New Novels
MR. NEWBY has a curious taste, or perhaps talent is the word, for the disconcerting. He has you constantly round-eyed. Not at any- thing horrific, or anything, in the normal sense of the word, shock- ing. It is simply that his world is full of mild shudders, and pot- holes, and obscure irrationality. You feel in it like a townsman who, in an innocuous-looking field, touches one of those wires that give shocks to wandering cows.
Egypt—Farouk's, at that—is just the field for him to string round with electric wires and booby traps. The Picnic at Sakkara fairly gleams with the rolling eyeball, the enchanted affront, the upside-downness of heroism. Mr. Newby has suddenly taken on tremendous spirits, a sort of spiritual sun-tan. Never has he shown this degree of exuberance, this cock-eyed deliberation. Into a lotus-land where 'they had all dropped into a pocket of time where ordinary chronology did not operate and where motion was arrested' he has dropped something else, a stooge-hero don called Edgar Perry, no doubt a grisly little man to meet but with that dogged gracelessness, that dampness and dimmery that can so easily become endearing. He keeps losing his spectacles and claim-
ing proudly but untruly that he cannot see an inch ahead without them; yet he follows his nose with the alarming success and deplorable leer of a Giles baby with a catapult. It is not quite irony that puts him there : rather a sort of inspired and enormous fatuity that has invaded the Pasha's palace where he gives English lessons and the lecture room where he talks on 'George Eliot and the Crisis of the Novel' and where, when he shrieks 'Hooligans!' at the rioting class, the students write it down and ask for its etymology. Devotion—of all emotions the one best fitted for comedy—is in the air : love sprawls and collapses before it. Devo- tion spurned, devotion ridiculous, devotion unkempt and offensive and faithful; devotion surviving that (to the murderer) most humiliating occurrence, a murder that fails to come off. Mr. Newby has harnessed to a masterly precision that slithery beast, inconsequence, and, from this severer corner of the world where things march, as a rule, in step and in sequence, his book reads almost like an idyll. In comedy of this sort he is unsurpassed.
We are back with a bump at Morgan, Alabama, to the world where inconsequence is inadmissible and everything, tape- recorded and photographed by an unobstrusive Mr. Heath, is in its proper place. Violent Saturday ticks neatly and inexorably through twenty-four hours of Morgan life, Morgan on Friday evening preparing for this and that next day, fishing, shopping, or just a hangover. Three men arrive at the station, register at the hotel as Thomas, Blake, and Brown, and call each other by the shadier names of Harper, Preacher, and Dill. Morgan's clocks move round to the Saturday drama, and at five to three sharp the three visitors raid the bank. This is roughly the technique of The Bridge of San Luis Rey and so many others since : why these people, why this particular moment? Mr. Heath's first novel is an almost gruesomely accomplished affair, with the author sitting always unseen in darkness.
Mr. Heath knows where he is going : almost too neat-footed, he skirts the dangers of novel-writing with the air of a prim-nosed cat. Mr. Selvon, in An Island is a World, does not : he rootles in that dangerous dustbin the soul, and comes up smeared and sur- pri§ed (1 speak technically; his book is in no way improper) at the garbage. Bolder than Mr. Heath, he invites comparison with many predecessors, having written one of those lengthy and attractive, but so frequent, accounts of the growing pains, the early loves, the mistakes, wanderings, philosophisings and friend- ships of a very young man; and of the first pause where he sat down under a tree to analyse and take stock; in fact, a Sinister Street, but by a Trinidadian of Indian parentage. As you might expect, since we all have something encyclopedic and fact- grubbing about us that cannot help being fascinated by the strange and new, the parts about shopkeeping life in Port of Spain are a good deal more interesting than the hero's efforts to set the world right. What is also interesting, though perhaps disappointing, is how closely the cast of an intelligent young West Indian's mind seems to resemble that of a young European; how, apart from the conscious passages of description and local colour, this novel might just as well have been written by an Englishman : a vaguely disturbed, spoilt, talented young man at odds with life till he finds the right girl. It is absurd to complain that Mr. Selvon has got away, as undoubtedly he has, from his island; absurd to expect the vision of a primitive from one who is at least half sophisticated But Mr. Selvon at this stage has lost the directness of the one before acquiring the complexity of the other, a common occur- rence in a world where the eye of innocence is given spectacles at the earliest age and in the remotest places.
ISABEL QUIGLY
Previous page
