Hurry On Up

The British Museum is Falling Down. By David Lodge. (MacGibbon and Kee, 21s.) Czar. By Thomas Wiseman. (Cassell, 30s.) The Hot Sun, of Africa. By Alan Caillou. (W. H. Allen, 21s.)

The British Museum is Falling Down is an en- dearing and intermittently very funny account

of a crucial day in the life of a young, Roman Catholic, postgraduate student, married, with three children, and terrified that a fourth will be started before his thesis is finished and he has found a job. The manner is much closer to the early Peter de Vries than to the latest English comics, Amis and the far subtler Malcolm Bradbury, whom it tends to parody: explidit parodies, in fact, play a large part in the scheme• of the novel and there are some amusing scenes in the styles of Kafka, Compton-Burnett, Joyce, and others. 'At times David Lodge seems to be trying too hard, particularly in the earlier domes- tic slapstick scenes, but the central joke is a good one and is well sustained.

Mr. Lodge, as befits one who has lectured in English • • Literature, is consciously pre- occupied with relations between the novelist's style and his subject-matter, but John Chris- topher just bashes out his story, at times showing

a remarkable insensitivity to the clichd. But the surprising thing is that sheer invention, the power of which is almost visionary, breaks through the ordinariness of the language and makes A Wrinkle in the Skin a memorable novel.

A series of earthquakes erupts all over the world and one such visits Europe, smashing towns to rubble and literally draining the sea.

Matthew Cotter, a Guernsey tomato-grower, is one of the few survivors and, with a small boy whom he has rescued, he sets off across the ocean bed to what was the mainland, where he desperately hopes to find his daughter. Perhaps the ending is a little too indulgent of the reader, too contrived and consolatory, but the whole thing has a hypnotic readability.

Thomas Wiseman's style is efficient but un- distinguished and • the narrative method and

structure of Czar is old-fashioned and solid, the

same rather mechanical attention given to event, character and dialogue regardless of significance, so that the story of a poor Jewish boy who

becomes a powerful Hollywood tycoon gives one a strong sense of déjà vu. It is not a bad book

and it holds the attention rather in the way that a competent, big-budget movie will keep you in your seat till the end, but it has one serious weakness: most of the action takes place in the 'twenties, but Mr. Wiseman fails entirely to communicate, through dialogue or by any other means, a sense of period.

The feel of a particular place and time is very strong in Dan Davin's For the Rest of Our Lives, but this novel is a reprint, published originally in 1947 and written very soon after the-events dealt with—the exploits of soldiers of the New Zealand Division in the Middle East fighting. There are a few dated but distinctly attractive erotic passages; and romanticised, too, are the bravery, self-sacrifice : and toughness of the, Kiwis; but the power and seriousness of the book are undeniable and it really gets to grip with the big issues that war pinpoints—love, death, good and evil. The descriptions of desert warfare have the same sharp authenticity as the scenes set in Cairo and, finally, one sees the whole work as a moving elegy for the last of the wars, in which such concepts as honour, courage and seffiessness—despite all the horror and boredom —were abundantly demonstrated.

A Bell for Achill°, another twenty-year-old re- print, is also supposed to be about war, in this case the allied military occupation of an Italian town under the benevolent rule of a saintlY, Italian-American major. I say 'supposed to' be,' because it seems to bear as much relation to war and its aftermath as to a Brownie picnic. It is cinematic in technique, 'adroit, and in its way rather enjoyable as an idyllic fantasy with a neat sweet-and-sour ending.

The Long Result' is part political allegory and part cops and robbers, the *hole dressed up as science-fiction, a form I find highly. resistible.. Apart from the almost inevitable comic-strip flavour and the fact that the' terrestrial imagina-' tion seems to find it wholly impoSsible to create' extra-terrestrial creatures in any other form than, peculiar parodies of earthly ones,' I am further put off by the implausibilities of communicatiOnd between humans 'and n'on-humans and, despite'

the extraordinary changei in every other aspect' of existence, the rhythnt and idioms of hurnap! speech seem to have stuck in the groove of the;

mid-twentieth century. I have no doubt addieW, will be undeterred and I am sure they will find., John Brunner's book a literate and fairly gripping' exercise in the genre.

Nicholas Monsarrat's latest novel- -if `novel' it can, be called, for it is not much longer than a substantial short story—tells in a prose that is not only pedestrian, but pedestrian with bunions, the story of Carter picking up a girl hitch-hiker who is about to have a baby. He feels sorry for her and takes her home for the night. But the next day she refuses to go. The baby is born and the girl takes off, leaving Carter holding the baby. A dead one. The behaviour of Carter becomes comprehensible only in the light of a surprise ending that might surprise but probablY will not convince.

Alan Caillou's The Hot Sun of Africa is full of lust, dust and contrivance, but it shows a thorough .knowledge of the background, and the description of a sinister witchdoctor's practices exercises a sickening fascination. If you can accept the author's implied assumptions of a natural white superiority, and characters that owe their existence more to other fiction than observed experience, you might find it an ex- citing enough tale.

• i VERNON SCANNELL