Radical Efforts
A Guest and his Going. By P. H. Newby. (Cape, 15s.)
The Men from the Bush. By Ronald Hardy. (M ul- ler, 15s.) Late Night on Watling Street. By Bill Naughton. (MacGibbon and Kee, 15s.)
ANYONE who read Philip Toynbee's portrait of the British Radical in this magazine a few weeks ago will recognise Edgar Perry right away. In the latest of Mr. Newby's 'Egyptian'. novels, A Guest and his Going, he has set himself up in Hampstead Garden Suburb as principal of a language school and is rapidly embroiled in the acts of his ex-pupil Muawiya, now a journalist and guest of the British Council. Muawiya has no sooner arrived than he is crashing a borrowed car and taking refuge in the Egyptian Embassy. From here he emerges only to star at a disastrous party he has persuaded poor Perry to organise for him, argue hotly at a genteel debating society that retribution for the white man is at hand, and scare the daylights out of the un- balanced landlord at Perry's school. Perry, con- fused, game, irritated and concerned, follows in his frothy wake. Waldo Grimbley, an older mem- ber of his staff, embittered at being turfed out of Egypt, accuses him shrewdly : . . what you lack are principles. It's only your sense of guilt that keeps you going. You're so busy understanding the other chap's point of view you haven't the time to develop a point of view of your own.' The strength and weakness of Mr. Newby's novel are pin- pointed here. Perry has not a point of view, since circumstances do not lend themselves to anything so simplifying; it is the constant improvising effort that engages him. And yet—as we see him, with his dreary wife and personal insecurities—he is perhaps unnecessarily ineffectual, his fits of anger and action as sudden and erratic as Muawiya's about-faces. There is a wry decency in Mr. Newby's observation of men and events that reminds one of E. M. Forster, as he is probably tired of hearing (Perry and Muawiya inevitably carry echoes of Fielding and Aziz), but this simil- arity of approach encourages one perhaps to expect more from his books than they are con- structed to give. Muawiya's behaviour is not just different from what we anticipate from an English- man; it is so powerfully eccentric that the chain of events it sets off frequently borders on farce and the domestic and moral trials of Perry, for all the lightness of touch with which they are presented, jar. But this is a consistently entertaining book, intelligent, humane and gently engage, with one splendidly heartless creation, Mrs. Blainey, a Widow, to its credit.
The Men from the Bush is a short novel in two parts, 'The Coming' and 'The Pursuit.' Jeff, a sixteen-year-old boy with a deformed foot, lives with his father and randy stepmother in the European community of a small African town. He is free, miraculously, of colour prejudice and takes a little Negro boy around with him as he shops in his father's Land-Rover. There are rumours in the town. Four natives are supposed to have come, seeking a victim for ritual sacrifice. Suddenly ten- sion lifts, the servants begin singing again; but the little coloured boy has disappeared. No one be- lieves, or wants to believe, that he has been kid- napped; not Jeff's father nor the unctuous Rev. Tiplady, nor even Allery, the liberal-minded District Officer. So the pursuit begins. Jeff leaves with Allery's athletic son, Mike, and an old Negro, Benedict, following a trail to the hills. The dénoue- ment is unexpected and completely satisfying. Mr. Hardy has made what might have been just another piece of BOP fictionising with modish overtones into an astonishingly coherent parable of strength and weakness : the larger statement he is concerned to make is 'earthed' at every point by his vigorous grasp of realities. There is not a character in this book who is not hit off with a Greene-like economy and something more than a Greene-like plausibility : the style is justifiably self-assured. My only criticism is that Jeff seems overly self-aware for a boy (presumably) brought up in the wilds.
The Chancer (unfortunate title : I kept read- ing chancre) is about Cameron, a young man 'in' television. who leaves his wife and becomes involved with the shapely widow of his best friend. The friend, Malcolm Fleming, had been a war hero—or had he? A large part of the book is con- cerned with the painful deflation of Cameron's image. But a whole rash of minor deflations sur- round it and at moments it looks as if we are in for another of those books where fun is not so much poked as punched at everything within sight. A cold moment on a bare Scottish mountain is thrown in for good measure. When Mr. Pugh trusts himself enough either to assimilate or prune his various manners, we should be in for a very good novel indeed. The Fig Tree is far less engag- ing than it obviously imagines itself to be. A young Nobel Prize scientist goes from England to Italy to inject vegetables with a fluid that enormously increases their yield. His experiments centre round a grove of fig trees, which bloom indeed—with fiercely aphrodisiac results. Mr. Menen contrives things so that the only consumers are two decent chaps who are appalled rather than enraptured by their exigent appetites. The scene eventually (after a good deal of anaemically iconoclastic conversa- tion) moves to the Vatican and there is a damp 'happy ending.' Late Night on Watling Street is a collection of short stories about members of the working classes in a skilful array of dialects. Mr. Naughton has both published in Lilliput and broadcast some of them, but there are far fewer concessions to popular sentiment than you migh expect ('Cockney Mum' is one). The tone is tough and rueful; the title piece and 'The Little Welsh Girl' carry very lifelike kicks in the tail.
JOHN COLEMAN
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