NEW NOVELS
Breast-beatings
DAVID GALLOWAY
My Friend Says It's Bullet-Pt'oof Penelope Mortimer (Hutchinson 25s) The Paradox Players Maureen Duffy (Hutchin- son 25s) Orchestra and Beginners Frederic Raphael (Cape 30s) The Murder of Aziz Khan Zulfikar Ghose (Macmillan 30s) The Pleasure Factory Valeriy Tarsis (Collins and Harvill 25s) The Ecstasy Business Richard Condon (Heine- mann 30s) The dry precision and incisive economy of Penelope Mortimer's prose clearly establish her as one of the most outstanding contem- porary novelists—not that her methods are in any way inventive or unique, but they are distinctively shaped by an intelligence and compassion which seem continuously to extend the carefully circumscribed horizons of her novels. Having long admired the resourceful- ness and the sheer verbal dexterity of Mrs Mortimer's writing, I wish that I could see her latest novel, My Friend Says It's Bullet- Proof, as ultimately representing something more than an exercise in feminine self-indul- gence (the heroine's, not the author's).
The book's heroine is an attractive, thirtyish correspondent for a woman's magazine. Pro- fessionally, Muriel Rowbridge submits herself to a frenzied public relations tour of America as the only female member of a motley tribe of British journalists; personally, she struggles to break out of the shell in which she has encased herself since the removal of a can- cerous breast. Her affair with a married man has come to an end following the operation, and now she reaches out to the men who enter her life for feminine reassurance and as part of her determination to 're-experience the past through new eyes and new senses.' Death, disease, her father's blindness, her own vague ambitions as a writer, the resources and the limits of human contact: all these subjects stream forth in the endless, polyglot notebook she fills with her observations.
One of Muriel's 'conquests' is an intense, middle-aged Catholic whom she rather too easily befuddles with her intellectual scepticism. Another is a devil-may-care movie tycoon with an allergy to complications; but the third— in accepting her as a whole woman, despite what she regards as her disfigurement—seems to offer her a way back into the world, and for a time Muriel abandons her compulsive scribblings, which seem, like those of Moses E. Herzog, less an attempt to come to term with life than a way of avoiding it. At novel's end, however, Muriel is back to her solitary journalising. Mrs Mortimer's point of view occasionally blurs, but I suspect that she asks for more sympathy with her impetuous heroine than most readers will be willing to grant.
There are no inconsistencies in the point of view of Maureen Duffy's Paradox Players: it is uncompromisingly, at times almost brutally, tough. The central character is a labourer and part-time writer who moves into a dilapidated houseboat on the Thames in search of an antidote to the suburban ethics of his former wife. Sym, however, finds himself drawn into a river world whose codes and values—while perhaps more real and more tolerant—are none the less as binding and, often, as frus- trating as those he has left behind. As one character remarks, 'It just depends on what kind of game you like. . . . Sym's struggles to learn the rules of this new game are seen through a knowing eye which never loses sight of the fact that, whatever paradoxical gambits are involved, the human stakes are unremit- tingly the same.
Against the massive panorama of wartime Britain, Frederic Raphael spins out the story of a middle-class marriage between two talented and attractive people who are repeatedly forced by the complex circumstances of their existence to abandon idealism and come to terms with the merely possible. Raphael evokes milieu with an extraordinarily deft hand, and there is abundant evidence—particularly in the duel of wits which repeatedly erupts—of that talent for dialogue which he demonstrated in Darling and Two for the Road. Orchestra and Beginners is a movingly, simple story, placed within a series of complex and often poignant frames; it is a novel constructed rather like a nest of Chinese boxes, and the total' effect is one of virtuoso technical achievement.
The Murder of Aziz Khan, set in modern Pakistan, is equally panoramic in scope, though rather more single-minded in intention: it is, basically, a throwing-out-the-baby-with-the- bathwater cautionary tale on the hazards of modernism. The wealthy, enterprising and corrupt Shah brothers, directors of a powerful textile industry, become obsessed with the re- sistance of a poor farmer, Aziz Khan, to their attempts to buy his land. Their ruthless brutality toward the stoical old man is counter- pointed by growing corruption within the Shah family itself. In the end Aziz Khan is a dis- regarded martyr, thrown carelessly aside in the march of capitalism. Despite Zulfikar Ghose's occasionally stilted prose and a for- mality of manner which distances rather than exalts the dignity of the victims, The Murder of Aziz Khan is an impressive novel and the herald, one suspects, of considerably better things to come.
The refusal of Soviet novelist Valeriy Tarsis to hew to a party line meant, first, that his novels could not be published in Russia and, when they were smuggled out to the West, he was incarcerated in a mental asylum until pres- sure from the press eventually brought about his release. The Pleasure Factory is a highly readable example of Tarsis's essentially non- ideological criticism of communism. Nastasya Philippovna, a beautiful, sensuous and vaguely talented young woman, grows every day more like her Dostoievskian namesake—`a restless, sarcastic, quick-tempered woman. . . .' The opportunity of working in a Black Sea resort dedicated to the rather gross pleasures of Soviet workers increases her fortunes as it sours her temper, and gives her even more men to freeze with her icy charm.
Through this bewitching and contradictory
woman Tarsis makes his most fundamental criticism of ideologies in focusing on the human frailties which thwart their high pur- poses. Even so, the novel occasionally drags under the weight of contrived political dis- cussion, and one ends by feeling that even a flawed jewel like Nastasya deserves a rather better setting.
Yet another pleasure factory is dismantled in 'Richard Condon's The Ecstasy Business—a farcical tour through the international land- scape of Hollywood-on-location. Pursued by ingenious murderers, the jaw-rippling, pomaded matinee idol must repeatedly lapse into the Bondiana of his movie roles in order to save his osOn life. At moments the novel's pop techniques actually threaten to work, but whatever in- tangible assets it actually possesses, pop yields inevitably, excruciatingly, to pun: 'He was an unzipped fly caught in forever amber.'
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