NEW NOVELS
Prose and cons
BARRY COLE
Better Than One William Watson (Barrie and Rockliff/The Cresset Press 21s) By the Waters of Whitechapel Bernard Kops (Bodley Head 30s) Wolf from the Door Rupert Croft-Cooke (W. H. Allen 25s) A Moral Obligation W. H. Canaway (Hut- chinson 25s) Song of the Earth Alexander Cordell (Gol- lancz 30s)
'Edgar was one of those unlucky young men who sense too early the unreality of life, and who, in order to deny it the chance of subjecting them to its practical jokes, de- cline to play with it at all. He was resigned to the impotence of emotion, the inaccuracy of human relationships, and the fact that systems of philosophy are so many expedi- tions lost in the desert. He stood in the footsteps of those who regard the immacu- late conception as a symbol of the fact that religion is a self-created device to express the fact of its absence; and cynicism, which had once provided him with equanimity, drew the moral energy out of him like the drain in a dirty wound, until he was too fatigued to sustain its tenancy any longer. So, although I tell you that he was resigned, you will understand that, also, he raged. The poor fellow.'
This passage, the opening of Better Than One, contains a good proportion of William Watson's prose style; the regard for lan- guage, the faint facetiousness, the tendency towards extended metaphorism. What it doesn't show is what he'd probably call his neonomian onomasticoneism. for he uses words as though the whole concept of lan- guage were an invention of his own. and one he is confident of patenting.
A good dictionary is useful every three or four pages, but the author's skill is such that one does little more than make a men- tal note of reference before continuing with the narrative. The story concerns Paddy- Pat and Edgar, two young possible misfits and their search for personal identity. Put baldly, particularly with the implication that they must, in the end, come together, it sounds stock. But the originality, which lies in the total control and machined ordering of images, metaphors and similes, is far from anything of the sort. Any part of this book can be quoted to the author's advan-
tage; the opening paragraph is an act, in quoting, of modified despair at the impos- sibility of selecting a quintessential piece.
Other passages show further refinements: `So Paddy, imitating the situation, if not the action, of Rapunzel, climbed to the top of her own prisate tower and pulled her hair in after.' Or: 'She went at it with the vigour of an alcoholic cat trying to scratch the
cork out of a bottle To me. this is mastery of a distinctive sort. Of course, it can become laboured. even precious: `So taking his courage in one hand, which left the other free to assure him that he had a shield, and while you may despise this pre- caution as literally and in the exact sense egregious, you will concede that he was making an advance towards, however in- adequate his panoply; he stepped. Out of the house.' Precious but worthwhile.
The bizarreries, like the verbal exercises. are energetically sustained throughout: the story itself complementing the form much in the way a hedgerow does a winding lane.
Which metaphor can be extended to des- cribe the rest of this week's selection. For they are as straight as a Roman road and about as variable. Mr Watson, with me as amanuensis, would probably call them puisne ogygians (if he were legally minded and oxymoronic). He'd probably be right.
Bernard Kops's By the Waters of II hue. chapel mixes a dark look at mother and son relationships with a skilful but unnecessary description of a fading Whitechapel com- munity where Finchley-bound Jews are being replaced by grinning Asians. Aubrey, the sheltered, daydreaming hero, is aware of the juxtaposition: 'His hand and mouth were programmed for delicatessen. His mind was free but his body belonged to his ancestors; he was addicted to the necessi- ties that sustained them. It was useless, he was trapped. She would never let him go.' She being his mother. Aubrey's desire to leave both his home and mother leads him into fatuous situations. He becomes ena- moured of the beautiful Zena, who spices his daydreams with simulated erotica; forges his mother's signature on a cheque in an attempt to prove himself capable of worldly success, and is eventually toppled from Mittydom back to the waters of W14,dtiapel by a scabrous private investi- gatof. The ending is as inconsequential as the rest of the book : artful but preposter- ous. There seems, incidentally, to be a con- vention which says that street names, like names of real people, should never be a part of fiction. Bernard Kops posits a school in 'Senrab Street': why not say it's Barnes Street, E14?
Rupert Croft-Cookc's Wolf from the Door contains even wilder geographical data: Tooting Bee Road, Camberwell (see map). Still, it is fiction. The book covers the crooked and well trod path of the young man in Paris who in need of money takes up pornographic writing under the aegis of a needy publisher. An innocent separated from the bed of his cohabiting fiance by a sheet. Paul Scout edges into the literary underworld and writes. Published in Eng- land, his book becomes a cause célèbre and he is soon enmeshed with agents, publishers. and the knowledge that his virginal fiancé has the mind of a physically detached but demented de Sade. Real Book of the Month Club stuff this (selected by the Book of the Month Club). it manages, despite its basic flippancy, to repeat one thing worth saying again and again: 'Many established writen knock along on an income that an appren- tice bank clerk of nineteen would l'omh at.'
Mr Croft-Cooke should know; this must be his fiftieth book.
A Moral Obligation seems intent on mak- ing two points. The first, hardly new, that war corrupts; the second, new to me, that the British used 'Japanese troops in Indo- china, specifically in Vietnam.' A postscript to this novel gives what facts are available, the Thirty Year Rule preventing access to British sources. In between the two points, W. H. Canaway tells of an odyssey involv- ing Don Everett, a crash-landed pilot, and a fourteen year old girl he feels obliged to take with him. Wartime heroics make for good entertainment but the overall impres- sion is of chain mail pegged to a clothes line: the noise of falling armour is more impressive than the reasons for pegging. Alexander Cordell's 'remarkable Welsh trilogy' is completed by Song of the Earth, a saga-type saga beloved of Anglo-Saxons everywhere. Hard tales from the mines of yesteryear, written in solid journalese, the book left me with non-prophetic diploplia and an ennui that lasted, such is my perse- verence, well into the night. 'Bitter old win- ter, that one in 1845'. Arr!
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