Fiction
Art, not life
Peter Ackroyd
Jesus on a Stick Ian Cochrane (Routledge and Kegan Paul £3.50) The Dry Conspiracy Frederick Broadie (Chatto and Windus £3.25) Here are two writers who, at their best, can be very skilful and very disarming, but who both run the risk of being stranded upon the niche which they have created for themselves; it is one of the perils of our post-cultural situation that there is no model of the written language to which new novelists can aspire, and to which old novelists can revert at moments of crisis. All of us are in the dark, and any light is necessarily going to be personal and inconstant. So it is with Jesus on a Stick; Ian Cochrane has found a constituency — it happens to be that of tough life in Ireland, but he has managed to avoid those political conflicts which hold out nothing but chains — and he has created a style, a tough and witty demotic which is capable of much greater flexibility than the solemn mimeticism of our middle-class novelists.
This latest novel is as funny and as inventive as its predecessors, up to a point. Peter, or what used to be known as the 'hero', is growing up the hard way, knocking around with his pal, the violent and vulgar Geezer, getting occasionally randy and occasionally employed. This of course is a common theme, but Ian Cochrane manages some quick, broad strokes of narrative which bring a situation immediately to life, and he has an instinctive rightness of emphasis that pares any scene down to its essentials. Here is Geezer trying it on: "She asked him, no word of his marrying, and he says 'I'm not that mad!' Then he asks Ma if she still loves him and she says 'You never get any wiser.' He puts his dirty hands around Janet and she says `Away on' and I say 'Don't trust him' and she says 'I don't.' Sure you can't trust anybody, he says and Ma says that bread has gone up another penny. He says that everything's gone up but the skirts. Ma says 'you are not wise' and he says he was neither wise nor otherwise." Practical criticism might unearth a certain hatred of sexuality here, and a self-disgust that emerges in the manner in which characters are reduced to caricature, but on the surface it is all very amusing. The constant, present tense allows people and events to run easily with one another inside the stream of unknowing and persistent 'life.' And from it all a credible picture of Peter comes through: introverted, easily hurt, anxious to please and even more anxious not to display his feelings to a world which has very little to do with him: "I felt self-contained and thought of all sorts of things I could invent — all kinds of cartoons I could draw." The book is extremely funny, and Cochrane has an ear for those conversational quirks and catchphrases that are so much more amusing on the page than they are when simply heard and forgotten. But there does come a point when the comedy of sharp description deserts Ian Cochrane — or, more likely, he deserts it — and the book becomes much more garish and considerably more self-indulgent. Peter becomes too important to Cochrane, who invests him with such sullen power that Peter threatens to break out of the frame which has just been created around him, and to become all but unrecognisable. He suffers from a heavily over-wrought nervous breakdown after a pub brawl, and he is carted off to a mental hospital from which he eventually escapes. As a leit-motif to this authorial fantasy,
the external events of the novel become melodramatic and frankly incredible: there is an accident which is far too nasty to be interesting and some of the characters of the book become, in every sense, disfigured. As soon as Cochrane abandons his prose for the sake of Peter's maudlin interior life, the novel becomes sentimental. Perhaps Cochrane is too close to his hero, and it may be that his fine style is too much like "all kinds of cartoons I could draw", but the art should be more important than the life. Mr Cochrane should be developing his language rather than his preoccupations, and then he may become a memorable writer.
Federick Broadie runs into the same quicksand. His first novel, Star Dust on the Pavement, was a powerfully nostalgic book, with a prose elaborate enough to fit its theme. Here, in The Dry Conspiracy, Broadie returns to the scenes of time past, but he does so from the perspective of the present, with an emphasis upon analysis and description rather than character and enactment. The distinction is a spurious one at best, of course, but it is part of the weakness of the book that it should be one which doggedly sticks to it. Yossel Ganger, an ex-violinist, is badly mutilated and lives alone; within his privacy, he dreams of a woman he may have met some years ago, and his persistent fantasies take him back to the streets of his childhood — before the War and before his disfigurement. What theme could be more romantic, and what theme could be more dangerous for a novelist who is not yet absolutely certain of his style and of his technique?
His writing is still as powerful and as harmonious as I had remembered it, and it still has that rhythmic attention to detail which leads very easily to the image of narrow streets and the even more constricted lives which are at the centre of Broadie's design. But there is something more hesitant and awkward about this second novel; it is as if the author is testing himself for a larger achievement, but is still not quite sure how to accomplish it: The Dry Conspiracy concerns itself with the prospect of change and the nature of moral responsiblity, not the lightest or the easiest of themes, but since Mr Broadie is a philosopher by training he kills his dialectic with kindness and does not rely enough upon the power of his images. He creates examples, and the characters who are grouped around Ganger — principally, his neighbours, the mysterious Manlys and a Cockney tart — stay perilously close to the edge of contrivance. Too much of the novel is taken up by the discussion and analysis of themes which, at the most elementary level, have to be seen to be believed.
But when Broadie stops fussing over his preoccupations, stands back and allows the images of his novel to appear they are often very striking and very original. I remember one very clearly, one which he repeats from his first novel and which recalls the illusory happiness of childhood, no less accurate for being untrue: "A picture of the children running along round the lamplighter and dancing round him night after night . . . " This is a flawed and disconcerting book, top-heavy with argument but still illuminated by those stray scenes and phrases which stay in the mind. And there is still Broadie's prose, which retains its confidence and which it is a pleasure to read: "What had he come for? Whatever it really had been, in this artificial void, here on this particular ground, he'd got it. Anything further he'd have to dream about. How can anything matter when this is the end?"
Peter Ackroyd is the literary editor of The Spectator Benny Green is on holiday. His 'Talking o Books' column will be resumed next week
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