David Hare on new thrillers
Sleep and His Brother Peter Dickinson (Hodder and Stoughton £1.40) Just one good thriller in a dreary month with more than the publishers' usual quota of simplemindedness. While the novel industry is said to be retracting, there seems to be no limit to the number of illiterate and oldfashioned detective stories. It's so hard to write in the genre at all without being over- obvious, implausible or irritatingly preten- tious. If like Peter Dickinson you avoid all three with superb disdain, it must be all the more annoying to find your publishers (Hod- der and Stoughton) produce your book in print guaranteed to induce immediate myopia. It's hard enough to defend the publication of hardbacks at all—who really gives £1.40 worth of value?—but to produce them ugly and cheap-looking is a complete waste of time.
Under two reading lights you can trace Dickinson's unique, lazy talent on the amble.
Pibble, now of course sacked from Scotland Yard, is back in an unofficial capacity, hardly stretching himself or the reader, but comfortably characteristic in a complicated and imaginative story about a home for children suffering from an invented disease—cathypny. The eerie symptoms are obesity, ugliness, extreme stupidity, slug- gishness and fatigue. If this sounds topical, the children do have a single distinguishing feature from the present government—they are also psychic.
Pibble stumbles by extra-sensory luck onto their wavelength, and the originality of the book lies in the fact that the disastrous chain of events at the home is entirely triggered off by Pibble's presence, so that instead of his being a neutral investigator-figure, it is his personality that precipitates arson, • murder etc. Dickinson's zest for characterisation leads him this time as far as a Greek egomaniac whose vacuum sweeper chews the New Statesman and hamburgers with equal efficiency. The whole tone of the book is slightly apologetic, not really as good as the previous Pibble stories, but with the same feel for the malformed, the defective and the miserable.
The rest of the month's outflow defy re- view, with only two exceptions. Peter Town- end is being touted as the new Ian Fleming.
Out of Focus, a Mediterranean adventure in- volving Philip Quest, 'a hard drinking freelance photographer', is what's called fan- tasy literature. I've never met anyone whose fantasies fitted ipto these particular shapes. It seems to me a completely dud area of writing. Most important, you can do so much better for yourself by closing your eyes and thinking of sex. Or sex and guns. Or guns. Why bother with someone else's partial and insipid guesses at your fantasies? Would anyone here admit to dreaming of `girls in gold kaftans' with 'slanting green eyes and dark chestnut hair streaked by the sun'? Or of breasts that 'flush and heave' or of 'the rosy stain of her nipples'? Every man should work these things out for himself, and Out of Focus will give you few original hints. Quest is the sort of person who 'grins at the bruise left by his teeth on her thigh.' The irritation of the book comes from the fact that in between these fatuous
imaginings there runs a real, readable thriller. Sex and violence has never seemed
so arbitrary a mixture : one or the other would have survived much better here. So much of the style of the book writes itself; `Hereera certainly knew how to give a party. The whisky was Chivas Regal, the cham- pagne Taittinger, and the cigars Henry Clay.' The author was—gasp—Townend, the publisher—groan—Heinemann.
Andrew Garve's new one, The Late Bill Smith, is so capable that your eyes fall right down the page and off the end. He seems to make a point of ensuring that nothing is too remarkable. His Fleming flourishes are almost embarrassingly self-effacing : 'Four ounces of black caviar ... two medium-sized lobsters . . . a nice piece of Brie . . . a half- litre of Moscow Vodka.' Sounds a nice meal. The hero's suit is Swedish, his shoes are Swiss, his socks are Greek, his shirts are French. Sounds a nice bloke. The descrip- tions of a trip to Greece are nice enough. They had a good time. Of course things get (slightly) more unpleasant as the book goes on, but basically yes, well, mm, er, good.
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