Fiction
Great Mischief. By Josephine Pinckney. (Chapman and Hall. 8s. 6d.) WHEN you put down Tess of the D'Urbervilles your feelings are not, in spite of the last sentence, directed primarily against the ''resident of the Immortals. They are not in fact directed against anyone. They are too big for that, and too simple, amounting Only to an overwhelming conviction of the tragedy of Tess. When the rubber truncheons, the electric torturing machines and the horrifying mysteries of Room tot have finished their sport with Winston Smith, hero of Mr. Orwell's fascinating new book, you may Conceivably feel bitter against Big Brother (mythical dictator of Oceania and London in 1984), more probably you will have an over- whelming sense of the tragedy of civilisation, but you could hardly care less about Winston Smith. This is because Mr. Orwell has been interested in Smith not as a personality but as an instrument for analysing totalitarianism. Certainly he has his moments of humanity, though these are not often to be found in the rather flat love affair with his co-rebel, Julia. His touching discovery of signi- ficance in the " lost " nursery rhyme is more convincing. But although Nineteen Eighty-Four is a parable of humanism, strangely it is not the human beings in it who count. And for this reason, inictly as a novel, it must be classed as a failure.
But it is not " strictly a novel." Regard it, then, as satire. Mr. Orwell's ingenuity in devising details for this totalitarian society of .l
e future has been remarkable. The ever-present telescreens which �wvatch and blare propaganda simultaneously, and which can pick up lin increase in your heart-beats and use what you say in your sleep m evidence against you • the all too probable official language, Newspeak ; the fatuous, slogans (" War is Peace," "Orthodoxy is 'Unconsciousness ") ; the " facecrime " which would mean immediate Vaporising for so many of us—all this invention is in a class with Gulliver, Erewhon and Brave New World. And yet even as satire thereis a weakness. For the real power of satire lies in its ability o shock and surprise. The material dealt with may be familiar,
t it is the new twist that makes us see it differently which counts. There is no intellectual surprise in 1984. We knew all this before: that totalitarian parties are interested only in power, that they are capable of unpleasantness to an infinite degree, indifferent to the sufferings of " the proles," and conducive to the total extinction of the human spirit. "Stale news" is the last response that one expects a good satire to evoke. And yet it rises continually to the mind on reading Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Again the book has many qualities as a thriller. The first half is as exciting as one could wish. But there is a flaw here, too. Just at the point where the excitement becomes excruciating and Winston and Julia launch out into their revolt against the Party, Mr. Orwell maddeningly reminds us that all he's really interested in is the political implication of his story. He suspends the plot for thirty pages of Trotsky-Goldstcui-Orwell analysis of contemporary political trends. And for the rest of the book he is concerned only with establishing the fact that no refinement of horror is beyond the Party's reach, not even that of making a man wholly love and believe in something which he knows is false and hateful.
Compounded of novel, satire and thriller, and unsatisfactory as all three, Nineteen Eighty-Four is nevertheless a remarkable book. You may put it down, shdken, intrigued, or merely disappointed ; but one thing will have made its impact on you, and that is the passionate force of Mr. Orwell's own feelings. And passion is a rare thing in English writing today.
As always when there is a giant present, the remaining books must be treated as dwarfs, even though their true stature may be above average. George Beardmore's A Lion Among Ladies has a freshness that strikes one like a cold shower taken on a sultry afternoon. It is probably as good as anything you can hope to get from the wrong-end-of-the-telescope school. For that is the view Mr. Beard- more takes of his characters—the rich eccentric family in the Potteries from whom his hero springs, the hero himself at one time ear-marked for musical genius but destined for more humdrum things, the extra- ordinary " best friend " who dogs him through a life of mixed for- tunes and even more oddly assorted women. The tiny beetle-like figures caper through their peculiar antics, and it is with a shock that one realises that yours and mine are no less peculiar if viewed in this way. Mr. Beardmore, his eye firmly glued to the wrong end of the telescope, watches with an endearing expression of sympathy, good humour and cynicism, making occasional asides to the effect that he dislikes psychologists and the B.B.C. But however entertain; ing this may be, one cannot help remembering from time to time that this is not really the purpose for which telescopes and novels were invented.
The blurb to Michael McLaverty's collection of thirteen short stories The Game Cock stresses their quietness They are quiet indeed, and one could hear a pin drop if any pins were dropping. God forbid that one should make eventfulness the test of a good short story. There is a tranquillity about Mr. McLaverty's clear balanced writing that sometimes, as in the story entitled The Mother, turns to poetry. But the equation is not inevitable. And the very form of a short story derfiands that the interpretation of life conveyed in it should he highly distilled. Chekhov's best short stories are almost always inconsequential, but they somehow manage to leave a very positive impact. Some of Mr. McLaverty's leave one a little too anxiously waiting for that pin.
Great Mischief—an American book—is very small fry. It concerns a South Carolina chemist who is quite literally carried' away by his taste for witchcraft. The slightly pretentious blend of fact and fantasy is resolved by the Charleston earthquake of i886.
ROBERT KEE.
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