Fiction
ONE taps, as a matter of course, at the barometer of contemporary fiction in the hall. No change. For years now, it seems, it has been stuck at the same place—somewhere between " Promising " and " Fairly Good." With a slight feeling of irritation perhaps that there is no sign of a move towards " Brilliance " one passes on up the stairs to business. " Where," everyone asks, " are the new writers ? " It depends, of course, on what you mean by " writer." Seldom can there have been so many intelligent, sensitive, competent, fairly good writers of fiction at work. (The very staleness of the high-class epithets emphasises the point.) Here for instance are Messrs. King, Prebble, Pember and Tennyson all in one week, and there are few weeks when one or two writers of equal standard
do not appear. But if you mean " Where are the giants? Where are the equivalents of Hardy, Forster, Joyce and Virginia Woolf? ", then indeed you must be content with an echo. New fiction seems glutted with very good second-class men.
If one judges the writers on the above list by their present books, all at one moment or other might be considered for firsts, all would
end up with very, good seconds. Mr. King is a border-line case perhaps he should have just scraped a first after all. Never Again is the story of one year in the life of an impressionable ten-year-old boy of the upper middle classes. And lest such a bald description should make it sound like just another book about childhood, it should be added that this one is particularly fresh, vivid and free from senti- mentality, and, after a slowish start, extremely readable. When Hugh Craddock's Anglo-Indian parents are killed and his Indian home destroyed in a fire, he is passed indifferently from hand to hand by a succession of conventional foster-parents and school-masters. In spite of the devastating effect on the boy of their accumulated arrogance, complacency and stupidity, he succeeds in the end in working out his own basis for a happy and healthy life. One knows well enough that there are only too many adults like Uncle Kingsley and Aunt Megs who think they know how children should be dealt with, and too many school-masters like Mr. Baldstone. Uncle Kingsley, since he reads The Spectator, may even read this review. If he can bring himself to read Never Again with honesty, it can hardly help having a chastening effect on him. It is scarcely worth mentioning the weaknesses of a book in which the merits are so positive, but some of the conversation between Hugh and his school- friend seems unnaturally' precocious, and there are far too many dreams.
John Prebble's The Edge of Darkness is another book in which sound modest writing may have a chastening effect on the reader. It must always be chastening to be made to understand the impact on other people of powerful experiences which one has not shared. And it is just this communication of the depth of war experience that Mr. Prebble achieves so admirably. In the first part of the book he follows individual members of a searchlight unit through the fighting in Europe of autumn '44 and spring '45. There are few gruesome horrors—the unit is almost always behind the fighting— but the effect on individual minds of the devastation, exhilaration and self-emancipation of war are perhaps all the more vivid because of that. And if anyone is still wondering why soldiers find it difficult to settle down to civilian life, he or she will be wiser after reading this book. The second half of the book, which deals with the aftermath in Hamburg and a tepid affair between one of the soldiers and.the widow of a Nazi colonel, is less good.
It is, in fact, unevenness such as this, or rather failure to make a talented whole out of a good deal of talented writing, that is the hall-mark of all these writers. Mr. Pember's book The Nee&e's Eye, for instance, gives every indication of a first-class writer's mind at work and yet, as a whole, leaves a singularly ragged and ineffectual impression on the reader. The book has almost no total effect at all —and certainly not the one ascribed to it on the dust jacket, which is putting-off to the reader and unfair to Mr. Pember. He is too good a writer to interpret the dark confusion of late adolescence solely in terms of politics. Certainly Harold ends up in the Party— or something very like it—but one feels it is unlikely that he will spend the rest of his life there. There is a great deal of careful characterisation in The Needle's Eye, some of it good—Harold, the nineteen-year-old Catharine, and her rather pathetic Left-wing father —some less so (the Rev: and Mrs. Hanson). But perhaps it is all a little too careful. Too often one seems to be breathing the rarefied atmosphere of a hot-house, examining a lot of carefully cultured plants.
One of the advantages of producing a book of short stories as opposed to a novel is that unevenness in the book as a whole hardly
matters. The best of Mr. Hallam Tennyson's six stories in The Wall of Dust (the story that gives its name to the book, for instance, and the terrifying In the Desert) are very good indeed. If he lapses, as he does once or twice, our enjoyment of the good stories is not affected. All are set in Italy or the Middle East in the closing stages of the war, but the time is irrelevant, for these are essentially stories of peace. Mr. Tennyson's ability for observing character in the same detached placid way in which he observes the Italian country- side is both remarkable and delightful. His most tiresome defect is easy to identify, for it is the most fatal one that can possibly afflict a short-story writer. It is simply that he is liable to lose the impetus of his story and become just a little boring.
ROBERT REEL
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