Fallen Idols.
The Emigration of Sergey Ivanovich, By Richard Freeborn. (Hodder and Stoughton, 16s.)
RELIGION is `in.' It's an okay subject to knock and two of this week's novels knock it, one seriously and in depth, the' other superficially. The first, Leslie Hedge's After the Flesh, is the story of an Anglo-Catholic priest who has, as a student, taken a vow of celibacy not asked for by his religion but of his own free will. When a fellow priest, who took the vow with him, decides to marry, Hugh Alderton is shocked and disgusted; he has his own 'love affair' with Christ, spiritual orgasms and ecstasies. Yet gradually he becomes embroiled in physical affairs, all the more desperate and lustful after his long chastity. And as he does so he becomes increasingly aware of the faults of religious dogma, the laws against contraception, for ex-
ample, and against marrying divorcees—laws which stand in the way of human happiness. With the final revelation that his own incumbent is having an affair with the male organist while attacking Hugh's promiscuity, he decides to renounce his orders. It is an agonising decision; he faces an empty future. The novel is well- written, evocative yet economical, and clever in its development from religious fervour to psycho- pathic lewdness and the collapse of values.
Alan Hackney—author of Private's Progress and I'm All Right Jack—has produced a new funny book, Let's Keep Religion Out of This. No doubt the film rights are already sold; it is very visual, with the bespectacled Vicar fall- ing into the new swimming pool, taking tramps and tarts into the Vicarage and finally going off in' a rocket to bring Christianity to outer space. Let's Keep Religion Out of This is destined for the cinema. As a novel I don't much care for it.
Elizabeth Jenkins is concerned with Chris- tianity, too, in her new novel, Brightness. An earlier book, The Tortoise and the Hare, is one which has stayed with me in extraordinary detail, but I am not sure that Brightness will be re- membered in the same way, although there are similarities of style and setting. It doesn't have quite the same force as that story of an unusual marriage triangle, but it attempts to answer spiritual questions as well as physical ones. Cer- tainly it is a very moving book. The main characters are two middle-aged women, one widowed, both with an adored son. But Marion Sudgen is spoilt, childish, selfish and nouveau- riche, and her son Derek has always been in- dulged. When he failed at school, his mother consoled herself that where others might pass
examinations, Derek was one of Nature's suc- cesses. Richard Lambert, on the other hand, is in his first year at Cambridge and is obviously destined for a career in the Church.
Halfway through the book, Derek Sudgen, speeding in his new five-thousand-pound yellow Italian sports car, kills Richard Lambert. The final chapters explores the minds of the men's mothers and the way in which they come to terms with the accident, one by moving from the district, the other—with a pastor's help— trying to understand the questions concerned with life and death that her son sought to answer and intensifying her unity with him by doing so. The brightness of the title is the brightness which emanates from this almost too good young man. I thought there were too many fringe characters diverting one from the central core; yet they do build up to a sense of knowing a whole community in an intensely realistic way which Miss Jenkins has demonstrated before.
The Emigration of Sergey lvanovich, by Richard Freeborn, is also, in its way, about a loss of faith—the disillusion of a Communist Party member under the Stalin regime. At the time of Stalin's death, when the crowds were gathering to view his body in the Hall of Columns, Sergey Ivanovich also lies dying and his story is told in feverish flashbacks. It begins with his bourgeois background, traces his enthu-1 siastic revolutionary student days, his service in the army of the Czar during the First World War, his part in the Revolution, his inspectorship of the Collectives, his disillusion at the purges of the Thirties and the demand that he should de- nounce his friend and colleague.
Any book of this sort must, I suppose, stand comparison with the novels of Arthur Koestler,
especially with Darkness at Noon. It does not have anything like Koestler's savage cynicism— after all, he actually is a Disillusioned Com- munist, whereas Richard Freeborn is a very English observer. Yet his work is remarkable for his insight into the Russian mind and his descriptive passages of the Russian landscape are often beautiful and, one feels, authentic. Nevertheless, I found it rather an effort to read, perhaps because in 1963 it all seems rather
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