Twee talk

Paul Ableman

Only Children Alison Lurie (Heinemann £4.95) This is a story told in two kinds of baby-talk and one kind of grown-up talk.

Mary-Ann's kind of baby-talk goes like this: 'Anna is a big tall strong lady with bright wrinkly blue eyes and shiny thick hair the colour of horse-chestnuts wound round her head like a braided crown, or made into a twisty sugar-bun shape in back.'

Lolly's kind of baby-talk is a bit different: `131obby sun patterns sliding on the cool kitchen table. Yellow round spots. Pointed shadow spots the shape of? Of hands, Lolly thinks — greeny half-transparent leaf hands pressing against the kitchen window.'

Alison Lurie's authorial grown-up talk goes: 'At the lowest point of the shallow valley a line of trees and bushes marked where a creek wound through the fields in long relaxed curves between banks of clay'.. . which may not be specially muscular prose but comes as a blessed relief when you feel you can't stand another single word of twee.

What happens is: Lolly and her mummy and daddy and Mary-Ann and her mummy and daddy go off to spend the weekend in the New England countryside with Anna ,who runs a progressive school called Eastwind. Eastwind is probably a reference to something in a fairy-tale but not one your reviewer recalls from his own remote childhood. The year is 1935 when, of course, another kind of chill wind was blowing in America, the depression. Mary-Ann's daddy, Bill, is a relief-agency executive and radical idealist. Lolly's daddy, Dan, is a failed writer who has sold out to advertising and now drives a shiny, red, super car. Dan is handsome and loves the ladies and lots of them love him back. This is very depressing for Lolly's mummy, who adores Dan, and has to spend the whole weekend watching him trying to lure Honey, Bill's wife, into the barn for a roll in the hay. Honey is a deep-South belle who could have married anyone in her home town but settled for Bill, who has got more and more staid with age. But Bill adores Honey so it is very depressing for him to have to watch her making eyes at Dan all weekend. But somehow the amorous pair never quite get it together and technical virtue is preserved. Anna, too, is involved in the listless ronde d'amour but only because of something that happened years and years ago and, since it is the one surprise of the book, shouldn't be disclosed even though you'll probably guess what it is after the first few pages or even from this review.

Is there anything important I haven't told you? Oh yes, Lolly's mummy is called Celia and she is not very interesting. Also on the scene is Lolly's half-brother, Lennie, a tiresome adolescent who sneers at everything.

The blurb says that 'it's not long before these grown-ups seem to be getting younger and younger . . . abandoning the conventions of adult behaviour . . . sliding ever deeper into a world of childish stories and games and secrets . . . of sudden passions and violent quarrels.' And it's really very odd of the blurb to say that, because it just isn't true. The grown-ups remain boringly predictable and consistent right up to the end and perhaps the blurb only says that because a blurb has to say something about a book and there's precious little in this one for it to get its teeth into except perhaps for the baby-talk which it doesn't even mention.

Alison Lurie probably set great store by the baby-talk and felt she was laying bare the souls of children. Now and then she does come up with a few grains of prettified psychological truth and then we readers get a faint sense of an adult world filtered through a child's consciousness. But much more often the infant minds are represented as being preposterously objective and abstract and what Mary-Ann normally supplies in her soliloquies is baby-talk versions of homespun adult wisdom. 'At dinner tonight they were all mad at each other the way big kids about Lennie's age get sometimes. Not yelling or fighting, but sort of laughing and saying mean things only they didn't always say them to anybody special the way younger kids would have. Instead they made jokes about bunches of people with names like "most men to-day" and "the idle rich".' More successful are the evocations of simple emotional response as when Lennie frightens Lolly with a vampire story:' "I don't believe you," Lolly says, but she can see Dracula already, a man with big furry. wings like a bat, flying up the valley towards. Anna's house.'

There was only one passage in the whole book that quickened my interest. MaryAnn is collecting Colorado beetles from Anna's vegetable garden because Anna has offered her a dime a jar for them. Her labours take her under the kitchen window where the adults are talking and she hears her own mother refer to her as 'an ugly duckling'. This is a terrible thing to happen to any child as I know only too well from an analogous incident in my own childhood. Mary-Ann is, in fact, none too chuffed by the revelation and sulks for the rest of the afternoon but, by the very next day, has regained her composure and even begun to find virtue in her homeliness. I don't think this philosophic acceptance is very convincing and I don't think Alison Lurie really demonstrates much empathy with children in this book.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that the cast also includes a teddy-bear called Theodore Ilgenfritz. Mercifully he doesn't say anything.

The Godmother Hugh Fleetwood (Hamish Hamilton £5.50) The Love Siege Tom Wakefield ( Routledge £5.95) The Coelacanth: A Novel Rosalind Brackenbury (Harvester £4.95) Night in Tunisia Neil Jordan (Writers and Readers 0.95) In order to write convincingly about obsessions, to create an atmosphere where murder is not only likely but inevitable. Hugh Fleetwood has sometimes (in the two other novels I've read by him, at least) made his characters monsters — monsters of egotism who love no-one, or monsters whose love for someone 'else is greedy and allconsuming. The first type will kill to escape the second type. the second type to get what they want. And so that they can inhabit an un really intense world, and have time to go mad or be dragged through the twists and turns of the plot, they tend to be very rich and live abroad. The last feature appears in The Godmother: its heroine. Jane Perreira. is a rather severe Englishwoman in her sixties, living in Rio de Janeiro. having been left a huge fortune by her Brazilian husband. But she is not a monster: on the contrary. all her life she has been haunted by guilt about her money, has sat on committees and given it away; and the book slowly proves to us that even she, a good. intelligent, apparently sensitive woman, can be driven to contemplate murder.

