Recent fiction

Miranda Seymour

since Rabbit got his redux after ten years, it was always on the cards that Updike would do the same for Bech, the lecturer and one-time writer whose transcontinental career formed the subject of an anxiously Comic novel some 12 years ago. Rabbit was an updated Babbit in whom Updike marvellously conveyed the fantasies and failures of the suburb-bound American male struggling to cope with middle-age in the Sixties. Bech, the glib and desperate American-Jewish academic caught in the ebb of his own fame, never caught on in the same way. He lacked Rabbit's universal qualities and the first novel about him has dated badly. His visit to swinging London, amusing at the time with malicious caricatures of English publishers on party- circuits, now seems embarrassingly super- ficial; Bech's wan consciousness of his mediocre life is less affecting than , the

disagreeableness of his character. His hopeful randiness fails to charm; his egocentricity is not engaging. The facetious bibliography of his works and their reviewers was an enjoyable piece of self- indulgence on Updike's part; like the rest of the book, it doesn't stand re-reading. Where the Rabbit books brought out his best quality, a meticulous observation of every- day small-town America, Bech brought out his worst, an irritating loquacity and a tendency to sketch stereotypes instead of penetrating characters. Like Bech, Updike appeared to have exchanged discipline for dash and glitter. The question was not whether Bech should make a return but whether the reader could return to Bech.

The sequel does not quite settle the ques- tion, although it is a better book. 'Bech is Back', the title, is the theme of the publicity campaign for the novel which the aging hero has been prodded into completing by his brisk and pleasant young wife, Bea.

Bech triumphant is much the same as he was failing, prurient, neurotic, garrulous and assertive. Bea, plump, sincere and determined to make a respectable novelist of him again — not least for the money - rescues not only the man but the novel. She is in a literal and splendid sense the most solid thing in it, the generator of its finer comic moments. Visiting Jerusalem, she sweetly enthuses on its holiness to an em- barrassed group of people who see it only as exploitable territory. On a Scottish honey- moon Bea, a proud Sinclair descendant, is condemned by Macbech (Updike's joke, not mine) as one of the arch-exploiters, a persecutor, by virtue of her ancestry, of in- nocent crofters. Back home again, poor Bea has to rely on the worldly Beth's advice on contraceptive devices for her daughters.

People, as he is fond of telling her, are his profession. Bech knows best. Bea is a beatitude, a splendid invention; Bech re- mains a bit of a bore, tolerable in a short story, a grind over a two-novel stretch.

Updike's comedy is fast, febrile and a bit strained; Brendan Behan's lighter stories and sketches fairly dance with laughter and blackly wicked jokes.

'And how's poor Mrs Murphy today, a mhic?'* 'She's powerful.'

'God bless her and spare the poor old creature.'

'Barring the humane killer...'

All I knew about Behan was that he was sent to borstal for complicity in terrorism, wrote two fine plays and drank nearly as

much as he talked. And died of it. The col- lection of pieces in After the Wake makes a

splendid introduction to his work for anyone in a similar state of ignorance. A

in- troduction and unpretentious n- troduction by Peter Fallon fills in the

background to four short stories, a couple of autobiographical fragments, and various other miscellaneous items.

The best of the stories are, unsurpris- ingly, the best-known. 'The Confirmation *my dear Suit' is remarkable for the delicacy and economy with which it illustrates the inno- cent brutality of children. A small boy does everything in his power to avoid being seen in the suit made for him by his mother's old friend. If her feelings are to be hurt, so are his by the shame of wearing it. Nobody can understand why, when she dies, he insists on walking through the rainy streets in his terrible suit. 'People said I would get my end, but I went on till we reached the graveside, and I stood in my Confirmation suit drenched to the skin. I thought this was the least I could do.' In 'A Woman of No Standing', a funeral is again the central event. The dead man's wife is determined that his mistress shall not be there. Right is all on her side. The child narrator, his im- agination fired by the thought of mistresses as rich wicked laides in fine fur coats, is bewildered to see her there, hiding behind a tree, 'a poor middle-aged woman, bent in haggard prayer.' Neither story is more than a few pages long; but each conveys much.

