Devil's Advocate
The Mandarin and Other Stories. By Eva de Queiroz. (Bodley Head, 21s.)
The Seed. By Tarjei Vesaas. (Peter Owen, 25s.) The Ballad of Oliver Powell. By Stead Jones. (Bles, 18s.) 'WERE we to read Stendhal in Portugal, we should never be able to enjoy him; what is considered exactitude with him, we should consider sterility. Exact ideas, expressed soberly and in proper form, hardly interest us at all; what charms us is excessive emotion expressed with unabashed plasticity of language.'
Thus Eva de Queiroz, the nineteenth-century Portuguese novelist, an almost but not quite fair enough preface to the present novella and its accompanying trio of short stories, published for the first time in English. The latter are lightweight, preoccupied, agreeably enough, with romantic love, courtly love, disappointed love. The eponymous The Mandarin shows a clerk, helped by the Devil, acquiring fantastic riches, enjoying experiments in love even more varied, eventually reaching China to appease a spectre aroused by his own guilt-feelings. 'I must kill that dead man.' The author's voice and eye are all, the story for all its inventiveness little more than a device for elaborate observations, elegant descriptions.
This was the time when the swallows leave Peking for the South. [ watched them gathering in bands in the sky above me, leaving the groves of the temples and imperial pavilions. Each one carried, as protection against birds of prey, a tight bamboo tube which whistled in the air; and these white clouds of birds passed as if impelled by a gentle breeze, leaving id the silence a slow and melancholy sigh. an aeolian undulation, which faded away in the pale air.
It is conversation not so much artificial as finely articulate during a leisurely and successful dinner, a richly imaginative purr of slightly wearied elegiacs, sensualities, ironic self- mockeries. A great effort of penance and resti- tution ends in cuckolding a general and almost losing an ear to a ferocious mob. Unlike much lesser if brisker fiction, this book is easy to put down: to digress, to savour an extinct atmo- sphere, gently humouring the past. 'We conversed at length about Europe, Nihilism, Zola, Leo XIII and the skinniness of Sarah Bernhardt. Through the open galleries came a warm breeze which smelled of heliotrope. Madame Camiloff seated herself at the piano. . .
To those rigorously intent upon post-Joyceab experiment and pronounced moral issues the impact may be null, and Eva assumes a par- ticular audience to whom explanations are un- necessary; as he himself remarks, Portuguese writers know how to sing, to paint everything blue, they do not know how to explain. This writing is full of a skilfully allusive use of language giving life to a type of fiction almost totally dead in hands less gifted.
Don't be put off by the opening of The Camp, which promises no more than brutal, foul- mouthed reportage of the RAF in Germany during the 'fifties. Soon considerable characters emerge and develop, though here, too, the author's tone is the thing. Mr William acknow- ledges a debt to T. E. Lawrence, but knows his subject from the inside. He shows the collision of a new CO, one-eyed and sadistic, with a camp notorious for its slovenly inefficiency. Thoughts straying after Ben Ritchie-Hook can be speedily dismissed. There is no housey-housey. The scene in which an officer is forced, on full parade, to remove his shoes, revealing a big toe sticking through his sock, will raise no smiles: the incident depicts one of the forms of murder without killing in which this novel abounds, to- gether with physical nastiness, lunatic obsessions, brooding hatreds and frustrations.
Those who still hanker after the virtues of National Service might glance at the bit where a punishment squad has to lick its meal off the floor. It has all been written before, but not often by a talent at once so harsh and controlled. One wonders where it will turn next, and on whom.
The Seed is a short dramatic tale, rather ex- pensive (148 pages), by the author of the well- praised The Ice Palace. A madman lands on a Norwegian island, murders a girl, is himself exterminated by a posse, which then suffers enormities of remorse and troubled speculations about God's will. The theme is human duality. `You look at yourself and see within yourself a sweeping landscape with vast plains and wooded mountain slopes capped with flying clouds. But you also see treacherous hidden pits, to be skirted and avoided. There are unknown things concealed in their depths.'
Sententious at times, it has the hard mood of The Ox-Bow incident. Occasionally it seems a parody of the stock view of Scandinavian literature: people going mad in small stifling places, tormented youth, guilt dragged like a sledge, runic shadows, the witch on the road. the abyss in flat country, laborious animal- symbolism. Yet the passionate identification with landscape can recall D. H. Lawrence. People are lit with the ominous lights of a fairy-tale, though disfigured by certain translation mishaps. `Yep,' 'Gotten.' Right Now,' I Guess,' Apple of the Eye,' 'Light as a Feather,' Pitch Black' are surely.. inappropriate noises here.
Mr Jones offers a lighter formula which generally works. That of the plausible impressive mystery man, half fairy-godfather, half palpable crook, here arriving with gifts and promises at a small Welsh workers' hostel. Pent-up youths and saddened elders needing the stimulus even of a bogus master-mind with preposterous irons in the fire, sexual, financial, social. Caring for its characters, not too clogged with underlying pathos, the story is fluent and good-humoured, with small entertaining absurdities, including the farcical lecture still indigenous to this sort of novel.
'Can't even threaten them with expulsion nowadays,' she said bitterly, 'what's the lecture about?'
Y Cynghaneddion,' I said.
Mr Higham will console any hearts still mourning Warwick Deeping. He discusses a post- war marriage duel between a car salesman, nice but deadly dull, and an Italian singer, herself pursued by a Stroheim-like musician almost as bogus as Stroheim himself so often made himself out to be. Some frankish sexual encounters and sincere feeling for musk may compensate for much that is otherwise rather off-the-peg.
PETER VANS1TT A RT
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