NEW NOVELS
Friends apart
WILLIAM BUCHAN
The Stranger's View David Pryce-Jones (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 25s) Kings of Infinite Space Nigel Balchin (Collins 25s) The Thing of It Is . . . William Goldman (Michael Joseph 25s) P49ple in Glass Houses Shirley Hazzard (Macmillan 21s) The Artist Type Brian Glanville (Cape 21s) A Light Affliction Anne Rider (Bodley Head 21s) The stranger, in David Pryce-Jones's new novel The Stranger's View, is the narrator who, orphaned while still a schoolboy, early finds himself in a position of detachment. He goes to live with an English uncle settled in north- west France, a devout convert to the Roman Church, who sends him to school with the Jesuits in his own small town. Here he meets Robert de Courville, brilliant maverick, roman- tic revolutionary, aristocrat a rebours, one of four young men whose stories will intertwine with his own throughout the book. The other three are Charles, child of the rich business world whose 'youth was overlaid by a pine- wood copy of an old fireplace, fake Chippen- dale, and four-course meals served by a Spanish maid'; Reg, of humbler origin, grant- aided to the same public school, who sees clearly what Charles's world has to offer and grasps it with both hands; and Nicholas, the impassioned original, who shows up by every thought, deed and idiosyncratic impulse the slipshodness of everybody else. The time is the 1950s, and the high point of the book comes with the Hungarian uprising in October 1956. To begin with—and what a relief it is to come upon this after years of defiant pro- vincialism or metropolitan coterie stuff—the author's cast of mind is European, cosmopoli- tan in the best, indeed the only proper, sense. His Vienna is Austria's ravaged capital to the life, no casual tourist's mock-up. The city's unique compound of febrility and petit-bour- geois stodge is astonishingly well conveyed, along with the beauty, the anxiety, the fear and the corking sense of loss.
The Stranger's View is an exciting work, and not the least part of its author's skill is that each of its main characters, although representing a clear attitude to action and involvement, is perfectly real as a character. Charles, the military romancer who, after seeing something nasty at Suez, turns his back on his past, his origins, and goes, by way of Mount Athos, to work in a paint factory in Cardiff. Reg, who rises in Tory politics by shrewd use of contacts made through Charles, playing up his own working-class background, because such backgrounds are 'in.' Robert, who exists to illustrate the Procrustean side of the French intellect, who would do the world good by force, if necessary, and who ends as a communist; and Nicholas, the single- hearted, the real man of action, who makes his
own gesture in his own way, driving a dubious ambulance to Budapest, finding apotheosis in a Russian shell-burst, fading in glory from his friends' horizon, ever to be regretted by them, Somehow the narrator, who seems to suffer the fate of the reasonable man in a world of increasing idiocy, never appears as negative.
To admirers of the earlier Nigel Balchin, Kings of Infinite Space is likely to be a dis- appointment. True, some of the old magic is in it—the authoritative handling of technical intricacies, the flat but flexible style compell- ing belief—but the theme chosen, that of space travel, and man's relation to it, seen through the eyes of a British physiologist chosen to fly with the astronauts, is either too big, or too untidy; at times it seems to evade Mr Balchin or, worse, to produce in him (and therefore in the reader) a kind of fatigue. There are fine, sharp moments, but the narrative hung between them sags, sometimes, like a hammock.
In The Thing of It Is . . . by William Gold- man, the thing of it is that Amos McCracken loves Lila, his wife, even though their marriage is on the verge of coming apart. They come to London, carrying it between them like a damaged suitcase, with four year old Jessica as extra weight. Amos is a successful song- writer, a likeable man racked with shyness, in- decision and the knowledge that he is half Jewish. London, most sympathetically de- scribed, fails to mend matters. Even Jessica's desperation, acutely portrayed, cannot reach her parents. They take off for Rome, then Venice, where they are joined by Amos's demon mother-in-law with the child. In a splendid scene in the old ghetto Amos finally produces, and discovers, some home truths. All comes right, quite plausibly, in the nick of time; and we are glad, if only for Jessica's sake: the child looks like Edward G. Robinson, and is wholly delightful.
Shirley Hazzard's People in Glass Houses is the book those of us have been waiting for who have wondered, fearfully, what life must be like in those palaces of do-gooding on the Hudson and the Lake of Geneva. It is made up of episodes, complete in themselves, but all involving employees of a great international organisation, each clear-cut and satisfying in its own way. Miss Hazzard has a sharp eye and a civilised point of view. Her stories are sometimes sad, often very funny; her turns of phrase are exquisite: 'He would sit there, speechless and crimson faced and heaving like a gong-tormented sea' . . . 'His goodwill had glanced off the Organisation like calf-love off a courtesan—the Organisation did not require or even notice it.'
Geoff Barnes, in Brian Glanville's The Artist Type, is a man of some talent, the exact nature of which he does not know. He has tried act- ing; he is halfway through a play; he collaborates with an artist on children's books. When we meet him he is an ad-man, free-lance, principally perhaps a gonad-man—his one field of certain success, in primary terms at least, being sex. This he uses, or thinks he uses, to get the better of people from classes he envies and fears. Lower middle class himself, he cashes in on current proletarian snobberies but, more often than not, finds that his 'conquests' are predators more accomplished than he. To Jane, who really loves him, he is naturally beastly, -unable to forgive her either her love or her conventional background. This is a savagely perceptive book which should be required reading for all young provincials with an eye on Chelsea. It should send the more
sensitive of them screaming into the woods. . Anne Rider's A Light Affliction takes us far, both in distance and feeling, from Europe, space travel, international civil servants, or the corruptions of Swinging London. An incident of the Chinese invasion of India shakes the lives of a European community centred on a small leper hospital in the Himalayas. For some days drama is high, big choices have to be made, new horizons scanned with courage or fear. Only for Dr Bone, and for Matron, there is no question of choice. The lepers have none either. Miss Rider tells her story quietly and well, and leaves the reader pondering.
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