New Novels
Quest for Pajaro. By Edward Maxwell. (Heine- mann, 10s. 6d.)
BY way of inoculation against prevalent sacred- sordid Italian fiction, unattached readers might try Carlo Coccioli's latest, Daughter of the Town, which without misuse of words could be de- scribed as a bloody, awful novel. Blood is its argument. Here is the small town personified again : 'The Town basking in the sun was like a dog on heat. . . . And the Town saw and heard everything. . . Here the girl Giuditta, 'whom some called Christ's courtesan and some a saint,' apparently committed a particularly bloody mur- der; at any rate, her mistress the cruel Signorina Garofani by daylight is found weltering in her own gore, and thereafter Giuditta becomes so bloody-minded that, having ritualistically sacri- ficed her virginity on the marble slab of the Signorina's tomb, she stabs, during the Town's Easter procession, Luciano, the young man whom she had seduced into seducing her. 'I have cleansed myself in the blood,' she publicly announces. 'And there was a stirring among the crowd.' End of book. For light relief we are offered beatings- up, bicycles and brothels, pederasty, piety and priest-impersonation, and a translation which, generally' ompetent, has some nice lapses into the D.O.P. style of fifty or more years ago : 'The devil take your funk.' Until Italian novelists find some- thing better and less absurd to exploit than rape and religiortin the slums, their products will con- tinue to be classed in-the trade as 'woppery.'
In Vicki Baum's Written on Water the author is narrator of a story told her by an American en- gincer, Bob, ThumbOrn, known as Thumbs. It concerns chiefly Glen Hammers, ex-officer of the US Navy; Tracey, Cowles, standard-pattern rich, bitch, married to a neurotic Hungarian prince;
and Vida, Indian girl cabaret dancer, self- immolating type. Glen, vouched for by Thumbs as 'a real guy through and through,' is on his beam ends at a Mexican fishing port when he attracts the nymphomaniac eye of Tracey. Injured in a brawl, he is kidnapped by her, but escapes from her luxury yacht to fall ill and enjoy the nursing ministrations of Vida. Tracey returns to the attack and captures Glen by financing his scheme for making a fortune out of shark oil. Comes the war. Naturally, it brings ,out the best in everybody—except Vida, who, having had the best brought out before, is the only casualty. (As you were : Tracey's Hungarian husband had earlier—did he fall or was he pushed?—been devoured by sharks.) For the incredibly happy ending we have to take the author's word. It can be taken, since we are in Mexico, with pulque, tequila or mescal.
In Her Grace Presents March Cost returns us to civilised parts. Here again the author, believe it or not, offers 'a true story.' It seems that Georgiana Eider, daughter of a Danish professor, was adopted by her English Aunt Emma, better known as Madame Brissac, the fashionable cor- setiere. Georgiana's innocent heart was won by Karl Alexis Theodore Casimir Honorius, Prince Kallunborg, Count of Graz (all one person), who eloped with her to Paris and having at a critical moment on the night of arrival murmured, 'At last, at last, at last, at last!' died without more ado. Scandal was averted by the prompt and tactful services of Lord Harwich, staying at the same hotel. Time flits past. Georgiana, her beautiful ash-blonde hair dyed black, is now hostess at the Barrette club. There she is at last rediscovered by Lord Harwich, later Duke of Dunster, who soon marries her quietly in Florence, but has been dead ten years by the time we make her acquaintance. It is expected that, although she is rather a corsetiere's dummy, we shall be concerned on her behalf because a cad of an English author in his memoirs written for an American publisher has revealed her secret : she once belonged to the Salvation Army. The plane in which she is indignantly flying to New York, with an old and faithful admirer for companion, crashes off the coast of Newfound- land. But there's no need to worry. Aunt Emma, 'Madame Brissac, sitting beneath her 'Winter- halter portrait,' finds it safe to smile. No comment.
Brendan Gill is a New Yorker writer, so in The Day the Money Stopped, a novel no longer than 190 pages, we may expect no longueurs. That is the kind of joke his Charlie makes. Charlie is the amiable black sheep of a wealthy lawyer's family. He has come to see his younger brother Richard, chief beneficiary under his father's will. The happy-go-lucky Charlie is told there is nothing at all to come to him. Undaunted, he wisecracks his way through a family quarrel, proving himself as tricky as all come up, as noble as all get out. Making verbal rings round every- body, he spellbinds in particular his brother's secretary, Ellen, who, like himself, has made an unsuccessful marriage, she frigid, he philandrous. Question (as Charlie would say): Will they get on together if they go off together? Whatever may happen to them, we have enjoyed their company in a novel that is a pyrotechnic display of wit used to illuminate some dark spots in a family history and cast shadows across conventional hypocrisy.
The opening chapter of The Unromantics, by William Rogers, might have been set in Cam- bridge, Mass., rather than Cambridge, Eng. It describes a poker game, and there is talk of 'whisky sour' and 'greenbacks.' True, the talk is by a young woman (rich bitch again). For not very explicit reasons, two of the undergraduates plan to go to Canada and work their way along, the young woman insisting on going with them. Apparently the aborting lover of one, she callously brings the other to heel and bed. The best bits of the story describe work in lumber and other camps. The rest is unbelievable in a style that ought to have been rustproofed before it was chromium-plated, but read quickly it is enter- taining enough for those who take their fiction lightly.
Those who take it seriously may prefer Quest for Pajaro, by Edward Maxwell, who is said to be 'a well-known writer using an impregnable pseudonym.' The narrator, a wealthy ex-RAF pilot, having had a plane built to his own speci- fication, flies twenty years into the future, lands in a remote Spanish village and, yielding to the demands of fiction, falls in love with a girl there—a girl who literally twitters. In 116 pages suitable for Lent reading, the story becomes so much a modern parable that, as Habakkuk says, he may run that readeth it.
DANIEL GEORGE!
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