The enchanted forest and other fictions
Peter Ackroyd
The Rain Forest Olivia Manning (Heinemann £2.50) Dogcatcher Peter Prince (Gollancz £2.50)
Well well, says Miss Manning as she glides into the neighbourhood rain-forest, this is too enchanting for words. For, indeed, it is as poignant as a bower, as a mediaeval walled garden. as a rabbit hole down which we may be lucky enough to fall. It is a topos, sacred within the bounds of its aestheticism.
And then out through the swing-doors of
the rain forest and into the Grand Hotel, that landed version of the Ship of Fools, where the fans beat exceeding slow. 'Al Bustan' is the looking-glass which magnifies these geegaws; it is an island once the home of Dodos and now strictly for the birds. Now the last rest-home for the first and last of the pioneers, the poor doomed British with their backs against the wall, but the wall is collapsing too. Even their old weather, the rain, comes back to .haunt them in their tropical kitsch. But. then, nature can seem so artificial.
• Hugh and Kristy Foster, late of this parish,
have travelled to Al Bustan to avoid becoming the nouveaux pauures. Hugh is a good sort, as good sorts go, but Kristy is keen on ecology and such like and is a terrible bore. Naturally they are rebuffed by the clockwork ducks who pass for English 'society' in this play-pen, and they must suffer instead the attentions of the local 'eccentrics', a motley collection of multi-racial bores. 'Society' here would be better under any other name, confined as it is to the ritual markings of a vanished landscape. Its presiding deity is Sir Robert 'Urquhart, with his baleful eye. And the alma mater is the proprietress of the hotel, Mrs Gunner, a cockney with a heart of plastic. Her son is a fat man and a double first. She has a lot to answer for.
There is a marvellous improbability about all of this, and these mannequins collide within what is suspiciously like a well-made play. You can see infinity within a grain of sand, but on a tropical island even the 'truth' is a whim. And there is a great deal of comfort to be gained from the works and .days of Al Bustan, as if only distance could lend enchantment to the poor ragged creatures who walk and cry inside Miss Manning's symbolic intentions. An aesthetic image of human destiny controls the narrative as cause follows effect, action follows motive, nature follows civilisation and the ramshackle hut of empire is knocked down with a breath.
Peter Prince's novel is set in a jungle that goes under another name, an America of rooming houses, 'flat-mates,' hamburgers and malted. A private eye, Frank Hammond, sits behind his frosted glass door, feet up on his desk and drinking a beer. Humphrey Bogart as seen by Edward Hopper. But Mr Hammond, like his ostensible creator, is English and he lets it show. Frank is also a product of the Army intelligence service and would need a lobotomy to make him interesting. Mr Prince does not seem to realise this.
It is a great pity that the action of the novel should be seen through Frank's dumb, beseeching eyes. To exist in a small MidWestern town you need, at the very least, a talent for nostalgia. But Frank's is an ordinary, human story and you know how boring that can be. He has an affair, he goes to a party, he suffers the friendliness of the average. American and he very nearly enjoys himself. He also has a disgusting habit of taking the reader into his confidence at every conceivable opportunity, on the principle that in these social democratic days we can all aspire to be the boy-next-door, and Frank spreads a meretricious warmth wherever he goes. The novel is without incident or momentum, and all of the flotsam of the modern novel sinks into a minor realism from which it may never be rescued.
Peter Ackroyd is Literary Editor of The Spectator.
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