Auberon Waugh on female novelists

Two lady novelists from the former colonies compete for our entertainment this week.

To prefer one against the other might seem ungallant, and there is little to choose between them, but I have put Buck first on the grounds that her novel is longer.

Jagat, the glamorous Maharana of Amarpur wakes in his palace to discover a mysterious but apparently familiar warmth in his loins. He appeases this for the mo- ment by a visit to his wife, Moti; who is in love with a Catholic missionary priest, Father Francis Paul. Of course, Father Paul is no ordinary Catholic priest, but the younger son of a Protestant earl, who was 'highly indignant that a son of his should be a priest in a rival form of Christianity?

Whenever Father Paul sits in his desert hills, his mind's eye sees 'his mother in the sitting room at her desk in Bickford Castle, the rose-scented air stirring her short white curls.' Additional sub-plots are the love of the Maharana's daughter for a young American hotel-builder who comes to turn one of the Maharana's palaces into a luxury hotel, and the search for his son, killed in the border wars against China. But the book is mainly concerned with the love of Rajat for an American girl called Brooke Westley, and if one were writing Shakes- pearian criticism one would say that the image of the Maharana's warm loins was the recurring theme, redolent of promise for what eventually happens on page 274 when the Maharana finally climbs into bed with her, to discover she is a virgin:

—I want complete union—with you."

'His voice was husky in his throat and he was silent, waiting. What was she thinking, what was she remembering while he waited? He did not know.

'She was thinking only about love. Yes, she loved this man, this stranger. Their worlds were not the same, their very history was different.'

And so it goes on, until the happy con- clusion is reached which Miss Buck has been promising for so long. Of course, one suspected that something was up when they met in the lounge of an expensive hotel in New Delhi. He picks her up, and she immediately relapses into some lady novelist's version of Middle English: '"I'll meet you here at eight? We might dine together," he said.

"I shall be here—over yonder in that gold chair ..."'

When she appears, in a black dress, 'ankle-length and clinging' it is obvious that the evening is not going to end with- out a trip to see the Taj Mahal by moon- light. So they go, after she has explained that she has not yet 'made connections with life'. Poor girl, she has to endure another 150 pages and a second visit to the Taj Mahal by moonlight before she finally makes the desired connection.

'There it stood, suffused and softened by the moonlight, so full, so glowing, that the marble building, shining white, seemed to float upon the landscape. No, more than moonlight, it was their awareness of one another which inspired beauty with new meaning. They stood speechless, gazing at the scene . . . Now instinctively their hands clasped.'

Well, it all ends happily. Brooke receives a pi-jaw from Father Paul and decides to leave for America, a wiser, more fulfilled woman. The daughter, called Veera. de- cides to marry her Indian fiancé after all, because the east is east and the west is west and the 'twain can't really meet, even if they make a determined effort and talk Middle English to each other. Moti is rebuffed by Father Paul. So there it all is —the Taj ,Mahal by moonlight, the curly headed Countess in Rickford Castle, all in a mjlange of oriental spices. I don't know quite how authentic it is: Do high-caste Hindus really eat meat and drink alcohol? My impression is that they don't, although I am not prepared to be dogmatic about it. But nothing matters much, beyond the fact that Miss Buck's book will sell in its hun- dreds of thousands, and richly deserves to. To condemn it for being corny is to con- demn the human race. No doubt there are occasions when this is a useful and effec- tive thing to do, but not in a review of an amazing new novel about hot-pants Maharanas and curly countesses. Her world is not such a bad place, when all is said and done.

One cannot be so certain about the world of Miss Lessing. The first 133 pages are completely unreadable. They are largely taken up with describing the hallucinations of someone who is mad, which means that Miss Lessing can indulge in 133 pages of associative, sub-poetic ramblings of a tedium which my faltering pen can scarcely begin to describe:

'Sucked into sound, sucked into sea, a swinging sea, boom, shhhh, boom, shhhh, boom ... thud thud, thud thud, thud thud, thud thud, thud thud, in and out, in and out, yes, no. yes. no, yes, no. Black and white, coming and going, out and in, up and down, no, yes, no, yes, no, yes, one, two, one, two, one, two, and the three is me, the three is me, THE 111REE IS ME

And so it goes on. Well, I had been paid to read the book, and so I did, blinding and swearing at Doris Lessing, at her publishers, Jonathan Cape, at the printer, Mr Ebenezer Baylis of Worcester, at the binders, called G. and J. Kitkat and at everybody asso- ciated with the wretched , venture. Most of all, I decided that the people to blame for my torment, who should be publicly whipped for the nuisance they were causing, were the novel reviewers who allow this sort of thing to pass. Any writer who thinks he can get away with it will write the purest rubbish, just as painters will splash a few idiotic smears of paint on canvas and call it a picture if there are critics around who are halfwitted enough to take it seriously, and purchasers who are in- secure enough in their own judgment to buy it. In places Miss Lessing adopts the form of typography most usually associated with verse. Nonsense is too kind a word since it suggests wit, or at least a humorous intention. The only word which accurately describes the egomaniac meandcrings of Miss Doris Lessing in her first 133 pages is rubbish.

But if you start the book on page 133 and read on, you find a pleasant, unpreten- tious novelette, completely self-contained, about a middle-class academic's experiences in a lunatic asylum. To anyone with experience of mental hospitals it is not entirely convincing—the idea of tension between two doctors disagreeing On the treatment of one patient bears no relation to mental treatment on the National Health Service—and the descriptions of hallucinatory experience under sedation are wildly, ludicrously wrong, but the unfolding of the patient's previous history through letters is skilful and there is a convincing description of the mysterious solidarity which exists among mental patients in hospital.

The book includes a mysterious paean in praise of Tito's communism, and for Churchill's ignominious betrayal of Mihailo- vitch in Yugoslavia, but the purpose of the book is apparently to promote health. I rather doubt whether it will have much in- fluence in that field. Lessing's second prop- osition is that disordered minds comprehend truths which are not otherwise apparent. Whether that is so or not, and I rather doubt it, her book sheds no light on the sort of per- ceptions we can expect when we finally go round the twist. Of the two, I judge that Buck leads by a nose from Lessing for this week's nomination.