NOVELS Cream and Offal

M. Aluko.

l‘l['Ett the Irish giants come the little people. I've not previously encountered any of the books, as °PPosed to the literary reviews and social °biter dicta, of Edna O'Brien. Mr. Amis thinks highly of her, and I thought it proper to study Girls in their Married Bliss with great care. Such treat- Ment is often inimical to the author's intention:

one pores where one should skim; one becomes niggling and literalist. And so when, on the first ,Page, Baba talks about the long poverty she

has shared with her friend Kate Brady, and how, 'he has ruined untold handbags through stuffing into them orts from dinner invitations to take home to starving Cinderella, I am a little in- Credulous: how, being so poor, can she afford s,° many handbags? On the second page Kate 'as to get married because she is ten months Pregnant. Now, let's either have the Salinger

touch of a million years pregnant or else observe the biological facts of gestation. Unless, of course, it works differently for Irish girls.

I'd be prepared to put up with this sort of (loftiness if the book as a whole had a grain of Seductiveness in it. Seduction is a big theme, however, and it seems to be introduced primarily to demonstrate how horrible men are—selfish, e trete, kinky, inept. Men, though despicable, re-

n, lain the great pursuing enemy, and the plot, a 'oose pseudo-picaresque affair, tells us how Kate

and Baba cope. Despite its pornographic ele- Inents, no book could well be less pornographic: a few more like this and one could be put off

sex for ever. The act is described with a sort of

indulgent sneer; the frigid colloquial is made Whimsical with Hibernicisms like 'eejit' and

' 'twas.' The final effect is of a dish of ill-cooked

°I\tial topped with sour cream from O'Hanlon's "airy. Miss O'Brien is revealed as a member of

that literary sorority dedicated to the deflation of ss-proud man. This is a big job; it requires a Digger talent.

. Better Dead than Red is also picaresque, but It transmutes a more wholesome bitterness into

rannine satire. Franklin Lear retires from the rtnily drug business in Vermont at the age of IftY, victim of devilish tycoonery. The enemy takes shape in his mind as a combination of aPitalist grab and Communist artfulness: he Inveighs against the red menace at home and abroad by means of cyclestyled letters to the ,IleWsPapers. Soon, changing at Washington June- 1011, he travels to the Mid-West to exploit the ilnlicious dynamism of little minds. A joke at ,13t, he wins through, just as the wild jokes of ins" exploits, flights of mad fancy when the book itytas written two years ago, are already becoming

Be stuff of sober news reports (the satirist need

l'ever fear that he's going too far; real life is a t'1311 of ultimate Swift, though a slow writer). A

great gift for mimicry makes this gallimaufry

f sane and demented Americans a real joy- astard, the ex-General, Texas Rose, the Mag- 4,ifleent Mowzacka. Critics who find the spirit of 'a/eh-22 here ought to look for a remoter an-

cestry—the one whose finest naturalistic flower was Sinclair Lewis. It is the mastery of provin- cial American speech, with all its vatic, folksy, sanctimonious wordiness, and the elevating of it almost to the level of surrealism, that enables Stanley Reynolds to make his savagely funny commentary so convincing. The admired comic columnist of the Guardian here shows himself to be well-fuelled for longer and madder flights.

The respect we accord some African writers has, paradoxically, a good deal to do with the fact that writing is not their profession. First comes the special knowledge, the mature grasp of affairs, which a responsible government post must give; next comes the fictional commentary on the job, often fanciful but always authori- tative. T. M. Aluko is Director of Public Works for Western Nigeria. His novel, One Man, One Mutate', is not specifically about the PWD, but it does deal with the human problems which are confronting all the administrators of newly in- dependent African territories. A white agricul- tural officer comes from England to Yoruba- land, in Western Nigeria, and advises the farmers to cut down their diseased cocoa-trees to prevent the spread of the infection. The farmers won't listen. Udo Akpan, the District Officer, supports the callow expatriate, but he, too, is new, though black. Benjamin Benjamin is a journalist and demagogue; he rouses the Chiefs and makes the whole issue political. The situations that fellow are familiar enough—the self-seeking, the clash of ignorant old and intolerant young, the desire for power without responsibility and the sweets of change without its bitter medicine. What gives the novel power and distinction is the almost Snovian solidity of its factual background. The style, too, is Snow-plain, but the lack of verbal decoration, the absence of atmospheric tricks, is again an aspect of its urgency and authority. I think that One Man, One Matchet is a genuine contribution to the growing corpus of African fiction in English.

'The clouds were bruise-coloured against an April sunset like cold flesh.' Nothing plain there. 'The coagulation of Jovian thunderclouds was spilling its casual localised Danaan shower.' Golly, as one of Aldous Huxley's characters might say. Sarah Kilpatrick's second novel, The Cool Meridian, knows what it is doing, despite its accessions of verbal pustularity. Indeed, we come to recognise the propriety of such excess when we dig deeper into the lives of Dr. Thomas Rayner, a don who fears life and hence makes a show of despising it, and his wife Ann, who has to find a life-surrogate in readings of D. H. Law- rence. The disclosing of the emotional agonies of complex people was once an honourable theme for fiction, and I think that Sarah Kilpatrick has reinstated it with considerable skill., One of the minor pleasures of reviewing is re- reading one's own forgotten laudations on dust- jackets. Sometimes these appear anonyrnouSly (the organ is bigger than the man) and then one has the added interest of recognising oneself from one's style. Of Christopher Hodder- Williams's last novel, The Higher They Fly, I seem to have said : 'What gives this thriller dis- tinction is the moral seasoning.' The same words will do for his new book, The Main Experiment, in which, in the secret experimental station, we hear: , . It's going to flood our brains during the night. It's going to come out of that mon- strous machine, in there, and think its way into obr minds . . .' And then Sir Jacob has to get the Home Office to work out an evacuation scheme for the whole area—better say ten miles radius. This is a bit of all right; this will do very well indeed.

ANTHONY BURGESS