Fishing
A Clash of Cymbals. By James Blish. (Faber, 13s. 6d.) The Tongue of Fire. By Mika Waltari. (Putnam, 12s. 6d.) IN some ways, a week like this can be more inter- esting than a good one. My duty is to draw out-
standing novels to your attention. The duty of every sane publisher is to bring out those he has in time for the holidays. So we're free this week to go fishing in the astonishing tide of published fiction which surirs across a reviewer's desk without ever coming normally under your eye.
Yet this is nine-tenths of a reviewer's work, and sometimes seems the more important part of it.
After all, there goes the great majority, the main stream. There's the material on which you've got to base your generalisations; only after reading it can you discuss Modern Fiction, why it's written and what about. And only then can you appreciate properly why the others stand out.
You can learn more about a writer, for example, from the work where he hasn't quite subdued his material than from the successes he's brought off. James Aldridge has divided Gold and Sand into nine short stories; but it's really three blocs of novel-experience which for some reason have refused to rise into full-sized company with The Diplomat and I Wish He Would Not Die. There are two stories about a boyhood in the Australian bush : the son of a village drunk wins a victory over the town by pelting every respectable tin roof with midnight rocks, and over himself by sparing an old red dog-fox on a hunt. Three are about the Russo-Finnish winter war—angry but rather faded snapshots, these. The rest all revolve about the lives of ageing barnstorming fliers in post-war Egypt : two English, one a tough, itinerant Ameri- can who drags his ten-year-old son along on alarming excursions filming sharks beneath the Red Sea. Mr. Aldridge tries two studies of their relationship, which are the best things in the book —vivid and exciting, with constant tension of character. But his longest and most formally ambi- tious piece is a curiously lifeless story of the friendship, terminated by the bombs of Novem- ber, 1956, between a shy English pilot and an Egyptian. His difficulty seems to be a compulsion to write political stories about unpolitical people. He admires, in a way which recalls both Nevil Shute and Hemingway, the spare, open-necked life of the mechanised twentieth-century frontier, with its masculine skills and oil-cloth virtues. He wants to show that politics intrude,on such a life with tragic irrelevance; but the fact is that they also dwarf it. The splendid ideal of a life without newspapers dwindles to the parochialism of people who don't read them. Perhaps he should try leav- ing out politics altogether, and return to his dogged American and the anxious boy in the coral jungles of the Red Sea. There's a fine novel some- where there.
Then in a normal week, we'd probably have to overlook science fiction, usually so specious both as fiction and as science. I still can't bring myself to use the name `novel' about a story in which 2,000-year-old people career about the galaxy in chitons and sandals, but it would be short-sighted to devalue all the inventiveness and intelligence which has gone into James Blish's A Clash of Cymbals. This is a kind of cosmic On the Beach:
the last sons of Earth, colonising a rather sub- topian planet at the far end of the Milky Way, learn that the end of the universe is at hand. It is about to impinge (if that's the word) on a universe of anti-matter, and the two will cancel out like plus and minus signs. None of the ageless charac- ters in the book are quite solid enough to make this a real loss; but it is developed with enormous ingenuity and imagination, and at the end, when the last earthmen force themselves through the eye of time to ensure that there will be matter for a new creation, I'd have waved a United Nations flag if I'd had one. The point is that, if neither fiction nor science has room for this kind of speculative play about the edges of our knowledge, a new medium has to be created to hold it. If some one could marry such intelligent concern about the future with really serious fiction, it would do more than anything else to reintegrate our culture with Sir Charles Snow.
An enormous amount of 4,he fiction you never hear of is written by people trying to communicate (this is why you don't hear of it) the incommunic- able. In every batch of novels which reaches a reviewer's desk, at least two or three will be attempts to deal with the experiences of pain or accidie or religious intuition. Occasionally a Bernanos or a Denton Welch will find a language to express these, but for every Voice through a Cloud or Cure de Cam pagne a score of honour- able failures drop annually into limbo. Mika Waltari, the Finnish author of those pre-historic epics The Egyptian and The Etruscan, has a shot in The Tongue of Fire at conveying religious possession. A small, agonised clerk finds himself driven to accost strangers on the street and inform them that God is seeking them. The early chap- ters which describe this compulsion do convey something of the burden of Calvinist election, but unfortunately the hero finds a friend to listen, and the novel bogs down in his attempts to describe an experience which can only be enacted. The book is worth study if only to bring home by con- trast the magnitude of what Dostoievsky achieved.
RONALD BRYDEN
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