Fiction
A Clouded Star. By Anne Parrish. (Heinemann. 9s. 6d.)
WE are, quite rightly, continually repeating that the proper business of Literature is Life. We cannot then complain if, among the naturalists, psycho-analysts, sociologists and other specialists who are our fiction writers, we find an occasional biologist. In labora- tories and other places in which biologists are found, strange colour- drained objects rest motionless in formalin to be taken out with forceps, sliced open with scalpels, and pinned back for further dis- • section. The light in such places is the light of the end of the world, and there is a smell of stagnant drains. And yet what is studied there is no less life than the affairs of the drawing-room, the battle- field or the analyst's couch, and there is observable in the technique of the men in white coats who work there a surprising combination of care and glee. Such a man in a white coat is Mr. William Sansom, whose curious ingrown talent makes another astonishing appearance in his first novel, The Body.
Of course, like all specialists, Mr. Sansom is hopeless off his own neat and has occasional ambitions to be there. It is not quite clear how seriously he himself takes the blurb's claim that this story of a suburban hairdresser, obsessed by the idea that his wife is having an affair with a garage-worker in the boarding-house next door, is "a study of jealousy." It is in fact nothing of the kind, since human emotions are not able to be bottled in formalin, and any depths of truth about human passion that Mr. Sansom may or may not have intended to plumb, remain unplumbed. This is, however, a largely irrelevant criticism since the delights of the book are found in a quite different direction_ Henry Bishop's obsession is a convenient and successful device for leading Mr. Sansom on a tour of dissection into the world that fascinates him, the world of seedy heartiness (" Eh bien, as they say in frenchy frame "), the world of curious phenomena taken for granted (dustmen, waterworks cupolas, dentures in a shop window), the world whose sense of values is expressed most forcibly at a river picnic (" Surely he might have put his trousers on to eat "). Other writers may employ their talents to explore the vastness of the universe or the furthest reaches of the human spirit ; Mr. Sansom turns his inwards on the commonplaces of twentieth-century sub- urban life. And why not ? This is Life, too, and a great deal closer to most of us than Egdon Heath. As Mr. Sansom peers and probes among his bottles, nothing, from a hairdresser's dummy to an ordinary telephone, escapes his fascinated scalpel. And because his fascination is real, much of his world is strangely illuminated—even for non-biologists. The result ? For the most part, a very funny and readable book. The goings-on in and around the boarding- house where the garage-worker lives have a flavour of Mr. Pooter. Only occasional passages emphasise the price one has to pay. "Inside those black boots there were feet and toes and on the toes greyish- yellow hairs. There was a corn on one toe, a patch of hard skin along the side of the other foot. Inside the boot, inside the sock, there was life." Essentially a biologist's view.
Highway 40 suffers a little from one's continual anticipation that it will develop the emotional momentum of the last scene in the film Paisa. The very fact that one should anticipate this is an indication of its merit. Its subject is similar : a mixed group of Italian Partisans are undergoing a rastrellamento by Germans and Fascists in the last stages of the war. Its treatment is sensitive and sympathetic, and Mr. Davidson can write beautifully. And yet it never quite achieves Paisa's poetic intensity. Perhaps this because the inevitably haphazard, almost ramshackle shape of events becomes a little frustrating in a book. Orke longs to have a clearer picture of the operations, even if the Partisans themselves are under- standably confused. And there are a few acts of technical clumsiness which irritate. For instance, although Robert Crookshank, the Englishman living in the mountains with the Partisans, has heard talk of Gianelli and his Blackshirts on pages 49, 51 and zo5, he has to have Gianelli explained to him on page 189, in case,
one suspects, the reader should have forgotten. The same thing happens in the case of the Mongols fighting for the Germans. These are mentioned several times before on page z6o Robert asks, un- necessarily helpfully, who the Mongols are. And there is an unhappy lapse in which a German lieutenant is made to talk to his driver in traditional English military slang (" Half an hour for grub," he shouted with a grin. "Look slippy now."). These are trifling criticisms but worth making because it is largely to the presence of such tiny faults that the book's failure to develop the fullest sense of poetic tragedy can be attributed. It is a moving and exciting book. With a little more attention to form and rhythm, and a little more polish, it might have been a great one.
Anne Parrish's A Clouded Star is less striking than the other two books on this list but a competent piece of work all the same. It is a novel built round a remarkable historical figure, Harriet Tubman, a runaway negro slave, who operated an "underground railway" from the Southern States to Canada, along which she conducted many of her people to freedom. The slaves knew her as Moses. A Clouded Star tells of the escape of Samuel, a small boy parted from his parents in traditional fashion to settle a gentleman's debt of honour. Better than the escape itself, which suffers a little as fiction from careful reconstruction, is the early Southern background, with the odious Mr. Percival quoting from St. Paul himself to prove that Christianity embraced slavery. ROBERT KEE.
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