminiscent of early Colin Wilson, but the book's greatest flaw is the portrayal of the 'actual' Christ, which is taste- less and insensitive almost beyond belief. Mr Moorcock is a talented man, but his ability to write with pseudo-seriousness about serious things belongs to the genre of science fic- tion proper rather than to a Faustian spiritual search.

In Love to Vietnam, a young Japanese, Nishina Shinzo, disfigured by the Nagasaki atom-bomb, writes to a Vietnamese girl, Dan Thanh, who was burned by napalm. Gradually falling in love, he goes to join her, with tragic results. This simple little book, propa- gandist in its intent, succeeds in arousing com- passion for the victims of scientific inhumanity.

Although Dan is no more than a symbol, it is difficult not to be moved by Nishina's plight. Shunning human contact although longing .for love, despised by his more fortunate fellows, he is about to poison himself when a moth wafting in through the door makes him realise: that outside my hideous gargoyle world existed a. world of beauty.' Suffering had blinded Nishina, just as others had been blinded to him by fear. Written convincingly, and with a light touch, in English learned by Nishina from a textbook, this is a slight but salutary novel. It is possible- to ignore its bias and read it as a poignant human document.

Natural Causes is light rather than slight, and improbable, an unserious satirical comment on the pursuit of holiness. When the routine of Mar Severus, a monastery near Bethlehem, is threatened by the discovery of a papyrus which denies an infallible dogma, three monks die mysteriously and the confidence of the formid- able Abbot is destroyed, but the sceptical Brother Thomas saves the order's reputation.

The humour of this pleasantly-written piece of inconsequence is dependent on mild monkish mania and the intrusion of technology into the monastic life—drip-dry robes, computerised gin- brewing, an absent-minded father injecting him- self with a fatal dose of vaccine—but the point, that a legend of saintliness may have natural causes, is made in a manner both easy to read and as easy to forget.

Last, and least, The Play Room is a provin- cial schoolgirl's morality, in which Ugly Duck- ling Leine Fletcher turns into—well, not a swan, but an Intelligent Duck, whose idol, beautiful indolent Vicky, falls for a Vicious Working Man and Receives Her Deserts.

When Vicky goes to meet her fate: 'Several times Laura. saw [her] shake her head and as her hair swayed, the light seemed to glance about her silk frock and. her long legs now brown with summer.' The apparent sim- plicity of style is little more than a list of cliches, and the whole has all the faults of a novel written down to women—the detail is petty and boring, the men weak or wicked, sex is secret and vicious. The implications of this work, that brains are better than beauty and '0' levels more worthy than glamour, are made more tedious than even ordinary virtues have a right to be by its utter lack of distinction.