Beginnings and Ends
IT is the common lot of P. H. Newby characters to be confronted with a situation for which they are totally unprepared, to be unsure what is going on, what to do for the best, what to believe. Here, for instance, is the starting point of three of the stories in the author's new collection : an Armen- ian shoemaker takes his dead uncle by train to Cairo as a fellow passenger, and, on returning from coffee, finds him missing from the compart- ment . . . an English hiker asks at a farm for a glass of water, and is courteously, but without explanation, refused . . . a young man is told to expect a hostile reception from the lady of the house at which he is to lodge; she greets him charmingly. Played for comedy, and given the author's extremely flexible imagination, the gam- bit works well. Bewilderment quickens the action, and the eventual explanation rounds it off neatly.
Unlike so many admired short stories, which are little more than character sketches or the exhaus- tive treatment of a single incident, Newby's have the unusual distinction of being not only memor- able but recountable. It is only when you come across this device a number of times in a couple of hours' reading that it occurs to you to see it as a gimmick. And the author is certainly not depen- dent upon it. In 'The Beginning of the Exile' and 'The Parcel for Alexandria,' for instance, the one a moving little story about the evacuation of two comfortably brought up Armenian children to a squalid mountain home, and the other a comedy of complication, there are no surprises but just the same tautness and completeness.
The setting of Geoffrey Horne's Land of No Escape is the area around a District Officer's post in the West African bush and swampland; its characters are the DO, his new assistant, a woman missionary, the native interpreter 'and the sergeant of police; and the time is the present, the point at which the native tribesmen realise that if they attack the post the DO has neither the authority to get his blow in first nor the power to protect himself if he does not. This is a rather overpowering novel, and it is hard to see how, without losing its honesty (which is certainly not in question), it could have been anything else. The circumstances are real enough, and in those circumstances the misery of the end is inescapable. But unfortunately the oppressiveness of the situa- tion finds its way into the story-telling. The characters scarcely ever talk to each other, they think to themselves in inverted commas; and that was in the author's power to alter. A backward glance at home, a little more of the lightness shown in the first-page dialogue would have been a great relief and not a concession.
A Flame in My Heart, by John Petty, is the story of a middle-aged foundry worker, George Binden, a man of great physical and moral strength, who finds he is developing an incestuous attachment to his eldest daughter, and, more alarmingly, that she feels the same way about him. It is all very un- expected, and not least by the reader who has settled down to a novel of industrial life which is strong on atmosphere and detail, and is just wait- ing for the first brush with the management. Mr. Petty very nearly makes a go of it. But it is not a subject on which a writer can afford to make any false moves, and in the characterisation of the daughter, Olive, he makes several. It is left to the incidentals—the picture of work in a brass foundry and of working-class life in a Midlands town—to make the novel well worth reading.
Robert Harling is one of those writers of thrillers whose reviews get longer and more respectful with each new book : a tribute to his skill in providing exactly what his audience expects of him. The Endless Colonnade begins with a labour-saving 'Who's Who' biography of the psychiatrist hero, moves him rapidly off to Northern Italy, takes a cultured interest in Pal- ladian architecture, and then, having engaged the reader's sympathy for the hero and his respect for the author, introduces some topical adventure in the person of a nuclear physicist who is about to do a Pontecorvo. The pace is leisurely, but the interludes are pleasantly filled with holiday chat- ter, and two fake Franciscans, of whom Ambler might have been proud, are never very far awaY. Bianca VanOrden's Water Music describes the changing interrelations of a group of young American artists on holiday in Florence. It manages to be at the same time sophisticated and slightly gauche. The teenage novelist, Jane Gas- kell, shows by her second book, King's Daughter, that in spite of her developing skill she is too young to have anything to write about.
GEOFFREY NICHOLSON
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