Most engaging are the pieces which Behan wrote for the Irish Press. Short, sharp and bursting with vitality, they seem nearer to the writer than the self- consciously grim autobiographical fragments. My own favourite was the one which begins: 'This life is full of disappoint- ments. The band of the Beaux-Arts School is one of them.' A good throwaway joke, it leads into a beautiful prose-poem of homesickness evoked by Behan's own Parisian days. But who , from that genial beginning, could have foreseen this end? (He is watching an Irish student successfully looting three church pillars to serve her patriotic chisel).

These pillars represent in their/ tortuous Celtic way the struggle of Christian France against the Huns, the Creation and the Deluge. Standing there... I noted lovingly the twisted features of each cantankerous countenance, thought of Raphoe, Cashel, Clonmac- noise, and heard the waves of the Atlan- tic break on the Aran shore and the praising voice of the holy Irish, long since dead, soft in the gathering dusk.

Jane Gardam frames her third volume of short stories between two points of a view of a chance encounter. In 'The First Adam', Bull, a lonely aeronautical engineer work- ing in the Middle East, toys with the idea of 'picking up a woman by the hotel pool. She is reading a letter, probably from a man who has left her. He asks her to his room for a drink, loses interest and lets her go with a moment's pity for the loneliness to which he is condemning her. In the second version, Venetia Craig has come out to Drab to close up the hospice of The Last Adam. Lying by her hotel's pool, she reads the notes and meditations of Sister Agnes, now flying home to England. She notices the old man watching her, vaguely pities him. 'It's not as if he's dangerous. He's old. He looks as if he's not got long, poor thing.' . Her sense of him is as slight as his of her.

If Jane Gardam seems on surer ground in the last story than the first, it is because she has a much clearer grasp of the female mind. All the rest of her stories concern women and girls, and they confirm her as a writer of sharp intelligence and rare imagination.

Unexpected and delightful is the revela- tion of her gift for comic writing. The title story is a splendidly funny updating of 'The Little Mermaid.' In Gardam's version, the youngest sister comes up from the sea to visit the prince who is maddened by desire for her and by the problem of her tail. Mar- ried nowadays to a good woman who drinks, he gets no sympathy from the prac- tical nereid: "I'm not surprised", said the

seventh mermaid. "I'd drink if I was mar- ried to someone who just stood gazing out to sea thinking of a girl he had allowed to turn into foam." '

Persuaded that it's worth losing wife and legs for this engaging creature, the prince comes down for an underwater betrothal

party, only to lose his nerve — but not his legs — and swim home to the drunk but less

demanding princess. Feminism in so frothy a form as this cautionary tale should please the most hardened of chauvinists.

A Coin in Nine Hands (Denier du Reve) was written in 1934 as an attack on fascism.

To many outsiders, Mussolini's regime still presented a confident and victorious face; Yourcenar was, she claims, the first French novelist to probe behind a façade as vulgar- ly overblown as the Vittorio Emmanuel monument. The result was this elegantly constructed book, a study of political evil, heroism and love. Completely revised in 1959, it is among her best work, a testament to her extraordinary ability to turn stereotypes into archetypes, to invoke the past to illuminate the present.

Linked only by the random passing of a coin, nine lives move forward in isolation.

Rosalia di Credo burns to death in her bed, lost in a dream of her Sicilian childhood and the family she loved. Her sister, Angiola, sits in darkness, staring at the photographed image of herself as a beautiful young film star. The man in the next door seat idly caresses her, never suspecting that this sad painted woman is the beauty of the screen. Angiola is driven away by her chauffeur; the man, Dr Sarte, walks away through the night to find his wife drowned in a pool of blood. After fail- ing to kill Mussolini — the central event of the novel — she had wildly fired on the crowd. Now, beaten to death and soaked by the rain, she lies like a dead Medusa. 'And her eyes, wide open but blind, contemplate the void which is now her whole future.'

In theme and language, the novel is close- ly linked to Fires, first published here last year. In that early work, Yourcenar made modern characters of mythical ones. Here, she has reversed the process. Marcella, the assassin, is seen not as a modern woman, but as a doomed spirit of revenge. Like the Phaedra, the Helen and the Sappho of the earlier book, she can only seem to choose. It has already been determined that she will fail.