Salad days

Peter A ckr oyd

Olia.Ys Eva Figes (Faber and Faber £2.25) Mirror Harriet Waugh (Weidenfeld Nicholson £2.50) Lae Death of Attila Cecelia Holland (Hodder ti Stoughton £2.50) es, it was one of those days. As the grey of the th morning steadily gave way to the grey of

evening, I lay in bed reading Eva Figes's

cq's, with only the occasional break for Zeals and for real life. I won't say that my Y Was ruined, only that it passed extremely sLW1Y. But this was probably in unconscious sLInPathy with the heroine of the novel, who 1,711ds what little life she has in the private

ard of a large hospital. Her meanderings, nwhich set the pace let alone the content of the

ative, are couched in Beckett's perpetual P'esent — deriving as they do from the I of a nem, e e "I merely think this. In actual fact I t-V only conjecture about what lies beyond ite Walls of this room. And in the last analysis e d°es not matter. I no longer allow it to s,?ecern me." Luckily for her, but not for us as 'Le roams over her attenuated past like a fly

Ov Ov

sheer cold soup. To add insult to her injury, A,h•Can glimpse only one small window from Ich, in the best traditions of symbolism, be seen a withered bough. is only, of course, in the ruined choirs of 4"alanticism that a monologue can be found 4P1Pealing. This happy fallacy has never stirred Particular stumps and a stream-of-conshsness retains its interest only for a very 11_°rt time. It is also the case that a frayed or

rotic vision is that much less interesting en, an average or healthy one. This offends

'ba'nst the canons of the School of Suicide 411,•1 wordly Despair, but it agrees with those A ,g, odd taste. The masks and reminiscences of ia knot of nerve-ends," as the heroine enorgingly calls herself, are not likely to amuse 40 convince unless they connect with r.ortlething other than themselves. This is IelY the case in Days. We do learn by in

direction that the I has a husband and two children, but this unhappy band of tem poraries claim only a weak hold on life. They move through the writing like phantoms, and even the weather seems to be in the pale and wintry clutch of the ego. I do not mean to be entirely condemnatory; the writing is always lyrical and often per ceptive. The sadness of growth and age are lovingly detailed, and there is something to be said for a novel in which loneliness and dereliction, the perpetual favourites of the

novelist, can be depicted without any overt commentary. The focus of Days is strong but

narrow, and Miss Figes has wrapped her subject within a cocoon of false self-consciousness. I often find myself wishing for those days when the novel offered a rhetoric of moral community, carrying everywhere with it relationship and love. Nowadays we have to be grateful if characters so much as talk to one another.

There are a few strained dialogues in Mirror, Mirror, the fable of an ugly duckling

who is transformed into an ugly duckling.

Godfrey is the foetus-as-hero; he is rescued from both an abortion and furnace, and he spends the rest of his life looking back. For he's no Moses, he is in fact something of a blot on life's escutcheon. His facial deformities are only mentioned as unmentionable, and the *substance of the novel is devoted to his attempts to wrap mental bandages around this particular cross. His room-mate at university is driven to insanity at the sight of him, and the parents eventually die of shock. Godfrey, however, survives to curse another day: "He hated it when he was forced to see people. They grew enormous and ominous. They could see him, and he could hear them." Of course there is nothing more comfortable than charity to the deserving, but Harriet Waugh is too smart to portray 'the poor little poor boy For when Godfrey is rescued by money and a face-lift, he turns into an, evan gelist but no swan. He incites nationwide guilt and masochism, out of delayed spite, but the Revenger's fate is ultimately tragedy. His head is cut off by a nun, who had once been the girl-next-door. This pi-kis may seem both odd and awkward, but the blame does not rest entirely with me. • For Miss Waugh has a worried and violent imagination, and the sequence of conven tional human emotions is consigned to the graveyard of the nineteenth century. The prose is detailed but hallucinatory, arid the novel is invaded by the fear of madness, and the closeness of death. The protagonists loom like a squad of rubbery giants — too inhuman to touch, but creepy enough to scare. Damp skin, vomit, hair and saliva litter the narrative since the body itself is the villain of this purple comedy. Miss Waugh keeps at a distance all that is palpable and visible, and the' mass masochism of the final pages is only the culmination of the novel's fantasy. All that exists is lacerated and will be destroyed. This is not to say that the book is not well-written '. The prose is garish without being in the least rhetorical, and Miss Waugh has a gift for lyriciscn that undercuts the grotesquerie of her theme: "He had looked at the eyes that did not shift from him and at the flesh that passed by him without retraction or stiffness, and he had become muslin waving in a wind of his own joy " This is fine, feminine writing and Miss Waugh has a perceptiveness that is all the more attractive because it seems so casual. I only wish that it had been employed within a less conventional and personal context. It is bitterness and 'world-weariness which ruin the book. Of • course the theme of the ' outsider ' is a wellworn one, especially when it is used by Miss Waugh to satirise the insiders. I wish she had not made it all too clear that the ' straights ' are as unspeakable as the ' freaks ', and that all forms of life are equally monstrous. We all know this is true, and we all know that it is not true. End of argument, beginning of a better novel.

I could say the same thing in a different way by noting that the novel loses momentum as soon as Godfrey becomes beautiful. Once the nastiness disappears, Mirror, Mirror becomes just another badly organised piece of writing. The authoress is trapped by her own novellageist, since -the interest of the novel stems from a mood that remains stubbornly outside the narrative itself, and could no doubt be found floating somewhere between the writer and the writing. A novel should not be at the service of emotion; it should create it.

Cecilia Holland has solved all these problems of theme and character, in The Death of Attila, by setting both in so distant a past that the more archaic and disjointed they are the more authentic they seem. The famous savage of the title appears only rarely, and the novel concentrates on the human interest of the Silly Ages. It opens among fifth-century rivers and mountains, a landscape of brown soil and freezing nights (rather like Shepherd's Bush during the fuel crisis). Tacs is a Hun, and one of Atilla's personal bodyguard, and Dietric is the son of a German chieftain. They live beside each other quite happily until Attila dies, and then they quite naturally become sworn enemies until Tacs ends the argument by dying knee-high in what they used to call gore. I have simplified the plot, but I am afraid that it doesn't amount to much more. The publishers haven't. helped matters any by mislaying pages 182-199 and by repeating pages 199-213, although I am bound to say that the mistake is not immediately noticeable. But what the novel lacks in plot it makes up for in detail.

Miss Holland has not spared herself. The details seem to be and, more important, read as accurate, what with painted shelves and Persian sugar. The protagonists may not be strong on character and dialogue (the latter sounding like a teach-yourself language record) but they certainly look the part: "Their hair was decorated with feathers, bright stones and metal." But it is not simply the detail which is convincing, since Miss Holland has been very modern and included a soupcon of anthropology. There is a great deal of ritual scarring, shamanism and totem. I must admit to feeling at parts like a latter-day David Attenborough on a guided tour of the natives (gee, aren't they cute and aren't they just like us) but I am sure that this was not Miss Holland's intention. She has managed to stir a little life into these old bones, but she would have succeeded much better if the characters had not behaved like the historical cardboard from which they came.