In the labyrinth

Nick Totton

A Feast of Snakes Harry Crews (Secker and Warburg £3.50) Seawitch Alistair Maclean (Collins £3.50) Gemmo Kemal Bilbasar (Peter Owen £4.75) Sunrise Over Hell Ka-Tzenik i35633 (W. H. Allen 0.95)

This week's novels leave an overpowering taste of brutality; but in four very different flavours. We have violence as entertainment; violence as aggression towards one's characters and one's readers; violence as apocalypse; and something passing for naive folk-violence. Where to begin?

A Feast of Snakes is motivated by aggression; and really this seems the only possible interpretation. Harry Crews apparently feels a deep hatred for his cast and for what they represent—Southern American small-town rednecks. He takes it out on them with all the free play of sadism that an author can inflict on his characters.

The town of Mystic, Georgia, is dominated by rattlesnakes. The central event of the year is the grand rattlesnake roundup, when thousands converge on the town to hunt snakes, with prizes for the most, the heaviest, the longest; plus the Miss Mystic Rattler beauty contest. Apart from this orgy of snakes, most of the good old boys spend their time catching, killing, playing with, feeding or eating snakes anyway (when they are not playing football or fighting bulldogs). The characteristic tone of existence in Mystic is an equal blend of pain and boredom; everyone is about half crazy, some a little more, some a little less. No one can think of anything to do; and Mr Crews solves their problem by having most of them killed.

At best, the novel is an inferior re-write of Day of the Locust, transposed several hundred miles east. But there is no character here possessed of any kind of health against which the insanity of the place could be measured. Mr Crews is content to vent his spleen rather than try for any sort of diagnosis. His only real thesis is that the rural South should be razed at the earliest opportunity.

Alistair Maclean has no such emotional involvement in his tales. Many years and many books ago, he found a selling vein; and he has been opening it, bloodily, ever since. But Mr Maclean's violence has no real suggestion of pain; it is the 'Bang bang you're dead' violence of children's games. The impression is heightened by the constant reversals and counter-reversals of fortune, captures, escapes and recaptures, that keep the plot steaming along: either Mr Maclean's supermen are stunningly incompetent, or we are in the convention of Cowboys and Indians.

There is probably little point in running through the plot of Seawitch: those who

read Alistair Maclean will read it, and those who do not need no encouragement. This time, it's about oil: the central protagonist, Lord Worth, is everyone's fantasy of a ruthless and arrogant billionaire (brought down a peg or two in the end, of course); and there is the usual cast of inhumanly skilful and talented villains and heroes, each with his identifying trait to minimise con fusion. The only outstanding question is whether there may not be a sense in which fantasy violence is more vicious than vio

lence which is at least conscious of suffering. Ge1711110 is an award-winning Turkish novel about Anatolian peasants in the 'twenties, slowly emerging from feudal

dependence on the aghas and shehs. Kemal Bilbasar has deliberately chosen to write it as a kind of folk-tale, within the culture and perceptions of his characters, in order to reach the largest possible audience with his anti-feudal message. The obvious drawback here is that the situation is then seen through the predominantly feudal ideology of the peasants: for a non-Turkish reader, the main impression is of an authority worshipping and casually murderous soci ety. In a book like this it is hard to get one's bearings, to distinguish between the social

norm and the social criticism. But as a modern. folk-tale, Genuno is lively and entertaining, with the colour and immediacy of naive painting.

My first reaction to Sunrise Over Hell was that I am not prepared to read any more

about concentration camps. This is not a frivolous response: Auschwitz, Dachau and the rest are fundamental facts that we must integrate into any view of humanity—but this is not best done by picking obsessively at the bleeding scab. Each of our imagina tions contains, by now, a superfluity of violent images, which are only a minute proportion of the violence of the world. The

question is what to do about it. Sunrise Over Hell offers no help: only assertions of transcendence through suffering that are essentially empty.

It is not difficult to write a moving book about incredible suffering. But, when so many already exist, what is the point ? The Germans in this book are treated as demons out of hell— understandably, since that was how they acted; but what we need; in the face of Auschwitz, is a means of understanding the roots of such behaviour—what forces create it, and what forces oppose it. Suffering may, under certain circumstances, ennoble: but this is not a justification for suffering, nor is it a justification for this novel.