The Iris Problem
The Red and the Green. By Iris Murdoch. (Chatto and WindUs, 25s.) Nice Try. By Thomas Baird. (Faber, 21s.) The File on Devlin. By Catherine Gaskin. (Collins, 21s.) Pretty Tales for Tired People. By Martha Gell- horn. (Michael Joseph, 21s.)
TRIs Munpoofs The Red and the Green is a distinctly ambitious novel: against a background of the intensely dramatic. Easter rebellion in Dublin, she eitplores the complex mechanisms of patriotism, love and fear as they shape and test the diverse members of a sprawling Anglo- Irish family. The bizarre destinies of her charac- ters converge with the pathos, contradictions, ironic reversals and eerie heroism of that startling Easter week, but the resulting tensions do little to illuminate either the characters or the abor- tive struggle for independence. The theme is a familiar one, voiced by Max Lejoui in The Unicorn: 'That rag freedom! Freedom may be a value in politics but it's not a value in morals. Truth, yes. But not freedom. . . . In morals we are all prisoners, but the name of our cure is not freedom.' In The Red and the Green freedom becomes a ubiquitous and dubious value in politics as well as in morality.
The ambitious and'admirable intention of this novel is finally, fatally sabotaged by themelo- drama and the sexual imbroglios, which would seem to have become the hallmarks of Miss Murdoch's novels. Stripped of these trappings, the novel leaves us, at best; with a fragmentary pic- ture of the revolutionaries and their 'beauty which could not be eclipsed or forgotten.' It is an ambiguous, ironic beauty of which Yeats has already given us full measure.
The astounding sexual convolutions of the plot only serve to obscure more hopelessly the thematic structure, of the novel, and the diverse and often superfluous episodes of The Red and the Green lack any consistent point of view, any controlling discipline which might have annealed them—a failure only underscored by a self- conscious, plot-tidying epilogue. If the reader experiences a sense of loss, it is not engendered
by the characters of the novel, but by the spec- tacle of a novelist who has exercised- such sig-
nificant talent in the, creation of a work
dangerously near a parody of her own most distinguished and distinguishing characteristics. Inbreeding, infighting, and pre-dinner incest are also major ingredients in actress Irene Handl's
The Sioux, the war-like nickname of the exotic 'French Benoirs. The elegant members of this family shift like nervous birds between palatial homes in Paris and New Orleans, r,;,;) their lives
centre (despite an elaborate series of marriages and affairs) on 'The Dauphin,' a young boy who travels everywhere with a nurse, a retinue of seryants, a bodyguard, and two white Rolls Royces.
For a first novel, The Sioux is a remarkable tour de force. Indeed, one hardly needs the quali fication: certainly The Dauphin (alias George, Marie, Moumou, Puss) is a brilliantly realised character, and one of rare vintage. Pale, sickly, nervous, surprisingly strong-willed, and over- flowing with love, he is used and abused by everyone around him, and yet he radiates an innocence and charm which at moments can transform the chaotically selfish world of the Sioux. His only parallel in contemporary litera ture is James Purdy's Malcolm, but Miss Handt convinces us that George will survive the brutalities of civilisation, will survive even his own feudal arrogance. Occasionally painful (and shaky in its details of New Orleans life), The Sioux is none the less an engaging entertain ment, distinctly on the side of the angels.
Though he has written a book which is both moving and distinctly appropriate for our time actor Bill Gunn is considerably less successful in his first novel. The story of a young Negro who works his way up the brittle show-business ladder, frantically striving to live up to and finally to grow beyond the image of his dead cousin, All the Rest Have Died dramatises both the seamy and the hopeful facets of race rela- tions in America. That it does so without ever appearing self-conscious or didactic is to Mr. Gunn's credit, but the Manhattan eccentrics who surround the hero-narrator seem too much like the window-dressing of the `with-it' novel. Window-dressing as the subject of farce is another matter, and Thomas Baird has taken superb comic aim at the one-upmanship of the contemporary art world in, New York. In addi- tion to being an exuberantly funny, book, Nice Try corrosively explores the sinister American compulsion to capture and worship tomorrow's golden calf.
In her current novel, Catherine Gaskin evokes a nostalgia for the old-style secret agent--not 007, but 000, the• seedy bachelor with a routine job and a not-so-glamorous private life as a courier and contact man. His role assumes dramatic significance when a series of chance events makes him an expert on The File on Devlin, sending him off to Switzerland with the missing Devlin's daughter and into some fairly conventional high jinks at a mysterious cluitean, Miss Gaskin tells a good story, but it seems a bit anachronistic, and not quite enough of that to be a good camp. Pretty Tales for Tired People offers advice to prospective adulterers: Don't. The first of these three cautionary tales, which shows how 'A Promising Career' terminates in scandal, is very stale cake. The others demonstrate the wit, the economy and precision which characterise the best of Martha Gellhorn's fiction as well as her journalism. Unfortunately, she maintains something of the journalist's detachment, and if we respond to the claustrophobic situations ,of her characters, it is not easy to respond to the characters themselves.
For similar reasons, Meyer I4vin's The Strong" hold also seems flat and peculiarly lifeless, de" spite the inherent drama of the novel's situation' Based on the actual imprisonment of tor ranking French politicians by the Germans during the Second • World Was, it perhaps suffers fron, that grounding in the realities of history, faili" to transmute into the realities of art.
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