Horrorshow on Amis Avenue
A Clockwork Orange. By Anthony Burgess. (Heinemann, 16s.) The Blood of the Lamb. By Peter De Vries. (Gollancz, 18s.) Therefore Be Bold. By Herbert Gold. (Deutsch, 18s.) The Lonely Girl. By Edna O'Brien. (Cape, 16s.) The Sky Falls. By Lorenz Mazzetti. Translated by Marguerite Waldman. (Bodley Head, 13s. 6d.)
ANTHONY BURGESS must have garnered some excellent reviews in his short, busy writing career (A Clockwork Orange is his eighth novel since 1956). No one can match his skill at anguished farce about the end of empire. His characters seem to be trapped in a tent whose pole has just been sawn in two by an over- enthusiastic administrator doing his part in a campaign to save wood. It is hilarious to watch their frantic heaving and humping beneath the spoiled canvas, to hear their absurd multi- lingual pidgin groans. But as we wipe away our tears of laughter, we notice that someone has just thrown petrol over the collapsed and writhing tent: frozen with horror, we see him strike a match.
If Mr. Burgess is, in some ways, a pupil of Mr: Waugh, he yet has an originality of manner and subject which place him, to my mind, among the best writers in England. Yet he has never received the critical attention granted to Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis, with whom at least he deserves to rank. Certainly his prose is more attractive than either's, and he is pre- pared to take risks which they are not. And if his novels seem rather hollow and heartless at times, from a tendency to move his characters about to illustrate his points instead of letting the characters find their own way to making them, the points are major ones about our times.
A Clockwork Orange is set in the future, in an England where the streets are called things like Amis Avenue. It is narrated by Alex, a beguiling adolescent gang-leader with ultra- violent tendencies and a passion for classical music, in a teenage slang which takes a few pages to grasp. A splendid slang it is, though, full of stuff like `yarbles' and 'profound shooms of lip-music brrrrrr' and `droog.' The key praise- word is 'horrorshow,' for Alex's world is hor- rible and sadistic, and he is one of the toughest juvenile delinquents one could hope to meet. Very properly gaoled for killing a cat-loving old lady, Alex is subjected to a new cure for criminals, similar to that for alcoholics: he be- comes sick and faint at the thought of violence or the sound of classic music (connected by him with violence). Released, he finds himself the victim of the entire world, at the mercy of policemen, old professors and politicians. His responses are no longer his own.
Mixing horror with farce in his inimitable manner, Mr. Burgess develops his theme brilliantly, though there is a certain arbitrariness about the plot which is slightly irritating and I find it difficult to accept the contention that being young is like being a clockwork toy— you walk into things all the time. But the language is an extraordinary technical feat, and the whole conception vigorously exhibits Mr. Burgess's great imaginative gifts. No doubt ig- norant and anonymous reviewers will criticise him for 'experimenting' (as John Wain was re- cently and absurdly criticised): they will be merely exhibiting their ignorance and anonymity. Mr. Burgess is far too. good and important a writer not to go in any direction he chooses.
Like Mr. Burgess, Peter De Vries is known for his wit and sense of horror. The Blood of the Lamb starts by being very funny about the Calvinist Dutch Reformed God, but there is disaster in the air, and the book ends with the death of the 'narrator's child from leukemia and the narrator's hatred of any gods there be. The novel is often touching, but the author seems to lose control of it towards the end, and there is a scene with the dead child's voice on a tape- recorder which only someone with strong New Yorker connections could possibly imagine he could get away with.
Also from America comes Herbert Gold's Therefore Be Bold, about a Jewish boy's adolescence in Cleveland, Ohio, so grotesquely over-written that it is almost adolescence itself. As an admirer of Mr. Gold's stories, I have to say I'm glad he's got this novel out of his system (it appears to have taken him ten years to write), and that it is full of good ideas and scenes and characters trying to struggle through mannerisms which might well have been dis- carded by now.
Being against Irish charm, I approached Edna O'Brien's The Lonely Girl with caution, to find it agreeably funny and wry, an episode in the long battle between innocence and sophistication, with loud interruptions from the heroine's drunken father. Caithleen loves an Austrian film- writer, but feels obliged to sulk when his friends come to tea, since they make it clear that she cannot shine. The minor characters are beauti- fully drawn, and if Caithleen loses her man at the end of the book, 1 suspect she will get another one just as good (if not the same one) in Miss O'Brien's next, for we leave her on her way to Soho. Tremble, Englishmen.
Lorenza Mazzetti's very short child's-eye view of-- the war in Italy is remarkable for what is not said as much as for what is. The children worry about their uncle going to hell for not being Christian (he is a Jew) and take it in turn to play the devil in their private game about the Garden of Eden. The defeated Germans shoot the Jews as they pull out. Before that they have been nice. Life is hard to understand. Miss Mazzetti's novella is a brilliant tour de force, charming and harrowing.
JULIAN MITCHELL
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