Jerusalem, Jerusalem
The Time of Green Ginger. By Armstrong King. (Macmillan, 25s.)
The Time of Green Ginger and Belmarch are both about the sufferings of, the Jews, a subject of which I dare not tire. Both in any case con- quer indifference. The first is hardly a novel, strictly speaking. The' sweeping narrative that stretches from the 1939 White Paper restricting immigration to the end of' the mandate in 1948 is a grieved, passionate history. Not at all national stereotypes, the characters have that vividness which people. do assume in a period of acute-national and political stress.. Mr. King says, and need say, little of ptilicy. He simply shows what effect it had on the humanity of those who had to live with it. Jews, Arabs, British; anger, fear, violence, misery. His strict and simple prose builds up the increasingly frightful atmosphere in Jerusalem, as the old domiciled Italian Corelli builds up his wall behind which the final holocaust takes place.
The naked hate of the parties is nailed down unforgettably, and the writer avoids the pitfall of being either totally pro-Arab or totally pro- Jew. More remarkably, he re-creates the despair- ing numbness that closed in on the city's in- habitants' as violence grows—and which he as a participant must have shared—without losing his generous understanding. This gives the book its solidity. It's a fine, grim piece of work, the grimness relieved only by the malign comedy of the press conferences.
Belmarch, on the other hand, is a lay of the first crusade. I was baffled as well as fascinated. Its formal movement reminds one of The Seventh Seal; the dizzying writing recalls Patrick White. I feel nervous of attaching meanings to the mysterious concentration of symbols. I shall fall back on the critic's formula: if you can't say what it is, say what it's about, and vice versa. A French knight, Belmarch, takes part in the first crusade, which turns aside at Mainz to massacre the Jews of that city. He kills a child, who injures his hand. It festers, like the guilt in his mind. Annas, a Jew, prevents his suicide, and follows him as he retraces his steps in a circle both literal and psychic back to the scene of the pogrom. Mr. Davis skilfully employs the mediceval trappings to wrap up his symbolic content : one can also read the story simply as guilt fantasy. He exploits the reader's pre-knowledge of the Mainz massacre with particular effect in an ironic set-piece, one of those mock battles beloved of mediaeval chivalry: the Siege of the Castle of Love, a sound military tactic on the part of the crusade's leaders to get the soldiers of Christ well worked sup with flowers and copulation before the actual work of killing begins.
The Long Play is about schoolchildren. I don't
know if non-parents read books about children with the same tense anxiety as parents; this re- duces my own critical detachment to a minimum, with no reference whatever to the quantum of suffering the fictitious creatures undergo, still less to the quality of the book. I can't think off- hand of any child character who does not suffer: even Jane Austen, in Mansfield Park, treats little Fanny (her only full sketch of childhood, I think) with serious pathos. The Long Play, indeed, makes it only too clear that we are still far from recognising the heart-rending stoicism that even well-meant and kindly people force upon children. Its theme is the primitive rite of initia- tion as thought up by the prefects of a London secondary modem school and inflicted on* the first-years. Mr. Leach uses a twelve-year-old boy, Harvey Shepherd, kind-hearted, tough, nice, as his first-person narrator, and captures his speech to the last dropped aitch, not missing either the, resigned 'resentment under the laconic
`Yes, Sir.' ' s The detail is carefully revealing. It is not so
much . the physical brutality—disgusting rather than frightful—Harvey and his mates can deal with this, it is on their own level, much though they dread it. It is the ceaseless brutality of indifference and onrespect from the adults in power, even nice ones like Davis, the art master; the inherited tendency to treat the .doing and being of the young with cynical distrust and contempt. It is the converse, in. fact, of the pessimism of Lord of the Flies: the open, generous, creative nature of the child being slowly bruised by the corrupt values of the adult world. Unlike Piggy, Harvey Shepherd is not destroyed. Mr. Leach's ending.has a sadder, more fruitful truth. Harvey simply draws the only con- clusion open to him : if he is not going to go on being battered, he has got to get behind his de- fences, stop giving and hit back.
Crooked Hearts is not a first novel, though
its frequent attacks of lyrical Writing, not omit- ting alliteration's artful aid, made me think it was. Basically the mistake was to use an elderly drunk as a. Greek chorus. He says things like this: '. . . the lights go on and the drink goes down, and a blight comes over my soul and the bile begins to brew inside me.' So we think this is big romantic stuff? Of course not. There is a big romantic ending, too. I don't know why Mr. Homan has to strive for the heroic. The novel is about .something that matters, and he can convince us of this all right without using a spade. Jack, rugged, rather old-fashioned, re- signs his commission in the colonial police because of his feelings for Julia, beautiful, loose, rich. Jack and Julia go off to a painters' paradise in the Aegean. Jack does not fit. Then he hears that, owing indirectly to his absence, there has been a massacre in his former colony. Driven by guilt and joblessness, he takes to drink. One feels vividly enough their commitment and incom- patibility; their confused and bitter exchanges are also good. This is done with genuine insight..M r. Homan should folloW this talent more soberly, seeing where it leads him, cutting the colourful stuff.
JILL HUGH-JONES
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