Wild Britain
Mr. Love and Justice. By Colin MacInnes. (Mac- Gibbon and Kee, 15s.) 12s. 6d.) •
COLIN MACINNES'S new novel comes, I suppose, as a comparative failure after City of Spades and Absolute Beginners, but that should not deter for a moment anyone who understands the immense significance of, the work on which he is engaged. Mr. Maclnnes has yet to show that he is even a particularly good writer, but none of greater im- portance has emerged among us since the war. Like a Victorian traveller to Tartary or the Congo, he transcends his limits and prolixities by bringing authentic word of an unknown country : the-Britain of the 1960s. It is unlike any Britain reflected in our laws or literature since Mayhew. Rather, it is a society from which the self- persuading superstructure of literature and law— the whole nineteenth-century creation of British gentility—has been lifted, disclosing the primitive colour and wildness beneath. It almost seems a foreign place, for at last if can be seen as little different from the Latin', Asian and African societies we view without patriotic preconcep- tions. Crimes happen there, things are stolen, wives beaten or stabbed, sexuality is openly recognised as the prime source of human pleasure and prestige. Strangers are suspect, but somehow slip into its common humanity more easily than into its civilised liberal crust. On the whole it is an open, easy-going community, frankly ac- quisitive, fond of display, violent, unsentimental, cruel to children and animals. And it is confi- dent, for though not yet self-governing, it knows that it is on the way to power, on the tide of wealth created by our post-war revolution Ultimately, it is a moral revolution, best ex- plored along the border where it comes into con- flict with the old law. Mr. Love and Justice is a report frdm that swaying front line, based evi- dently on considerable research in Mr Maclnnes's field of corner-call, cellar-club and .magistrate's court. Frankie Love, merchant-seaman out of a job, is taken in by a blonde-rinsed Stepney tart, who supports him by her earnings; Ted Justice, newly promoted from beat to vice-squad, hunts him down. But in the course of the chase, their roles become blurred, and both learn that the names of ponce and copper define only functions, not right and wrong or individual men. To apply the law impersonally, Ted discovers, may involve more paltering with conscience than some crimes do, while Frankie learns that even in love there may be principles. In the end, both men, sym- bolically wounded, wind up befriending each other in hospital, equals in a no-man's-land be- tween warring definitions of good and evil. Mr. Maclnnes's documentary method has become slightly over-algebraic in this fable. As the names of his protagonists suggest, he is more concerned that they should represent than be, and the same charge can be made against his cleaned-up stand- ard-English equivalents for their speech. But he still has a wonderful eye for social detail (can you see what's different about policemen's hair?) and he still captures the joyously vital sense of a society changing, seething with new forms of in- dividualism and intelligence. The next time some shrill recluse tells you we are sliding into a swamp of anonymous drabness and passive uniformity, don't just strike him across the mouth.,Do so with one of Colin MacInnes's books.
For some months, practitioners of that branch of lifemanship devoted to having read things in the original in Paris last year have been dropping gloating hints about Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le metro, its brilliance, scandalousness and total untranslatability. In the last respect, they ap- pear to have been right. In French, I gather, the work is a glittering grenade tossed into the facade of the French language, shattering its classic fen- estration to admit an urchin horde of slangy comings and gutter wit : a kind of Parisian Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be. Barbara Wright has striven valiantly and ingeniously to fashion an English equivalent for its dense tissue of Pigalle argot, Joycean puns and Nabokovian pedantries, but the result seems scarcely worth all the effort. It comes over as an arch French reversal of Auntie Marne: Zazie, a precocious, foul-mouthed enfant terrible, descends for a hectic day on her Parisian Unkoo Gabriel, a hefty bourgeois who earns a blameless living dancing in a tutu at a pansy night club. There's a comic taxi-driver, a comic widow, a comic White Rus- sian guide and other signs that chic amusement is intended. But I found myself growing increasingly bored and irritated. Somewhere in mid-Channel, there's been a failure in communication.
Jeremy Brooks's Jampot Smith is something fresh and welcome in remembered adolescences. It's about a group of boys and girls growing up together in Llandudno during the war, and is blessedly free both of claustrophobic .family rancours and of moist infra-sexual infatuations. Instead there's a cool, idyllic picture of one of those fortunate adolescent enclaves whose members help each other to reach maturity with- out the interference of adults. Bernard Smith, the London evacuee, starts out so scared of girls that he dashes frantically from one to another, earn- ing the nickname `Jampot.' But as the gang bicycle about the Welsh hills, pet in the long grass along the sands and organise their own dancing club; his panic fades, and he winds up with the girl he first desired. Mr. Brooks's treatment is leisurely, finely detailed, moving and funny.
Some alert agent, l suspect, pointed out to James Michener the enormous sales rolled up by Edna Ferber's Ice Palace in the year preceding Alaska's statehood, and suggested—since they couldn't live for ever on Mr. Michener's royalties from the plot of South Pacific—that he attempt a similar epithalamion for his own maturing territory, Hawaii. The result has led the American best-seller lists for several months, and can claim, I suppose, to have outdone even Miss Ferber in gimcrack opulence. It crams into a thousand pages a seven-generation circus-parade of Hawaiian history, economics and agriculture : a kind of pineapple-flavoured Herries chronicle of several leading island families, milling with tooth-flashing whaler-captains, naked brown Venuses, tight- lipped missionaries, centenarian matriarchs and other stock personnel of the genre. It can't be denied a certain garish exhaustiveness and gen- erosity, but I found my attention straying from the lusts of Mr. Michener's corn-flake-package characters to the pages on the culture of the pineapple.
RONALD BR YDEN
Previous page
