Wearing of the Green
Snapshots and Towards a New Novel. By Alain Robbe-G rillet. Translated by Barbara Wright. (Calder and Boyars, 30s.)
THE settings to the current batch of novels are diverse, but with one, possibly two, exceptions, the approach of the writer to his material, charac- ters, ideas and emotions remains rather frighten- ingly similar. It is unnerving to find that a novel set amid the vast troubles and huge continent of Africa should contain little more that is truly alive than the love-hate a deux of a semi- sophisticated New York couple. As MacNeice once wrote, The world is more various' than we suppose.
William Cotter Murray's Michael Joe is a large disappointment. Mr. Murray is an emi- grant Irishman, settled now for some years in Iowa, and his disappearance from his own County Clare seems to have also curiously in- volved him in the perpetration of the cliché of the stage Irishman. Michael Joe swears, plays football, makes love, drinks and becomes violent in a way we all know only too well—though not from life itself. Michael Joe loves a nurse, Nell Culben, is shocked when he discovers that she has had a child by another man, marries on the rebound, unhappily, begets a son, and grows in- creasingly dissatisfied and morose. Mr. Murray lacks the art—possessed so abundantly by Sean O'Casey and Brendan Behan—to make the commonplace alive and even funny. He tells a dull tale, without conviction or profundity.
Simon Gandolfi's Even with the Shutters Closed examines racial hatred, personal guilt and sex (often in a deftly Lawrentian way), but, apart from some fine descriptive passages, this novel tends to remind us that we can no longer be funny about Africa. It is a far cry from Even with the Shutters Closed to Waugh's Black Mis- chief and Scoop, but one misses not only the fertile invention of these two earlier novels, but also the carefully concealed but undoubtedly present sociological implications. Since all the novels at present under review are set in many milieux, one cannot help reflecting that when comedy, or humour, is omitted, much remains unexplored.
David Martin's The Hero of Too, however, is a comic epic which works by the art, first of accumulation of detail, and then by slow and skilful deflation. David Martin is a Sidney Nolan seen the other way round : that is to say, where Nolan draws all that is grand in bush-life, Mr. Martin mocks the grandeur and by an almost Shakespearian unravelling of relationships, ex- poses the ludicrousness of Tooramit's worship of its hero. The book starts with the whole town planning the October celebrations of the seventy- fifth anniversary of the foundation of Tooramit. Many characters are involved and all are
shrewdly delineated and also seen and shown in the round. Unlike most of the other novelists under review, Mr. Martin has a rich humour and, while he mocks Tooramit, he never ridicules Australian life itself.
George Ryga's novel about Canada, Ballad of a Stone-Picker, also possesses this strong sense of place and, more particularly, of landscape. Mr. Ryga's simple, but occasionally rather laboured, story of the not-so-clever elder son who gets left behind in the homestead while the bright younger one goes to college, really does have a stark, ballad-like quality. The brilliant, and 'lucky,' Jim wins a Rhodes scholar- ship while his brother stays at home doing menial jobs and ruminating on his own misfortunes. There is no self-pity in the story, but there is certainly a good deal of resentment. The best thing about this book is the ease and clarity with which it conveys the 'feel' and appearance of a rocky Canadian setting; the characters emerge from this background, make their rather futile gesture, and then withdraw into it again. The world around them is greater than their own individual lives.
The Ghosts, by Kathrin Perutz, is also fairly exotic in its setting, though here one feels that Spain and New York, the background of the main action, have little effect on the two main characters, Luke and Judith. These two meet on holiday in Spain, start an affair that has a strangely self-tormenting element in it, and return to New York, uncertain how to continue their relationship. Luke is a writer and, in a rather unreal way, cogitates at length about his work. Rather horribly and by no means convincingly, an abortion is supposed to bring about 'a moment of truth.' It doesn't, at least not for the reader. Miss Perutz's novel fails, paradoxi- cally, simply because she has tried to interpret her characters' thoughts and actions so minutely.
Alain Robbe-Grillet also examines pheno- mena in great detail, but for a different reason. With him, one feels not only that he really cares about the objects he describes, but also that the accumulation of description does, in an unex- pected way, prove to create some sort of personal philosophy. In some ways, though by no means all, M. Robbe-Grillet is a very visual writer— 'A distorted reflection of the window is shining on the spherical part of the coffee-pot, a sort of quadrilateral with sides like the arcs of a circle. . . . The design on the tile represents an owl, with two big, somewhat terrifying eyes.' Just as Brecht wished to remove the element of sur- prise from the theatre, so M. Robbe-Grillet tries to omit from the novel the subjective emotions which we normally associate with inanimate things. Being an experimentalist and therefore extreme, M. Robbe-Grillet does not always suc- ceed in assuring us that the anti-novel is the rightful heir of the old traditional novel.
In Snapshots and Towards a New Novel, we have an example both of this author's practice and of his theory; the credo announced, in note form, in Towards a New Novel is interesting for its outspokenness—% . we should try to construct a solider, more immediate world to take the place of this universe of "meanings" '— and for its close examination of Beckett's nihilism. Strip Jack Naked, by Alexander Baron, is, as the title implies, a story about gambling. In spite of its subject-matter, it seems almost naive after the sophisticated subjects of most of the other novels being discussed. Written in the first person, Strip Jack Naked is refreshing, light, quickly forgotten.
ELIZABETH JENNINGS
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