Fiction

Little Miss Fate

Peter Ackroyd

My Struggle Geoff Brown (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £2.65) The Last of the Country House Murders Emma Tennant (Jonathan Cape £2.25)

Out Of The War Francis Wyndham (Duckworth £3.45)

The title of Mr Brown's new novel, My Struggle, suggests the memoirs of a powerful and ambitious man, a man who has been granted the special favours of fate and who Possesses a unique destiny which is close to fulfilment. It actually refers to Eric Hudson. Eric Hudson goes to school; works out his National Service in the honourable capacity of 'other ranks,' goes to an art-college with the secret ambition of becoming an artist, falls in love with a girl only to desert her, and eventually starts his real life by working as a glue-mixer in a local factory. This is his unique , destiny, to have a perfectly ordinary life; but little Miss Fate has cast a few thorns along his Path, since My Struggle is a study in the slow growth of madness.

Eric Hudson fulfils his life-long ambition and becomes schizophrenic, which is of course a marvellous excuse for Mr Brown to include a great many different voices without changing his hero: a case of six characters in search of a person. But it is also a device for encouraging a wealth of detail. Eric Hudson can become, for instance, a satirist lashing the follies of the age — the principal follies being students, liberals, and that class of parasites known as "social workers." Here is Eric describing a 'therapy session' in his asylum:

Mrs Ponsford the social worker] says that the problems of racial prejudice are problems of education. She says that people need to be educated. And it is suggested that Harry [a patient who has used the word "wog"] is in particular need of education

• • It is possible to think that, in putting down racialism, they are concerned to defend their Privileges. They have been to the university in order to despise Harry. It will not do for Harry to despise People merely because of the colour of their skins. The only demarcations they will allow are the demarcations that are to their advantage. Other demarcations are to be prevented because their existence will lessen the importance of those demarcations. There is to be an elite, and there is to be a rest which is not the elite, and that is all. The

education they have in mind for Harry is the learning of that.

Now if that is the voice of madness, then I for One Will be willingly taken awayand locked up.

Like any satirist worth his aloes, Eric Hudson has been reading up on such reactionary Philosophers of nothing-in-particular as Hume and Nietzsche, and he notes down some fragments of a social philosophy to shore himself up against his ruin: "To encourage idealism is to encourage the ignorant dishonesty of the baby, or it is to encourage. the calculated dishonesty of the rogue, or it is to encourage suicide." Certainly idealists, like stu.dents and liberals, make very bad writers: E. nc Hudson is not always as lucid as he appears !n, these passages (even madmen can have their irrational moments), but his transition to overt lunacy is one that Mr Brown handles with great skill. Previously, madness has been the, preserve of middle-aged and nervous feminists who have written about the pity of it all, but Geoff Brown lends his theme an imaginative robustness which prevents it from becoming squeamish: "Alice Hitler, however, is hidden in the very femininely smart lingerie department

of a very expensive West End store." Eric Hudson eventually succumbs altogether to his madness, and that slow ascent into himself is conveyed in a prose that retains all its lucidity and directness. The writing stays close enough to the experience to make it live again: "I think that one has to be insane to know the anguish of not being able to feel unhappy. One cannot be hurt. One is the indestructible Wandering Jew," and yet it is distant enough to be exact about its nature: "One is not insane because what one thinks is not rational. One is insane because what one thinks is not relevant." It is better, with a book of this kind, to quote rather than to describe and there is one passage, towards the end of the novel, which stands alone in the literature of madness:

Aggression is replacing sexuality as an obsession with the psychiatrists, and we lunatics must be ready to adapt ourselves to the change. We must be ready, as always, to say and do what we are expected to say and do . . the articulate English lunatic, with the great English language as a hiding place, will prove as ungetatable as ever. The permutations are endless. Nobody can ever go far wrong as long as he remembers that what he is doing is pretending that he is not alive.

My Struggle has the simplicity of direct vision, and Mr Brown has been able to turn his obsessions into a work of imagination.

Emma Tennant has, in her new novel, abandoned imagination for the sake of a little fancy. The Last of the Country House Murders is set in that conventional period of future shock; Jules Tanner, the last occupant of the last country mansion, is about to be murdered in order to attract the tourists ("would they import a butler to discover him?") and a revolting little detective, a character which fiction has now turned into a cottage industry, must dress as Lord Peter Wimsey in order to solve the crime. Who is to be the murderer and, as it turns out, who is to be the murdered? Time will not tell. The wrong man is killed, and the new English tribes rise up for no reason in particular. There is no room in the future for such things as causality.

The novel is, presumably, a parody of the upper-middle-class world which creates and consumes detective thrillers, and it is no doubt also meant to caricature the detective thriller itself. There are some amusing scenes as Miss Tennant relentlessly follows the principle that, sooner or later, our little world will be no better than a stage (her suggestion, however, that all future novels will only be able to use the characters of previous fiction, is already the theory of modern literature), but her writing suffers from a surfeit of 'things to come.' She uses such contrivances of "science fiction" as mass suggestion, starry gadgets, and global illusions, but manages to neglect such old-fashioned matters as character, narrative and — most important of all —general plausibility.

It is qualities like these which show to best advantage in Francis Wyndham's Out Of The War. It is a collection of stories written by Mr Wyndham while he was, as the publisher puts it, "still in his teens" but they are written with such assurance that they must, in retrospect, be the work of his maturity. This is a pity, since Mr Wyndham's prose in this book is so finely tuned an instrument that much more than a swansong could have been expected. All of the stories are vignettes of war-time as it seemed on the domestic front, and especially as it passed by those lonely and frustrated young women whom everything passes by. Miss White, for example, finds consolation in writing letters to the Sunday newspapers ("is this a record?") or in sending an anonymous note to the wife of her employer. Her image is the one that dominates this book: fussy, ungainly, suburban and with a passion that can find expression only in the most awkward forms. And then there is Agatha, resigned to being "you're the brainy one of the family," who reads Aldous Huxley and desperately wants to meet "interesting people"; she, too, will come to grief. Francis Wyndham deals with a passion, or rather an attempt at passion, which serves no good purpose and which invariably fails; all of his stories end on a consciously false note of suburban reassurance as his young ladies sink back into the prison of their respective fates. He writes with a great imaginative sympathy, which is only to be expected in a young writer, but also with a quite extraordinary objectivity, which is a rare gift even among our older novelists. The writing of Out Of The War is natural and it avoids all of the self-regarding fripperies which the adolescent mind is heir to — Mr Wyndham uses a plain prose, which can be both ironic and colloquial. And he has a very good ear.

Peter Ackroyd is literary editor of The Spectator.