The Highsmith Jewel
Brown Lord of the Mountain. By Walter Macken. (Macmillan, 25s.) The Sacred Malady. By Anthony Campbell. (Chatto and Windus, 25s.) The Gates of the Forest. By Elie Wiesel. (Heine- mann, 25s.) THE fiction of Patricia Highsmith has been generously praised for its dry wit and scrupu- lous psychological realism; such works as Strangers on a Train and The Glass Cell clearly carried the crime and/or suspense novel well along the road to legitimacy. To devotees, Those Who Walk Away may serve as further evidence of this triumphal march; to me, however, it seems an example of admirable talent serving dubious ends. Character, dialogue and scene conspire to set the reader on an eager search for a hidden jewel which turns out to have been nothing but paste after all, and if the irony of that discovery is rendered at the reader's expense, it operates even more forcefully at the expense of the book itself.
The novel opens in Rome with a young American art dealer and his father-in-law stroll- ing home after a mediocre dinner; without warning, the older man, Edward Coleman, shoots his companion and vanishes in the shadows. The wound is superficial, and the following day Ray Garrett follows Coleman to Venice, where he is ensconced with his rich mistress and an elegantly dependent Italian boy. Garrett's wife has recently and unexpectedly committed suicide after a year of marriage. Coleman blames his son-in-law for permitting his daughter to face such a sordid death, and Garrett attempts with incredible patience to explain how poorly her sheltered childhood had prepared her to accept reality. But Coleman, still belabouring his idee Are, pushes Garrett into the bay outside Venice; after his rescue, Garrett surrenders his old identity, but Coleman is unaffected by remorse over the presumed murder, discovers the charade and attempts to kill his son-in-law once more, lives incognito himself for a time, and then makes a third bungled attempt at murder.
At times the novel verges on comic opera—the coincidences a trifle too improbable, the charac- ters too consistent in their fixations; this is where Miss Highsmith's cool, almost surgically precise prose serves her in good stead, and the novel unfolds in a series of carefully detailed episodes., But what, in the last unfolding, is revealed? The novel's potential is everywhere apparent and nowhere properly explored. Cole- man clings tenaciously to his vision of himself as an ideal father—refusing to concede that his over-indulgent love may make him partially accountable for his daughter's insecurity. Ray Garrett absolves himself of guilt as well: his ' wife was what she was, and although he adored her, catered to her whims and encouraged her talents, it was too late to `save' her. But Garrett, we uneasily sense, may be just as patently—though less obtrusively—wrong as his father-in-law, and in the fervour with which he seeks to show the older man his daughter's weakness, he may well be forgetting his own limitations. This is, at least, an ambiguity. sug- gested by the action Miss Highsmith has created and the characters she so adroitly sets in motion, but she merely pecks at the edges of the problems of conscience and love; enveloping Ray in the sentimentalised love, of the Italian peasant families who befriend him seems merely another
way of obscuring—or merely avoiding—the real 'mystery' which the novel suggests.
Brown Lord of the Mountain is a dish of Celtic twilight leftovers, but they have been genially warmed, and the dish is not, of course, without merits of its own. The story begins at the wedding feast of Donn Donnshleibhe, only son of the Lord of the Mountain, the somewhat derisive 'inherited' title of the leader of a remote village in Ireland. Reacting against all the forces of conformity and tradition which weigh on him, Donn leaves the community on his wedding night, deserting his pregnant bride in a quest to know something of the world beyond the mountain. Donn's real lesson in humanism comes not in the outside world where he has known the horrors of war and the depravities of civilisation, but in the closed world of the mountain: the last stage in his education comes with dramatic tardiness, and Walter Macken cannot entirely resist exploiting the ob- vious emotionalism of the conclusion, but throughout most of the novel sentimentality is held at bay both by the vigorous pace of the action and by the novelist's own indulgently critical vision.
Perhaps the miracles of faith-healing touch some strain of the eternal child in most of us, but The Sacred Malady makes light of fairy- tale appeal; it is a modern 'miracle' story told with an uneasy mixture of commercial slick- ness, sly contrivance, and two-fisted realism. A sceptical doctor, dying of Hodgkin's Disease, places himself in the care of a painter with the reputed ability to heal; he falls in love with the painter's wife, and during the idyllic weeks he spends with her in Crete, awaiting her husband's return, he reviews the entire shape of his life as it is outlined by the shadow of death; the subsequent romantic conclusions emerge with almost clinical predictability.
The work of Elie Wiesel, a Hungarian Jew liberated from Auschwitz, has been compared to that of Albert Camus, and in its persistently, triumphantly ambiguous tone The Gates of the Forest might also be compared with Richard Kim's The Martyred, a novel by a professed Camus disciple. A young Hungarian boy is saved from the Germans by the intervention of a name- less Jew who wishes to teach him 'how to value your life.' Gregor gives his protector his own name, and for decades he searches for this splendid 'phantom' in order to reclaim his own identity: the possibility of his death threatens to be the final, overwhelming proof that God has abnegated; The Gates of the Forest subtly records a moving, impassioned, often painfully graphic struggle against the daemons of nihilism and despair. DAVID D. GALLOWAY
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