Polarities
Nick Totton
Polonaise Piers Paul Read (Alison Press/Secker and Warburg £3.90) The Doctor's Wife Brian Moore (Cape £3.50) The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century Michael Moorcock (Quartet £3.95)
Novels like Polonaise usually die at the outline stage. In skeletal form they impress everyone, not least the author; but as the appalling difficulty of actually writing them gradually emerges, there is a tendency to turn to other projects. Also, they fall uncomfortably between two stools: more than just another novel, but distinctly less than the masterpiece one will write some day. But there is a lingering attachment to the materialalways a feeling that it could somehow be pushed and prodded into that vital inevitability which was promised in the original conception. So sometimes the writer buckles down to it.
Piers Paul Read has buckled down to it, and produced a novel not without conviction. It is about a writer, which is difficult enough; but much more so when the writer is a decayed Polish aristocrat involved in Communist politics between the wars. Stefan Kornowski is also a very particular kind of writer: he is and remains into middle age an adolescent nihilist, the kind who identifies dutifully with De Sade and picks interminably at the scab of his atheism. The characterisation is extremely accurate—in terms of a stage of development : many precociously intellectual young people enjoy this pose for a while, and can be seen any day promenading through the older universities with their black capes and other para
phernalia. It is at least an effective cover for sexual nervousness. But the idea of someone spending his life stuck like this—because the wind changed at the wrong moment ? is horrifying. It makes one worry about Mr Read.
However, Stefan Kornowski eventually saves himself (we are to believe) by the unusual expedient of pushing someone off a cliff during an English country house party. You see, he wants to save the engagement of Teofil, the son of a pre-war friend who rejected the Communist party after killing for the NKVI) in Spain, and died in the right-wing Polish resistance . . . There's a great deal of plot in Polonaise, certainly, spun in endless strands of insubstantial candy floss. The historical background is solid, though, or at any rate plausible; and obviously something has to happen to fill the prolonged pause in Stefan's development. Clearly if anyone could keep this stuff up for a lifetime it would be a Slavic Catholic aristocrat : look at Nabokov. But why should we, or Mr Read for that matter, be interested? By the time Stefan makes his earth-shattering discovery that nihilism is a mistake (the whole tenor of the novel being that old Chestertonian nonsense about Christianity and nihilism as the only alternatives) I was watching the picture with the sound turned down.
People in The Doctor's Wile are much less exotic, much more plausible, but not a great deal more interesting. This is a simple tale of everyday adultery. After fifteen years or so of unsatisfying marriage, Sheila Redden finds herself alone in Paris. Unsurprisingly, she has an intense affair with a younger man, an American. One thing leads to another, her husband finds out, he and her brother use the unpleasant tactic of telling the American Embassy about mental illness in the family to block her entry into the United States; and she leaves the young man waiting for her across the Atlantic.
At this late stage, the novel becomes a good deal more powerful. Instead of going home in defeat, Sheila goes to London; takes a job in a launderette; and we leave her gazing into the granite face of the future. In a mei=e two deft pages, Mr Moore manages that difficult task of portraying a good
person: the manageress of the launderette. who offers tactful and disinterestedly generous support. It is strange that he saves this kind of impressive skill foi last; but in fact the novel only comes fully alive in the last chapter. Mr Moore might have done better to choose less well-trodden ground than middle-aged infidelity (one hopes that it wasn't because he fancied himself as an erotic writer: the sex here, like Mr Read's, ls pretty depressing). It is possible to write a good book about it—Doris Lessing's The S11171Iner Before the Dark, for example; but her novel is about so much more. The Doctor's Wile is without wider resonances. If Brian Moo' e somewhat disappoints expectation, Michael Moorcock far exceeds it. The Adventures of Una Persson . . . is al! resonance: like the whole 'Jerry Cornelius sequence of novels and stories, it is an attempt at portraiture of the twentieth cell' tury in its essence. An ambitious project: and all Mr Moorcock's previous attempts have been dreadfully flawed. But in the light of this novel they can be seen as necessary preliminaries: here, he at last succeeds not, of course, in totalising the twentieth century; but in showing us a great deal rha! we already know in our bones, but have perhaps not yet articulated, about where and when 'here and now' is. Mr Moorcock's great gift is for synthesis. He has a strong sense of the cultural 10; rhent, the coherence and intelligibility °' fashion, music, literature, politics, and every other human activity. Often his representations of such synchronicities have been forced, over-experimental. The effort has been too visible for harmony; and harmunY is essential. In The Adventures of Una Persson . . . there is a new relaxation to Mr Moorcock's writing: he can afford the time to take care over its fine texture, and tile time to feel for his characters, and to give them feelings. There is a lot of time to play with, in feeti Mr Moorcock's highly effective way ° looking at here and now is to look every. where else. His characters are time travellersk' who can move not only forward and bae (though temporal inertia keeps them prettoY much to this century) but also sideways, int e alternative histories. One might describet!.1A whole thing as a dramatic extension of ni°'.c decor. Instead of just altering the themetie era of one's decorating to suit a mood. 0°,, can actually travel there, and stay until one: mood shifts. Like most people with exaggerated resources, Una and Catherine are looking for something worth doing' They try activist manipulation of histnrY and hedonist retirement by turns; tralVe.d always in the ambiguity of (partial) orlindl: science without omnipotence. Understall g ing a problem does not always imply solbe it; and it is increasingly clear that tor twentieth century is one big problem. 'xi Moorcock knows no more than the person about solutions; but his new hook finally, that elegant, informative and joyable statement of the problem wh'e he has for so long failed to achieve.
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