REVIEW OF BOOKS
Auberon Waugh on novels and prizes
It is whimsical, towards the end of a year's reviewing, to see which of the year's novels have recommended themselves to the Booker Prize judges. This year's short list of four, we are told, comprises The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith by James Keneally; The Bird of Night by Susan Hill; Pasmore by David Storey and ' G' by John Berger. Of these, I found the first immensely entertaining; the second was quite excellent, if too serious for all tastes; the third struck me as particularly bad (unoriginal, boring and, to the extent that it had anything to say, rather silly); while the fourth, John Berger's album of fatuous pensees and solemnly inane apercus, illustrated once again the extent to which the awarding of literary prizes has been cornered by a small handful of vain and hysterical pseuds whose obstinacy and blinding unintelligence do so much to discredit the poor British novel. I write this without the faintest idea of who the Booker judges are this year, but it is a wretched thing for English novelists when the Booker judges can short list anything so dismal and mediocre as Pasmore or so affected as 'G.'
Between Keneally's ' Blacksmith ' and Hill's ' Bird ' I offer no advice. Miss Hill strikes me as the worthier of the two, in the sense that she worked harder to produce a work of great artifice as well as of imagination; but Keneally's book may well strike many readers as more enjoyable, and I am by no means sure that this should not be the ultimate criterion.
A similar choice confronts the bookbuyer in this week's selection. Miss Elliott's book* is painstakingly contrived and intelligently written, even if it is a trifle short on jokes, while Miss Gillespie's t is a bundle of fun even if it is short on moral fibre and a trifle slapdash in places. Both are well up to silver medal standard, although I admit I found Gillespie the more enjoyable.
Miss Elliott's novel is a continuation from her last one, called A State of Peace, which I unfortunately missed. This may explain the puzzlement with which I read the first few pages, in which we meet (in my case for the first time) characters called Olive, Dennis, Elizabeth, Catherine, Polly, Sukie (who turns out to be a puppy), Polly's husband Edward, Olive's husband Bob (Dennis is her ex), Catherine's husband whose name I forget, Mary and Chris Olders who, I think, are Olive's halfbrother, or possibly brother, and sister-inlaw, her stepson Alan, and a thousand others, all on Christian name terms already. The blurb describes it as a "richly peopled book" and so it is. These people drift in and out of its pages as if they were in a Russian play rather than an English novel; almost all of them have nervous breakdowns or go more seriously mad at one time or another; most of them have babies in the course of the novel; one or two begin to die, giving all the others an opportunity to sit around and discuss death; they discuss Korea', commitment, communism, the atom bomb and the fact that Britain is done for (the novel is set in the 'fifties) very intelligently together between nervous breakdowns. The height of drama is when one woman shouts at another at a cocktail party.
One of them has a still-born baby and goes mad. Bob leaves the Communist party and goes mad. Daphne, Bob, Chris, Catherine, Tim and Polly all go mad, one after the other. The cat dies. When young Alan fancies a girl, he thinks of her as "an affirmation of life." The book itself is described as a " celebration " — the fashionable new quasi-liturgical word to describe any gathering of pseuds. Miss Elliott's people aren't my people and her book isn't really my type of book but it strikes me that she makes the best possible use of her resources. The sad truth is that nothing ever happens to intelligent, thinking people who live in London. Francis Hope's agony is all a sham. They only have nervous breakdowns and attempt suicide in order to draw attention to themselves and because there is nothing else to do. If they won't go and smuggle hashish over the mountain passes of Afghanistan, the Arts Council should at least send them on adventure courses to the Lake District.
Miss Gillespie has written an extremely funny book which is partly a straight satire on the English Catholic novel (and Catholic attitudes generally), partly a little jeu d'esprit of her own and partly, I fear, something altogether loonie and disorganised which starts as a mystery story and then peters out, leaving nothing but a trail of fake clues and untied ends.
A fanatically keen Catholic authoress, Annabel Mott, is writing the biography of a Catholic baronet's wife who, in her widowhood, founded a religious order and is now being considered for canonisation.
After a chequered past, Annabel was converted five years previously, and now says the rosary surreptitiously in her handbag when men try to chat her up. Annabel is an exquisitely comic prototype and I can't think why nobody has invented her before. She meets the twin greatgrandchildren of her candidate for sainthood who, after going through their Sebastian Flyte act, reveal they have a secret which ties them together. We assume it is incestuous.
The male twin — Val — is as fanatically Catholic as Annabel and we assume they will pair off at the end; the female, Lucy, is indifferent to her religion, almost an apostate. Annabel's literary agent, an odious young man called Nigel, falls in love with Lucy and couples with her rapturously, as only heathens and apostate Catholics can, although the faintest twitch on the thread of her Catholic loyalty very much reduces her pleasure in the sex act. Eventually, we discover that Lucy's secret is not an incestuous love for her twin but that she has rejected her own vocation to be a nun. This wanton air produces all the familiar symptoms of listlessness, nymphomania and emotional instability which require her brother to devote his life to looking after her and keeping her secret. Everybody agrees that this is no way to go on, so Val eventually poisons her. We are not clear whether it is in punishment for her habitual unchastity or for refusing her vocation to be a nun.
There are many, many excellent jokes, all very black and for the most part all very controlled, although there are a few moments when the satire's edge becomes blunted through diffusion — as when the odious Nigel rebukes Val for not protecting his sister's virtue against himself, Nigel. But there is a beautiful supporting cast of bores, prigs, dying men, and the Catholic jokes are the best I can remember for a long time. Needless to say, Nigel wakes after a night of passion with Lucy to find her saying the rosary beside his bed, and so it goes on. I could award it a gold medal unhesitantly if Miss Gillespie had not laid quite so many false trails. I look forward very much to reading the first review which will treat it — censorously, no doubt — as a work of piety, or at any rate as one with a serious Christian message under all the banter. No clue about the novel is given on the dustcover, which is a very dirty trick to play on reviewers. In fact it is entirely dedicated to black humour and the only reason I don't award it the Booker prize straight away is because I feel that few people will enjoy it as much as I did and few will recognise the full depth of its nihilistic commitment.
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