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AnOlique and the King. By Sergeanne Colon. (Heinemann, 21s.) IN the central, most arresting episode of Neville 6 awes's uneven, talented, irascible novel, the Jamaican hero falls in with a sardonic little himself of other West Indians, retreating like nimself from the wounds and blandishments of Oxford. They appear only as voices, endlessly, richly and profanely raised in argument about colour, politics, art, colour again: identified simply by their islands. complexions, and the schools from which they won their scholarships 'Harrison College, Barbados; Wolmer's Boys' School, Kingston; Queen's Royal College, Port- ,°lApain. They arc real places, these elderly, honourable academies, and in a sense they are the subject of The Last Enchantment. It is good to see them given a kind of recognition, for they are the seed-beds of the remarkable phenomenon which is West Indian literature. Sixty or seventy Year ago (while Lugard was pacifying the Ugan- dan kingdoms, the first European expedition stumbling toward the caked altars of Benin), certain forgotten colonial governors and bishops founded the first real education for the dispersed et Africa. By accident of history and vague altruism, the first voice to speak for Africa was given to children who had never seen its shores; the first explanation of what wearing black skin means came from the backwater of the Carib- bean. Today the West Indians make a uniquely endowed group in English writing : one with a bitter corner on the market, engaged as no other can be with the main subject of our time. Their schools gave them another unique endowment. The Wes: Indians dislike being classed as English writers, preferring to regard their public as some future literate Caribbean nation rather than the British readers who actually buy the majority of their books. But they Possess a view of British life no other writers have, a critical perspective of salutary and merci- less radicalism. it is the viewpoint of men born outside national assumptions who have had Englishness—Keats, Shakespeare, cricket, Dr, Arnold, the lot—thrust intimately but alienly uPon them. Ramsey Tull, the hero of The Last nchantment, is the son of a small Jamaican banana-grower who has scraped to put him through a local grammar school. In revolt against all the premises of his education, he joins a tiny Party of extreme splinter-Socialists; but realises that their ill-printed broadsides and street battles cannot yet provide a native alternative to the obsequious Anglo-colonial culture he shares loathes. He wins an island scholarship to Oxfor8, rinlY to discover that he can never be an English- man either : even if he fulfilled all definitions, his skin excludes him from the imperial citizenship.
returns more or less broken, to try and piece together from the few solid facts he owns— family, the febrile Indian girl who loves him, the bright mother-soil of his lovely, divided Island—a life within his own lonely identity. A summary makes it sound self-pitying; in fact, the cook crackles with savage intelligence and self-
satire. IL has no real shape, and loiters over the heavily mythologised personality battles of Jamaican politics. But it's the liveliest, most subtle picture I've encountered of the colonial struggle to shed the instilled shame which seeks to hide coloured skin in borrowed clothes. Warren Tute's The Golden Greek is an ambi- tious effort to extend the promenade-deck range of his previous sea stories to the whole post-war revolution in mercantile shipping. On a thinly veiled portrait of the rise of the Onassis tanker empire, he grafts a romance which brings in the fortunes of British shipping since 1945. Kostas Levantikos marries for dynastic reasons the daughter of a Greek-American tycoon who con- trols most of the oil in the Middle East; but his soul-mate is Susan Mott. the British heiress to a great transatlantic line. Mr. Tute has a firm grasp of the shifting power-concentrations of international trade, and shows how the rise of State control of capital has created a new, extra- national class of millionaire freebooters, operat- ing under hired flags beyond the reach of national laws or taxes. He seems partially aware of their parasite status; but any moral feeling he may have about them is swamped by a beglamoured, Sunday Times dazzlement with their success, their yachts, their millions and general goldenness. Any dubious practices are excused as vivid, neo- Elizabethan enterprise, refreshing in contrast with drab Socialist bureaucracy. His novel should help future historians and philosophers to define the 'good' which we have never had it so.
Charity Blackstock's The Briar Patch is built on a nice idea—a finishing school for English young ladies which looks across the place of a small French town at a hostel for Jewish DP youths from Belsen and Buchenwald. Every time the well-brushed, anachronistic crocodile of rosy maidenhood sweeps forth on its way to church, it is followed by windowfuls of wolfish eyes which have seen all the century's horrors. All that Miss Blackstock has done is to make a nice novel of it: the sleepy young Irish beauty, Deirdre, discovers the face of violence and is saved from it by a sacrifice on the part of Max, oldest and wildest of the boys. The worth set on innocence seems high. but none of the other values are falsified; the boys' past experience is given its proper weight, with no hint of sentimen- tality. For once, we can be nice to niceness: it's a good, wide-hearted novel. What Kathleen Win- sor's heroine was to Restoration Whitehall, Ser- geanne Colon's Angelique is to the Versailles of the Sun King—a kind of Ambre Solaire. While Louis pants over her bodice, a pageant of the grand siecle passes behind. 'Have you seen Tar- tu& yet?' asks Madame de Sdvignd. Angelique, living to the hilt, has seen it twice.
RONALD BRY DEN
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