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Games of Chance

Peter Ackroyd

44. Game of Patience Francis King (Hutchinson t2.75)

Scandalous Woman Edna O'Brien (Weiden,!!t1 and Nicolson £2.50)

Q.50) Blackwater Pauline Neville (Hamish Hamilton Of all games of fortune, 'patience' is the least ,,usefill and the most pleasurable, demanding a 'Legree of solipsism which would normally be unhealthy in an English adult but which becomes a positive duty in times of war, when !lations are fighting over 'truths' and causes. So it is _ in Francis King's latest novel, the end of 'i)ver!iich is by no means a conclusion: "Red was

bl ing placed on red; black was being placed on

ack; no sequence was being followed". aornething has obviously gone wrong, but even a close reading of A Garrie of Patience will give You little clue as to what it might be. Mr King jhust goes to show that if you take a number of ,funan situations, and arrange them in roughly enronological fashion, nothing whatever will Merge. But Mr King is a fastidious writer, and would not admit to anything so tragic. His is a

Picture of little people amidst a prospect of the arced War: Marion 'Thurloe owns a farm and is 'reed to keep the company of Valery, a

,voinntary albeit nervous evacuee, and Roy, a onch' whose sights are set so high that he can frequently see over his principles. Meanwhile, a IP3art3i of airmen arrive to establish a line of airage balloons. The invasion of the 'outsider' Into a small and precious community has been a *I.taPie of fiction since Oroonoko, but Mr King as_a way of making familiar things seem new. Ile is a considerably stylist, and his prose is Practically invisible. It is exact enough to f3nveY social detail at the same time as it r 'pops downward to convey the more mun',_ane passions of love and death, Scenes and Phrases are carefully balanced against each :31!her, and no one mood is allowed to dominate t e novel. People are always waving goodbye, ;oat at the same time they always manage to 00‘,„it,ridiculous. Which is to say that he has a marvellous ,s,ense of that remote and gawky period. Lines

like "Oh, Marion, it's lovely. Must be pre-war"

ar'e to be cherished by all those who see a lf,niverse in just a speck of HaTrods. A Game of

Eatience is rather like a locked room which has 'leen re-opened at last; all the objects which You recall from childhood are still there, but

are much smaller than you remember t1 em. Mr King is too fine a novelist, of course, to use or even hint at so vulgar an image and I Must take such mawkish imaginings upon my oWn head. Edna O'Brien looks backward, too, to a sweet ,e_sPecial scene but in her case it is the dirty and itYPocritical Ireland which Flann O'Brien parcelled up and dropped into a pint-pot. Miss _u,I3rien is a more conventional writer than ,Nolan, but when she withdraws her powers or sensual perception and retires into the Privacy of her own mind she can come up with s°1rie very amusing lines. A Scandalous Woman is a collection of short ,a,nd shorter stories; the eponymous heroine of

'Ile first is Eily, the village beauty who

,SoMetimes wears a cerise dress with slits up to ',ler side and "she was called a fashion plate". e comes to a bad end for a short time, but _eventually slips into that vacuous benevolence which is characteristic of those who have been Worn or beaten into shape. All of this is told in a self-consciously artless prose, which is by no nlearis the same thing as celare artem. There

are some very nice touches, and the whole story has a humour and a detail which is characteristic of nostalgia at its best. It is, naturally, dampened somewhat in the more contemporary tales. 'Over' is the monologue of 'the other woman', and loses something in the translation. Most of the other stories are on similarly romantic themes, with 'The Favourite' and The Creature' full of the loud desperation of women who have come to realise the 'truth' about their middle aged selves. The plots don't in general differ from conventional magazinese, except at those moment when Miss O'Brien's plangent and continuous style takes over. She has a talent for keeping her prose in a perpetual present, without much complexity but with a wealth of impression and fine phrasing. I rather like it.

Try as I might, I could not like Blackwater. Miss Neville is so obviously a novelist of fine feelings and honest intent that I feel rather a cad in saying that I found her characters tedious and her prose insufferable. It is insufferable because it is predictable: a maid called Dorcas might always say, "Well, be you ready for the day?" to her elderly mistress, , Cella Labasse, who will always reply "There was no colour under the moon . . . only . . . stretched silver" and we know . . . that she is mysterious ... and senile.

Cella Labasse is seventy that very day, and Blackwater (named after the Hammer horror house of which she is mistress) is concerned with the apparent fact that her family never quite get to congratulate her. You would be forgiven for thinking that nothing much happens, and it may be in recognition of this that Miss Neville reserves her passion for her adjectives. Cella's husband, Dr Angus Gillespie, "was a man of little physical colour, but with an inner disturbed intensity". Cella's daughter, Valerie, is called by someone or other a "beautiful misfit" and her illegitimate grandson says things like "cool" or "scene" and has a cat fetchingly known as "Freakie." It reminds me of my school days back in 1967. The cloying familiarity of it all inevitably turns Miss Gillespie's people into 'characters'; they wake up and remember things so perfectly that I could swear someone had been writing them down for them; they have 'feelings' that appear to be hovering outside them somewhere

and remainresolutely transparent.; and they 'think' a great deal about 'life'. These are my own italics, but the thoughts are so generally familiar that they can afford the luxury of becoming a genre. Although they do happen to be more coherent than the narrative itself, which is glimpsed fitfully as if through a fog as thick as that which, naturally, surrounds Blackwater itself.