New Novels
WHEN the quality of novels is poor, we console ourselves with facts. The plotless novel stands or falls on its intrinsic merits; if it has none, we wonder why it was written at all. But the novel about some definite thing—some specific adventure, some situa- tion to make us argue and question—starts off with an advantage. Even if it isn't very good, the framework of events supports it. Two novels from a lamentable week stand out, not for their fictional merits, but for their situations. In both, these are fearful, contemporary and dangerous.
Sea-Wyf and Biscuit is the lighter, the more schoolboy adven- ture. It unravels a mystery—not perhaps very subtly, because though no detective, I guessed it about half-way through. But the oddity is odd enough, the basic facts of the story are fascinating enough, for even the mediocre novel it is to keep you absorbed. It seems that four years ago some announcements in the agony column of a national newspaper tried to bring together the sur- vivors—three men and a woman—of a raft that had drifted for fourteen weeks in the Indian Ocean. The two men left meet again and tell their story; at the end of it the woman turns up, and the mystery—of her identity and the fourth man's disappearance—is solved. Here is the fascination of the creepy-documentary school: the thing that is odd but true, and oddest of all because true. Or isn't it? A clever publicity stunt more than a good novel, it buzzes about you afterwards with the maddening persistence of an October wasp.
The Accident is another piece of reconstruction, but less tight and documentary: an imaginative case-history, gruesome and unwieldy. At Los Alamos one day a scientist loses control of an instrument while making an atomic test. No one knows quite why or how: there is a blue glow and then, incredulously, the handful of men turn round to find themselves still alive and, by the look of things, the same as usual. The scientist telephones for an ambulance, 'just in case of nausea,' and walks into hospital, apparently unhurt. It takes him eight days to die—a slow disinte- gration that, interspersed with flashback, is described very clinically. Well and good, though painful; but out of it all sorts of enormous questions mushroom up until the subject topples over its treatment like the atomic cloud itself—a subject that is the book's justification and its impossibly ambitious theme. God, man and the universe, no less. Mr. Masters is not hefty enough to carry so large a burden. But the science, to a layman, rings true.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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