Fiction
Sending up
Peter Ackroyd
The Abbess of Crewe Muriel Spark (Macmillan £2. 00)
Hers Al Alvarez (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £2.75)
The Life and Death of Rochester Sneath Humphry Berkeley (Davis-Poynter £2.50) Muriel Spark's theme is that orient and immortal cheat, lasting from everlasting to everlasting, the wickedness beneath starched habits. Watergate turned it into opera bouffe but The Abbess of Crewe rescues it for straight humour in an electronic pastoral where springs do not fail and where silence is elected only, with the aid of some very expensive tape equipment. Abbess Alexandra rules her convent with a platinum hand — 'The trees, of course, are bugged" — sweeping through her oval gardens like an expletive, fingering the monitor hidden in a statuette of the Infant of Prague, talking about herself in the third person, and for light relief reaping victims wherever she falls: "Be that as it may, Winifrede is in it up to her neck, and the scandal stops at Winifrede."
Sister Winifrede is to be blamed for a little jeu d'esprit which elevated Sister Alexandra over the popular Sister Felicity ('This morning the polls put her at 42 per cent") in the election of a new Abbess, a caper which has embroiled two Jesuit novices and a great deal of camera-work. Sister Winifrede, " `one of the finest nuns it has been my privilege to meet,'" is ordered to buy the pair's silence in a downstairs lavatory in Selfridges (rather gilding the lily, I think) but, as nuns should know by now, you cannot burn the candle at both ends. The game is up, and Abbess Alexandra orders all of her flock to sign a full confession, beginning "I confess to Alnighty God, to blessed Mary ever Virgin ...". We are all guilty. It is an unashamedly little novel, with more than a trace of Firbank about it. The book is tied too closely to the mundane reality of Washington to quite manage his baroque cool, but if Miss Spark has allegorical ideas above her station I did not notice them. It is a shrewd and funny book.
If, on the other hand, you enjoy, romantic melodrama, and there must be people who do, Hers is yours. Her is Julie, a lady of thirty-two who looks like a woman of fourteen (this is known as the thin edge of romance) and is married to Charles, a professor of Renaissance
Spectator opectator November 16, 1974 Literature; him is a post-graduate student, known fetchingly as Sam. If I read another novel set in "one of our older and more prestigious universities" I shall forget I ever went there. Mr Alvarez is adept at these occasional c1ich6s, and his book bears all the scars of a first novel in its clumsy attempts to leave nothing unsaid: Julie is "sly, quick, sideways-on . . . mocking, plangent . • gentle, regretful . . . slim and quick . • • slender, waif-like," and all within two pages. On, page ten, "she never said the expected thing' but Alvarez must be exaggerating since oh page thirteen she is saying, "But I'm a mother now, and soon I'm going to be thirty. I'm due for a life of my own, Charles." When she becomes "the only begetter of several sheaves of love poems, mostly in lower case, and the heroine of a rather smart first novel by a thin young man who swiftly disappeared int° television," her outer life becomes as predictable as her inner torment. The ensuing plot does nothing to dispel that sinking feeling of deja lu. Sam and Julie cling to each other "like two drowning people" (Alvarez must have been reading a dictionarY quotations); Charles learns all, and goes for a long car-drive during which he suddenlY remembers large chunks of his past; Julie becomes seriously ill and goes home ta Germany; Sam returns to his Jewish parents (there must be an irony here somewhere, but I did not stay long enough to discover it) who saY very Jewish things; Charles tries to commit suicide; Julie jilts Sam in favour of the junkie son of a war-criminal; Charles and Julie are eventually re-united, having at last caught up with the reader and realised that none of the above really matters. It is one of the little ironies of life that the critic who once wrote an essay entitled, as far as I can remember from my schoolboy daYs; "Beyond Gentility" should write such a gentee: novel, brimming as it is with conventioria' dialogue, conventional characters and evf°1-en conventional virtues (there is a lorry driver, example, who is obviously meant to be the salt of the earth and who knows "what's whaQ Alvarez is clearly trying to make some Po'n.„' about the fatuity of literary or acadettil"; standards when contrasted with life, love and war-criminals. He must be very impressed bz books and Professors to treat them with suc'' open contempt, but his own book relies s: doggedly upon the conventions of romaric_ that it becomes very derivative indeed. it creaks like a set of library doors. Rochester Sneath sprang forth from th,e playing-field fully grown, always in view of hi!, slight acquaintance, always most grateful anu privileged, given to understand that such is the case, fond of exclamation marks and the rilore obtrusive forms of full-stop. Mr Berkeley ha' created a headmaster out of thin air, reversing • the usual progress of such things, and set hira loose upon the learned and humourlessi teachers who run our public-schools as they were gentlemen. Mr Berkeley is one of owe finest humorists, as those who have had pleasure of dining with him will remember, an..„el it was a mere quirk of fate that diverted from fiction into politics, although in his case the boundaries are very thin ones. In this relentlessly slim volume, he hast collected a distinguished company and 1)11,0 them through fire: visiting Bishops are madev,te shudder, ladies collapse in heaps and have to taken out in blankets, and boys are seen London clubs "without any women present, Rochester Sneath endures it all like the rock ri! is, sending only the occasional letter on delicate topic, and receiving real and docti_t mented replies. I believe he has now left his at Selhurst, and is working for the Council in South America. His ties hav,A grapefruit ait h littelealmwoaryes wgaarissh but he is still the 01`. Peter Achroyd is( the literary editor of 'The Spectator
Previous page
