Faust in the nursery
Russell Hoban
The Ghost Downstairs, Leon Garfield, illustrated by Antony Maitland (Longman, £1.25).
Child o' War, Leon Garfield and David Proctor, decorations by Antony Maitland (Collins, £1.25).
In his second adult book — the first was The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris— Leon Garfield explores the Faust theme. The characteristically twinkling opening promises nothing beyond the exuberant ingenuity of such earlier work for younger readers as Mr Corbett's Ghost; but once into the action Garfield, possessed by a conception of frightening power, is driven by his talent into a work of rare distinction.
The measure of his invention is the shocking vitality of his 'What if?' What if it isn't necessarily the Devil who wants to buy the soul of Mr Faust? What if the canny seller offers the mysterious Mr Fishbane seven years of his life in return for wealth, but seven years from the beginning of it? What if, having signed away with his childhood all that once was bright and wondrous in him, he finds existence a perdition of betrayal through which he haplessly pursues the self that he has sold?
Garfield relies on nothing but total risk in confronting these questions. Wholly mastered by his theme, his sense of detail is inspired: the sound of an iron hoop rolled in the moonlight by the ghost of childhood; a marvellous model of St Paul's made by a cabinet-maker "long since retired from life size," with the craftsman's giant spectacles lying on miniature Ludgate Hill; the "gently outstretched hands" of a young man sleeping in a train compartment — darks and lights evoked within the reader build a shifting chiaroscuro through which moments flash occulting one by one until the end: • Where shall we go now?' whispered the little phantom, its pale face smiling up into the old man's. 'God knows,' answered Mr Fishbane; and his beard streamed out to catch the stars.
That echo of Marlowe's " See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!" is not out of place; it closes a book that is eerily insightful, demonically vital, and not quite definable.
John Theophilus Lee joined the navy in 1793 when he was five and a half, shared an age with Napoleon Bonaparte, Nelson and Wellington, and accordingly wrote a little memoir of his modest career amid large actions and great men. In Child o' War Leon Garfield, consulting with David Proctor of the National Maritime Museum, imagines Lee in retirement, his large family around him as he dictates the memoir to one daughter while two others draw his portrait.
Garfield in his contrapuntal commentary views both man and time with the coldest possible critical eye. Lee loses nothing by this treatment; his own words give us lucidly and with dignified naivete such disparities as the ginger beer he served the officers on the quarter deck of HMS Swiftsure during The Battle of the Nile, the hanging of marine Patrick McCrink in the time of the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore, and the airborne disappearance of old Mr Booty from Wapping into the mouth of the volcano, Mount Stromboli, "the entrance of Hell."
Russell Hoban's best known work of fiction is "The Mouse and his Child."
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