The way is all so very plain
Jonathan Keates
MORTAL SINS by David McLaurin Duckworth, £14.99, pp. 250 In the days, now long gone, of the land- lady and the boarding house, a selling- point calculated to attract patrons was the expression 'Good plain cooking'. From the planetary distance created by Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and a whole succeed- ing foodie generation, it is hard to see what the allure might have been. Doubtless there was rejoicing in heaven when a hard- ened epicure remorsefully consumed a plate of treacle sponge or grew enraptured over boiled greens, but the hackneyed implication of virtue in simplicity now seems insufferably priggish.
Occasionally, however, this plain=good principle has its charms for novel-readers. Gagging on stylistic refinement, tricksy little games with time and location, 'big' themes handled with an obvious cringe in the direction of prize juries, we turn grate- fully to the unpretending narrative, its issues and characters signposted with a graceful economy and its authorial ego held firmly in check. David McLaurin's first novel, The Bishop of San Fernando, was an obvious example, hailed with relief by jaded reviewers who hastened to make flattering comparisons with Conrad and Graham Greene in their praise of its clarity and moral sinew.
In Mortal Sins McLaurin has staked out a little more of the territory claimed in the earlier novel. Once again the setting is exotic, an unspecified South American republic whose sophistications suggest Chile or Argentina, in which the regime of megalomaniac army officers and a bungling police force predictably wobbles towards collapse. Roberto Enriques, a personable young cavalry officer, finds himself hired by a dubious assembly of brass-hats to ferret out anti-government activity among the dis- affected. His credentials on the surface are impeccable and he endures, with only a small accident to his trousers, the mock execution designed to test his nerve. From here it is, of course, the shortest of steps to a world where achievement is measured by the rapid evanescence of anything like scruple or conscience. When Nicola Nickle- by, a gormless Surrey ingenue despatched to the republic by her parents to learn Spanish, is mistakenly seized as a subver- sive, raped and driven to suicide, Roberto, mired with complicity in the affair, begins his slide towards damnation.
McLaurin, currently studying Theology at the Gregorian University in Rome, has cleverly dovetailed this nemesis with its exact opposite, the attainment of grace through self-denial by the callow young lieutenant Rodolfo Tanucci, whose simple acts of faith are crowned by his assumption of a Franciscan habit. A saintly aura is already detectable when, swimming to safe- ty during a military putsch, he wanders into the friary clad only in bathing trunks. Fol- lowing his abrupt disappearance, leaving only a pair of wet footmarks, the fathers are convinced they have encountered an angel unawares.
The nature of this epiphany typifies the book's homoerotic undercurrent. Women, a pneumatic mistress for Roberto and a society fixer who flits to London at the earliest hint of danger, are merely decora- tive in a world whose commerce of bruised ideals is carried on among young men emerging from the shower and one of whose key encounters, between Roberto and his friend Fritz, takes place in a Turk- ish bath. Arguably the most interesting character in Mortal Sins, Fritz finds his proper place in the story only through remaining permanently detached from the moral dilemmas threatening to impale Roberto.
Themes such as the nature of sin and responsibility, and that curious Catholic obsession with trying to persuade non-Catholics that within them lurks an unacknowledged allegiance to Mother Church, are what interest McLaurin rather than the sensual enjoyment, relished by other novelists, of furnishing the reader with backgrounds, perspectives and descriptions. The absence of such pictorial dimensions gives the book a strangely pas- sionless air which its author can scarcely have intended. Good plain cooking is all very well, but when it assumes a seminarian asceticism which goes with hard beds and fleshly mortification, your sinful reviewer, though admiring McLaurin's seriousness and lucidity, prefers to rot his teeth on the corrupting sugarplums of enhancing detail and verbal seduction.
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