Fantastic
Francis King
Wild Nights Emma Tennant (Cape £4.50) The Old Jest Jennifer Johnston (Hamish Hamilton £4.95) We all have lists of things that, though there is nothing intrinsically wrong with them, just happen not to be to our tastes. My own list would include restaurants in which the service is better than the food and the decor than either; cars, however large or powerful, with only two doors; ocean-cruises; and literary fantasies. The last of these aversions makes it impossible for me fully to enjoy Orlando, Lady into Fox or The Master and Margarita, much though I admire Virginia Woolf, David Garnett and Mikhail Bulgakov; and it also makes it difficult for me to be sure of being fair to Wild Nights, much though I admire Emma Tennant too. This novel functions simultaneously on two levels: the realistic and the fantastic. On the realistic level, this is an account of a family of landed gentry — father, mother, child — living on their estate in an inhospitable valley in the North. Each autumn, they receive a visit from the father's sister, Zita. Since she brings with her the ghosts of the past that she and her brother shared together but from which the brother's wife is excluded, her presence has about it a mingled attraction and disquiet for the child narrator. The mansion, from the far corners of which all life has been perpetually withdrawing, to concentrate itself into a smaller and smaller space, suddenly fills up again with the footsteps of servants long since dead. After Aunt Zita's visit, there follows the Christmas one of the mother's sister. Thelma, a woman of a totally different stamp. Unlike Aunt Zita, she awakes no ghosts; she belongs to the present and there is nothing of the sorceress about her, as there is about Zita. After Christmas, the family, yearning in its northern fastness for the longdelayed Spring, makes its way south to the house in which Uncle Rainbow — in fact, not an uncle but a cousin — lives wish his faithful housekeeper, Lefty. A long line has trickled to its end with Uncle Rainbow, who effetely spends most of his time lying on his bed, who has done nothing distinctive and who has produced no issue.ssuthee. fantastic level, Aunt Zita a female equivalent of Forrest Reid's Uncle Stephen — is a true sorceress, who transports the enraptured child to mysterious trysts and secret celebrations. The villagers dread and deride her, burning her effigy as a witch on the night of their Hallowe'en ball. On the same fantastic level, there is Uncle Wilhelmina, who is arrested after wandering down the main street of the village, stick in hand, asking to be beaten; and many of the descrip!ions of life with Uncle Rainbow, 'in a 'louse in a maze of tall hedges' somewhere between Glastonbury and Stonehenge. In its combination of what one would guess to be autobiographical elements and an intensely poetic style of presenta this novel is reminiscent of Virginia ,70011s To the Lighthouse. The general aYperaesthesia and elaboration of imagery also recall that masterpiece — in particular, its middle section, masterly to some and irritating to others, in which Virginia Woolf describes how the days, months, and eventually years eat into a deserted house. Miss Tennant can survive this comparison cum summa laude. Must confess that, as I have indicated, this kind of pale, smoky Lapsang Souchong, served in the finest of boneChina, is not quite my cup of tea; but to those for whom it is, Miss Tennant's skilful decoction should give a lot of pleasure. More to my personal taste is Jennifer Johnston's The Old Jest, a realistic novel about a young girl coming to painful Maturity in perpetually troubled Ireland soon after the first World war. Nancy is 18 but, like many 18-year-olds of that Period, she behaves, in her innocent gaucheness and vulnerability, more like a 12-Year-old today. An orphan, she lives with her kind, slightly pathetic maiden aunt, and her grandfather, a former general and now senile, in a delapidated and inorrgaged house. Miss Johnston's evocahoo of the day-to-day life of this family their neighbours is always splendid. The aunt returns slightly tipsy from !ace-meetings; the old man spends his time chanting hymns and watching the nearby railway line through binoculars; ;1,te young girl moons over a conven,1°Ital, virginal young stock-broker, who 's himself in love with a self-composed girl, adept at the piano. It is when Miss Johnston introduces a Mysterious stranger — is he perhaps the toteroine's father? — and the complications .t insurrection against British rule, that the realism, elsewhere so rich, thins and drains away. I found it hard to believe in `!te emaciated, war-scarred intruder, who aYs things to the girl like 'I am as be' to you as a locked room might °e' and even harder to believe in the murderous conspiracy into which he Sweeps her up, until, by the last page, she 's herself committed to the cause of l. e_volution. Whereas all the other details of t Nancy's life — her nail-biting, her solita: walks by the sea, her romantic yearn' "lgs — are totally convincing, there is Something factitious about the melo ro d,e amatic core of her story. This is a Pity' ta cause in every other way this is a first" rate novel.
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