To write a first novel, to leave it without a
successor for five years, and to have it still remembered when the successor appears —that is a feat, not quite so rare as the Indian rope trick, which it rather resembles, but uncommon all the same. Mr. Nigel Dennis wrote Boys and Girls Come Out to Play in 1949, and I remember it well; he has only now followed it up with Cards of Identity.
A rather dim and forlorn brother and sister, natural dependants (the brother indeed a professional sponger), get mixed up with the new people at the Big House. Before they know where they are they have been talked, doped, bounced, into accepting new identities. Henry becomes Jellicoe the butler, his sister becomes Florence, the dear old housekeeper, the mainstay of the family, relied on by all, teased and adored by Master Beaufort. (Beaufort Mallet, Henry Paradise—these names, and a certain witty formality itt the dialogue, suggest to me that at Hyde's Mortimer the Ivy is tending to come in through the windows.) This is good stuff, amusing and sinister, but it is only a beginning. Captain Mallet, the organiser of this change of identity, is a member of an organisation! the Identity Club, which, in the words of the blurb, realises that 'modern man is so unsure who he is that any charlatan can impose a false identity on him.'
When the Identity Club meets at Hyde's Mortimer, and its members begin reading their papers, we enter upon a saturnalia of imposed identities, a kaleidoscopic dance of false personalities, a brilliant conjuring display of satire. Contemporary institutions and attitudes are raked with a murderous cross-fire, directed from a rather unusual and interesting position which Mr. Dennis occupies on the border of the New York and the London intelli- gentsia—here a touch of Angus Wilson, there a suggestion of Lionel Trilling. As the going gets wilder and wilder the book is, in flashes, grim and 'nasty' and hellishly funny.
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