New Novels •
THIS week's novels are half American, half English. They are interest. ing examples of the differences in styling and bodywork, as well as id basic conception, of the '54 models. The Americans are all big cars: roomy", family affairs, produced for a prosperous, expanding market, designed for long-distance travel (anyway, for the journey from New York to Hollywood), shiny with chrome, ticking with gadgetry, each much the same as the other. The English? Smaller, handier, modester in design, each produced for a different job.
There has been an increasing flow of good, solid American imports this year; and while standard English production remains as dreary to look at as, say, the Prefect, there are more than enough indi. vidually styled Bristols about to keep the balance. For excitements like The Catcher in the Rye or Limbo '90 come over all too seldom.
Mr. Lanham's novel is certainly not one of these. His is in the cheaper American range: mediocre, performance camouflaged by a deal of glitter. This is a newspaper story, and the types haven't changed much since Front Page. Enter Roy Durkin, City Editor of the New York Record-Star. Mr. D. drinks too much at the bar round the corner from the paper and he talks dirty and he's 11,w" to work for but he's the best Goddamned newspaperman in U.P Goddamned town. Roy has trained Carolyn Brown (the 10, Maid& of the title) who has gone on to bigger and better things an finally married the owner of the paper, an able but intellectual nice, guy, who isn't what his grandpa was. Question is: when the presen` managing editor retires on Mr. and Mrs. Star-Record's return frolt their honeymoon will our Mr. Durkin get the job? Since Carolyn is a bad girl (not all bad, you know, there's a scene from her eatil life which explains it), you can guess that he won't. In the mealy while you have to spend fifteen shilling's worth of reading time learning about Carolyn's love-life in flashbacks and finding out WI1) Roy drinks. Not that any of this is uninteresting at the level Si which it's written, or that it's badly put together; no, in the handling of the flashbacks and in the authenticity of the atmosphere, Mt' Lanham demonstrates solid professional ability. But all this, Ynd feel, to make a sentimental parade of types; a waste of enerek With Mr. Sykes we're moving up towards the Cadillac class. Hip theme is serious, and it's developed by people, not characters.' Carlotta, an ageing but still beautiful actress, is involved in a love' hate relationship with her scientist husband. His return from a period of work in Europe to try to mend a nearly broken marriage; while showing her the shoddiness of her (needed) admirers and renewing memories of her earlier happiness with him, produces final, and nearly fatal, return of her rejection impulses. It causes complications too, in the lives of-her immediate circle, all of then' cleanly drawn people with problems of their own. What Mr. Sykes cannot quite do, having thrown his pebble into his pool, if control the radiating ripples. About two-thirds of the way through The Centre of the Stage runs away with him, action degenerates into talk and outlines blur. You can see what he's getting at when he starts to probe at the idea that Carlotta's husband is turning into s saint; but the idea's never worked out and the ending is unsativ factorily loose. Despite this, Mr. Sykes's Forsterian sensitivity, his delicate peiception of shades of feeling and his certain know' ledge of the uncertainty of people, all confirm the hopes that he raised with The Nice American. He is an adult writer whose onlY failing is in trying to cope with too many problems at once. This will pass; and when it does he will be an important writer.
Mr. Gibson also has quality; and for a first novel, The Cobweb is a remarkable piece of work. He goes at things very differently from Mr. Sykes; he takes more words to establish a situation; the working' lines of his construction are left showing now and then; he keeps his plot wheeling steadily along a broad, uncomplicated road rather than sending it scuttling up promising-looking byways; and he is a less finished writer.
Dr. McIver is the Assistant Director of a mental clinic in the Middle West. Angular, strong-willed, honest (except about his oval marriage), he has everything that the psychiatrist hero needs in order to be played by Gregory Peck. Yet he remains—and this is Mr. Gibson's skill—a believable character whose fears and joYs can be shared. At the clinic, his Patients' Committee is coming along fine; they have decided by themselves to design and make a new set of curtains for their own living room and McIver's [pet case, Stevie—in whose cure he sees the solution of his own problems—has produced some first-rate designs. Then, in a series of misunder- standings, some of them maliciously purposeful, the patients' project is cancelled and curtains donated by the richest of the trustees are hung. What effect this has on the clinic's inmates can be imagined. In the resulting trouble McIver faces up to the truth about his marriage; finds uneasy peace with a female colleague, fixes the trustees, and secures the resignation of the Director, whose weakness has been responsible for much of the mess.
