New Novels
The Small Rain. By Diana Raymond. (Cassell. 10s. 6d.) The Narrowing Stream. By John Mortimer. (Collins. 10s. 6d.) The Small Rain is a novel of an easily-recognised type. A group of characters of roughly equal importance is portrayed; most of them are married, some have young children, and parental as well as sexual love is involved; the various relationships, unstable at the beginning, finally achieve some kind of stability; the setting is Important; there is a good deal of non-riotous humour; although male attitudes are skilfully managed, the emphasis is strongly feminine; sensibility is firmly under the thumb of intelligence. The encouraging thing is that good novels of this type are becoming more and more plentiful. One of the best I have read is Mrs. Ray- mond's story of a Swedish holiday resort, with its amiable Russian baron, its noisy small boys, its admirably clear pictures of sand and sea and pine-trees, its tentative and touching love-affair between one of the baron's daughters and an English publisher. It is all beautifully done, or rather what there is of it is beautifully done. Its weakness is not in any failure to grasp, only in a failure to reach out far enough. Surely something more could have been done with that baron, for instance; need he have come in so much when he really has so little to do? And wouldn't that French piece have acted more sur- prisingly than she did? That perhaps is it: not enough surprises, a tendency to stick too rigidly to the mode. The result, witty! endearing and sad as it is, just misses being an important novel and remains only—well, in all senses of the phrase, a good read. Mr. John Mortimer, though otherwise unlike Mrs. Raymond, shares with her the merit of being in complete control of an impressive range of literary weapons. He has the great gift of fixing a character by a few scraps of dialogue and he has a very fine sense of place, expertly evoking the recent history of his milieu and always uncovering the relevant detail. The Narrowing Stream gives a vivid account of middle-class riverside life and of the kind of people who take part in it. Unfortunately it sells rather short on story. A housewife (not the sort who likes Housewives' Choice, naturally) is invaded by an educated tramp who bit by bit reveals to her that his sister, a part- time actress, has died under suspicious circumstances aboard a houseboat, and that the housewife's husband may be mixed up in it. It finally emerges that he was, but not in either of the ways you thought. Nothing, therefore, has really happened, a fact which Mr. Mortimer 's skill conceals until the book is put down, but which is then painfully clear. That skill is genuine enough, but this time it has failed to find a vehicle commensurate with it. As a footnote I must say how bitterly I hated the tramp, with whom Mr. Mortimer seems to sympathise rather. The cultured, talentless hobo, free (because he cadges), alone (because he deserves to be), and not wanting (to earn) money, is an interesting contemporary product of our older universities, but he needs a regular and extended course of threats, abuse and being thrown into the fountain.
A Time To Love and a Time To Die is set in wartime Germany, and mainly concerns the experiences of a young soldier on leave from the Russian front. His home town has recently become a main target for Allied bombs; his parents are missing; while searching for them he meets and marries a girl, and is able for a short time to achieve happiness in an environment of misery, fear and guilt. The events recounted are truly horrible and pitiable, but while they go on unrolling one after the other the reader's mind, as with a succession of casualty-figures, becomes dulled, unable to deal with them, no doubt because this is what happens to the hero too. His protest is purely negative; his desire for happiness is a shying-away from pain, an uncomprehending and animal nuzzling up to somebody for warmth. One need hardly say how under- standable this is in human terms, nor, 1 repeat, how pathetic, but some stronger centre is needed for a book with such a setting, some relief from the unyielding pattern of suffering as against doing.
The hero of More Than Human is a composite individual repre- senting the first specimen of Homo Gestalt, who is the next evolu- tionary step after the old sapiens sort. This particular creature consists of a directing intelligence (a clever man), a universal com- puter (an infant Mongoloid idiot), a telekinesis unit (a girl who can move things about by thinking) and a teleportation unit (twin negro girls who can move themselves about by thinking). Quite a plausible start, on the whole, but a composite individual is very difficult to imagine, and Mr. Sturgeon has failed to do it himself: the 'individual' is just a lot of people milling about and sometimes quarrelling, so that for one period it has two heads. Further, it never does anything, perhaps understandably, concentrating instead on getting going. The general approach and some stylistic features recall Mr. Ray Bradbury, and like him Mr. Sturgeon falls between the two stools of science-fiction and poetic fantasy. The resulting crash is magni- fied, possibly, by the second stool's only possessing two legs anyway.
Low Notes on a High Level, subtitled A Frolic, involves the Fourth Programme, a pirate radio station attacking bureaucracy, a sort of double-tuba called the Dobbophone needed for a passage in Stannsen's Tenth Symphony, and a young man and a young girl. Also prominently featured are protests against 'the new barbarism,' 'this age of mass communication and advertising,' this 'world of robots, sheep, monkeys and rats,' and income tax. I tried hard to work up some emotion as positive as boredom with it all, but was confounded by sadness that it should be Mr. Priestley who offers to teach us wisdom, and correspondingly that he should have sunk to these low jinks off a low peg.
KINGSLEY AMIS
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