Fiction
Other Voices Other Rooms is easily the most exciting novel to come from America this year. Though one of its chief characters is what is customarily referred to by reviewers as " decadent," both he and the rest of the characters in this emotional story of the South make the average character in contemporary American fiction seem perverted by comparison. For the only moral standard that literature knows is the truth, and it is the truthful intensity of Mr. Capote's book that makei it so remarkable. This degree of lushness, this amount of emotional force, we had been led to suppose, could only bring one to disaster on the mud-flats of romanticism ; safer far to play for competence, to measure like a slow tailor the outside of your cus- tomer-character from every conceivable angle and to divert attention from what is inside him with a neatly drawn-up list of measurements. For whatever else may be wrong with a list of measurements it is almost impossible for it to be in bad taste.
To those who have grown accustomed to accepting this sort of thing without protest Mr. Capote's book will be very welcome. He has dared to write of life- in all its complex splendour and to tell of the .human heart, and yet he has triumphed- without sinking into romanticism or departing from any of the desired standards of taste and maturity. Other Voices Other Rooms is the story of a boy discovering his " home " (and a good deal else.besides) for the first time at the age of thirteen, when his mother dies and, he goes to live with his father at the mysterious decaying house called " Skully's Landing." The feelings of curiosity and excitement with which the book opens and which one shares with the boy, Joel, as he arrives at the house are fully justified by the astonishing ménage that is revealed : pianola-playing Miss Amy, Joel's gaga and slightly terrify- ing aunt, a paralysed father able to communicate with the world only by sending red tennis balls bouncing down the stairs from under the blankets and, above all, Cousin Randolph. And few readers of detective fiction can have known a shock quite as exquisite as one experiences on discovering the identity of the strange white- haired lady at the upper window. Unexpectedly in a hook where a child plays a central role, the other characters Eve independently and in their own right, and this alone sets Other Voices Other Rooms above and apart from other books about childhood. But what ensures its success is the quality of Mr. Capote's writing, which is very high indeed, and original without being exhibitionist or obscure. The tangled overgrown garden at " Skully's Landing," the
decaying luxury hotel in the the storm that breaks over Noon City—all vibrate with life in the close southern atmosphere no less fiercely than the characters themselves. Perhaps Mr. Capote over- reaches himself in his climax. And for such a good writer he has a curious taste for the word " commence." But it is evidence of the book's worth that one can bear to notice such tiny blemishes.
Mr. Moorehead in The Rage of*the Vulture is attempting some- thing easier, but is to be congratulated none the less on his success. It is about a small Anglo-Indian community cut off in an imaginary Indian State in 1947 and threatened by mass invasion of tribesmen from the hills. The book is made by its excellent null- tive, balanced and controlled with a real novelist's gift. When Captain Judkins interrupts the party in Flanagan's Hotel with the announcement : " They're arrived I tell you. You've got to sober up. They're already in the bazaar," one longs for the suspense to end in the same sort of way as when, desperately thirsty, one longs to finish a glass of water. For although The Rage of the Vulture contains much of the intelligent observation of man and nature that we expect from such a good journalist as Mr. Moorehead, this is not just a fictionalised piece of journalism. It is a genuine novel, a novel of action. The characters (the ex-prisoner-of-war Pearson, the blind rich girl Elizabeth, the middle-aged adventuress Isette) are adequate and no more—mild extensions of familiar, fairly obvious types. One gets the impression, though, that for Ar. Moorehead adequacy is already not enough. If he can learn as much about characterisation as he has already learnt in other fields of the nove- list's art he should one day write a formidable novel. Or is this perhaps something that cannot be learnt at all ?
Readers of Francis King's Never Again earlier this year will be struck by his development towards maturity in An Air that Kills, although they may well find it less emotionally satisfying. This story of love and loneliness and jealousy centring in a middle-aged uncle's relationship with a young nephew is an extremely ambitious one, treading as it does the no-man's-land of all relationships which is hazy enough in real life and more difficult than ever to bring into focus in a novel. Mr. King has mastered it with surprising accom- plishment. And yet, though the book is smoothly written and reads easily, there is about it the feeling that he has mastered his subject in the same sort of way as some people master a difficult horse—by killing some of the life in it.
Tobias Brandywine is a jolly, wistful, comfortable book of American family life during the middle and late 'twenties. The family is a large one covering three generations, and it is agreeably presided over for the period of the book by the slightly eccentric endearing little man who has once been something better than the tramp who knocks at the door on the first page and allows himself to be called Tobias Brandywine. The book is strangely English in its mildness and good humour. It would almost certainly be enjoyed
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