The whole thing is handled with devastating competence. For all his seeming lack of artistry Mr. Gibson is as serious a workman as Mr. Sykes.
Now, chugging down a provincial avenue of lending libraries, comes Miss Borden in her little, battered, pre-war Morris. Margin of Error is a very English novel about the crash, in an unattractive bit of the Sudan, of an airliner filled with the sort of people who—in novels—are always crashing or about to crash. (It is a reassuring thought that one has never seen anything like them in real life.) They were en route for a colony where the natives, and Socialists in Whitehall, are causing trouble with nice Saunders-of-the-River-like administrators, on whose side Miss Borden squarely is. She editor- ialises at some length about colonial problems, and this, as is under- standable, does not altogether help the book along. Three Labour MPs react stupidly; a nice old priest dies; a rich woman is silly; a thought-to-be-in-disgrace civil servant is grand; so is a boy, who's the son of a more senior administrator—splendid little chap. Back in Darnba all the nice people are grand about it too; and the nasty people aren't. So when they're rescued you know everything will come out all right with the rest of the plot and—oh good!—so it does.
Mr. Watney is certainly original. His book bounces with freshness and confidence. And while the confidence may be at times mis- placed, the freshness is a delight. Common Love takes its theme from Plato and its hero from a dull job. Michael Bell, twenty and tired of it all, goes off in the gay way young men do in young men's novels, to stay with his sister and her husband in France. Their proposal that he should marry Jacqueline, the neighbouring farmer's earthy daughter, seems insulting; and Jacqueline herself little more than a promiscuous slut. It is only when, wandering, Michael sees evil at work in the mysterious, pitiful Captain Thorne, magnifica of an ever more sinister village in the back of the beyond of the Camargue, and again in Mamie, a lost millionairess whose bodyguard he becomes, that he begins to realise that Jacqueline's animal approach is not just honest but also endearing. To drive home the point of his theme Mr. Watney produces a 'random effect' ending which, with its sudden twist to tragedy, is very telling.
The characters are uneven but two are excellent: Captain Thorne, an early Aldous Huxley eccentric who swells from a mildly comic figure to a whole being in a few pages; and Purvis, the idiotically vinophile Englishman who is such a menace in France:
'This great fertility rite, the culmination of all the harvests, these fine people . . .' he shouted at us. 'The inestimable honour of
• actually making wine . . . to feel beneath one's fingertips the soft
and rounded grapes. . . He was breathless with emotion ' ... my greatest ambition at last fulfilled.'
It is a relief to find this .dreary pest pinned to paper at last. Mr. Watney still has a great deal to learn and his writing is often carelessi but there's life here and feeling and wit and charm—which is why he will always get rather better notices than he deserves.
Mr. Golding, in a first novel of great promise, is also original. Lord of the Flies opens with a Tempest-like purity : a party of boys have parachuted from a crashing aircraft and assemble from all points of the island on which they've fallen when Ralph blows on a conch-horn. At first everything is Ballantyne and Stevenson; but Caliban begins to make himself felt; and on twentieth-century desert islands there's no Ariel. The descent of the boys into savagery is handled with wry understatement and as Jack, the hunter, gains ascendancy over Ralph, chief at first by virtue of his possession of the conch, faces are painted, spears become weapons instead of toys and a diabolically schoolboyish blood cult is born. First to die is Simon, the odd boy, hacked to death in a way foreshadowed by the trend of earlier, more innocent horseplay; then, Piggy, the unacceptable boys and ultimately Ralph is being hunted by the whole tribe, united in blood and fear, as he could never unite them in work and comradeship. An incoherent naval officer with his splendidly inadequate: I should have thought that a pack of British boys—you're all British aren't you?—would have been able to put up a better show than that—I mean— serves to cut the nightmare off before it becomes unbearable; and by his flat, external bewilderment underlines the horrors that have come into being. Lord of the Flies is a remarkable, bitter piece of writing; and, with- out the use of a single jargon phrase, talks more deeply about what goes on inside people than either The Cobweb or The Centre of the Stage, both of which are jargon packed. Young writers like Messrs. Golding and Watney do much to make up for the overall dullness of the more orthodox areas of the English novel in 1954.
JOHN METCALI
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