Some • recent novels

Albert Read

Adwarf sits on the roof and gazes at the stars twinkling above Ireland. The reader takes a deep breath, unsure whether to expect a lengthy discourse on astromony or a tragic self-evaluation set to the strains of the blarney blues. It turns out to be a bit of both. The Dork of Cork (Bloomsbury, £14.99, pp.354) by Chet Raymo is the story of Frank Bois, 43 years old and 43 inches tall. It is also the story of his story. He is on the verge of literary fame for his book about the stars and his mother, Bernadette Bois.

Bernadette is a French girl possessed with mysterious powers. As a child in wartime France, a mine kills her friends when they throw a stone at it, but leaves her untouched. She eventually runs away from home, stows away on an American warship and nine months later gives birth to the unfortunate Frank. In Cork, she meets Jack Kelly, husband and father to four daughters. They have an affair and Jack teaches little Frankie all he knows about the stars.

The narrative cuts forward to the pre- sent: Frank Bois, the middle-aged sex- crazed poet dwarf. He sits in his cold den, women's underwear magazines strewn across the floor; he can only walk the streets at night and gaze up at the stars, craving the love of a good woman.

He is understandably obssessed by his physical condition and he senses his freak- show attractions as he goes to London to promote his book. From what we hear of it, the book he has written runs parallel to the book we are reading. A lot of the advice that his editor gives him could be applied to the real author. At one point, his editor says, 'I think the reader would feel cheated by a happy ending', and yet we have to put up with exactly that — a soppy Hollywood- style finale. But if you can forgive that and the occasional lapses into Irish sentimen- tality, then this is a curious, touching story that is well worth reading.

Swimming the Channel (Bloomsbury, £15.99, pp.182) by Jill Neville is a novel made up of four shortish stories concerning the same characters — at least, the periph- eral characters in one story turn up as the main ones in the next. This constant shift of narrative focus lets Neville show us dif- ferent viewpoints on the same character like taking photographs of the same object from different angles.

We have a small-scale example of this in the first story. We have met Beth, her hus- band Tom, and her lover Paul, and we know something of what they are like by what they do and what they say. Then a street sweeper passes the open window of their Holland Park house:

He stood and rested for a while, leaning on his witch's broom, looking in at the brilliant room where a woman lay on a sofa talking to two men. One man was showing signs of booze; the other was a smooth bastard. He was staring at the woman, who looked a bit of a tart.

Now we know exactly what they are like.

Paul's affair with Beth is short lived and they split up under a cloud of misunder- standing. In the second story set in Paris, the main character is an 18-year-old girl called Tess who gets a job as a babysitter for Paul and his new wife. Tess falls for Paul. Paul leaves his wife to go back to Beth, but, of all things, dies in a plane crash. Meanwhile Tess must retrieve the note she has delivered to Paul's wife announcing his intention to leave her. It's a story with non-stop plot.

The third story concerns Tess's mother (a dull bit) and the fourth is about Paul's daughter as a discontented nymphomaniac roaming the streets of Paris (better again). Sad, romantic and feminine, this is a book that holds the attention as Tess mulls over what 'might have been'.

Eyebrows are raised and net curtains are twitched in Tom Wakefield's War Paint (Constable, £14.99, pp.234) when Kay Roper sweeps into the mining village of Padmore to teach in the secondary school. This is wartime Wales, and the locals have never seen anything like it.

Kay wears make-up, high heels, lipstick and earrings, while refusing the advances of the Padmore gentlemen. She is Miss Jean Brodie (Now girls!') with a twist of Diana Dors (`Are my seams straight?'). She gives rousing speeches on feminism to the girls in her class (`One day, girls... ') and they go and give apples to their mothers whom she calls 'the beautiful people'. It's all a bit corny.

The story is told in flashback by her pupil, Janet Haycock, the headmistress, Ivy Chaplin, and her admirer, Patrick Harper. They all have this infinite reverence for this wise 'character' who has opened their eyes to so many new ways of living. Others are more disapproving: with all that face pow- der she must have acne, the villagers mut- ter to each other over the garden fences.

The truth behind the face-powder is rather worse. The 'surprise' ending is a sur- prise we are all getting rather used to, and it only serves to undermine the story as a whole — a story which is gentle and unde- manding with amusing moments dotted around the place. The reader is left at the end, though, feeling incredulous and slight- ly betrayed as the author turns it into something altogether unlikely.

Brian McCabe comes from a small min- ing community near Edinburgh. His latest collection of short stories, In a Dark Room with a Stranger (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99, pp.199), comes with glowing reports of `genius' and 'Scottish fiction at its best', and indeed his stories do have an enviable clarity about them. However, the implica- tion that these dry, matter-of-fact narra- tives should contain hidden depths of insight and truth was lost on the reviewer.

The stories, more often than not, reflect the intellectual as a stranger in his own home. So, in a story called `Boticelli's Fly- trap', a young man reads The Story of Art while working in a tile factory. In the first story, the student of Nietzsche returns for his coalminer father's funeral. He thinks about his father, the uneasy relationship, all those things left unsaid. 'Nietzsche by Christ,' he remembers his father saying. `Slave for thirty year doon the flamin suf- ferin pit tae send him to the Uni and this is how he thanks me: Nietzsche!'

I rather agree with him.