Cleverly, the author does it through playing on her sense of guilt. Pierre. an infuriating ex-lover whom she nonetheless wants. comes to stay with her. Her quandary is brilliantly described; she sees him for what he is. and longs for him to leave; yet she fantasises about sleeping with him, marrying him. When he proposes, she sees through it as a gesture of sentimental gallantry and refuses, though she had been thinking of proposing to him herself. She is released from this trap by Pierre's death in a fall. But she believes that her wet friend Robert who hated Pierre's success as a writer and was jealous of his attention to Jane, has killed him. And this — such is her nature — makes her feel more and more guilty; Robert, who appears to have taken over Pierre's soul, fills out and becomes successful, and realising her feelings blackmails her into paying him so he can devote all his time to writing. One of her friends notices what is going on and offers to have Robert killed. All she has to do is write a cheque.

The other thread in the story is her friendship with two Brazilian railways workers called Asdrubal and Osiris. They act as ambiguous confidants to her agonies of conscience, though she ceases to confide in them when she begins to suspect Robert. Are they native innocents, who can absolve her if she confesses to them or callous terrorists who plant the bomb that shocks her into realising what she is doing? We don't know. These moral reversals may sound rather slick; at some points I was conscious of the author gleefully shuffling and cutting another inescapable dilemma, but he so skilfully makes each one grow out of the last that I had no complaints.

Some time in the near future, characters from Tom Wakefield's two previous novels are running a home for handicapped children. An order from above directs that the worst cases should be 'erased'. and the staff and children settle down to endure the siege in a fortified mansion in Bayswater. They release gas-filled balloons with messages attached describing their plight. A small crowd of supporters gathers outside the house, and eventually Their plans are thwarted, though three of the women die while rushing forward over the mined lawn to save the evil school inspector. Two of those who die have been heroines of previous books. Margaret of Trixie Trail!. Star Ascending and Isobel of Isobel Quirk in Orbit. The outspoken Margaret. making her way up from Runnock to Bayswater. is a bigger character than she appears to be in The Love Siege.

I think this is because the enemies she met in Trixie were real people. amusingly observed, whereas the opposition in The Love Siege is mainly faceless — the assorted misfits who guard the children are almost all good. Harry. too, the versatile butler with two accents is much diminished into a nice old man who pairs off with painted Madge and persuades her she looks all right without her wig, makeup,and teeth. The characters' individual lives have been subordinated to the author's allegorical explorings; he scatters identifying clothes and habits here and there, and paragraphs summing up their history. but will not allow any of them to dominate the book. All the same it is an interesting experiment; and the difficulty of writing in an imagined future without any social institutions that can be taken for granted parallels the difficulty of living there.

Rosalind Brackenbury's new novel covers more familiar ground. Margaret and Nicholas, a long-standing married pair, are hosts to callous Toby, his pregnant second wife Jasia, and Oliver, a token homosexual. in their home by the sea — a sea that looms in a symbolic manner and contains a significant coelacanth. They talk earnestly about and to each other, and some of the interactions between them are well drawn. such as the way Jasia. starting as an awk ward outsider, changes and gains substance by making friends with the resident child. The story gradually concentrates on her. aS she absconds from the house and suffers a threatened miscarriage. In the end she is delivered early — 'there was a wave, in which she submerged' — and her child is brain' damaged, though he speaks on the last page: 'I like swimming. In the summer we go to the sea. In the sea I'm light. I can move about . . . Who am I? Myself, Adam. I swim in time.' The sea is used as a metaphor for the continuity of life through death and birth; the coelacanth stands for the human species. grimly determined to survive. The metaphor, however, sometimes overwhelms the rather ordinary characters floating in it. The impression lurks that it wouldn't matter if the sea did come in and sweep them all away. The first story in Neil Jordan's collection — and one of the most impressive — is about a builder's labourer extraordinary only in that he cuts his wrists in the Kensal Rise public baths. The inhabitants of these stories are often on their own. hungry for new experiences or haunted by the excitements and inadequacies of old ones. In 'Night in Tunisia' a boy on holiday unconl fortably stalks a local girl and works out his frustrations on the saxophone. In 'Skin' a woman escapes her kitchen to wade in the sea. thinking a man on the beach is watching her, but having gone in ecstatically up to her waist turns round to see him walking oft Some stories are better controlled than others; but his writing has a quiet authority which draws you on even into the bleakest.

In his Introduction Sean O'Faolain cool' pares Jordan to Joyce; a kind gesture to a young writer but misleading. as it might lead one to expect the humour and social canvas of Dubliners. (Is the writer's habit of leavin8 out question marks at the end of questions intended to convey an Irish intonation, or is it bad editing?) He does not have that kind of range, but the longing to be different. to escape the commonplace. to escape oneself. which Joyce sometimes touched on. he makes his main material, and the sensations and desires of his characters are sharplY tangible.

Emma Fisher