Paperback rider
Peter Ackroyd
.w Reluctant Bride Barbara Cartland (Arrow Rooks 30p)
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nfessions of a Private Soldier Timothy Lea (Sphere 30p) Although Miss Cartland always appears in stiff covers first, she has always been most suited to the macintosh-pocket brigade; the books bend easily and you can read them in c,rovvds without discomfort. I am amazed at ner capacity — Romantic Fiction has become a cottage industry, and Miss Cartland's products are into the seventies. Which, not to Put too fine a point on it, must average two ,every year. We all remember Sweet Punish" „gent, Love is the Enemy, The Enchanting vil and Again This Rapture and you can 'Ways count on Miss Cartland to turn a. ve-knot into a whiplash. The Reluctant now reissued for the first time, comes "tr the meat rack and into the drawing room. It opens, frantically enough, with the collapse of a stout party. "That is the third iling!" ejaculates Lady Lambourne, to which the only reply is, 'That is the third sentence!" Or almost. The Lady Lambourne 4rid her boyishly girlish daughter, Camilla, are quite clearly in dire straits but there is sornething of the green room about their P°verty. I know that all of the ladies in Miss ii.artland's novels are womanlike in the lghest degree, but there is an unmistakeable of the drag-artist about them as they totter one tragedy to the next. In this case, the ;ragedy is Camilla's acceptance of "the hand" k,,nd it is never suggested that it is anything the hand) "of His Supreme Highness :rInce Hedwig of Meldenstein," a principality Mewhere in or near the Black Forest. tvloney rears its vulgar head, since the dowry Would mean that Camilla could send her
ageing mother to Bath: "I know the hot springs would make all the difference to your legs." So, cheeks are pale, hands are knotted, hair is iron-grey, eyes are fearful, but sums are immense and accents generally Russian. Camilla knows where her duty lies, especially in front of the servants, and she agrees to change from "Miss Nobody" into a reigning Princess.
But the course of true finance never did run smooth, and Miss Cartland whips up a few storms. There is, especially, Captain Hugo Cheverley, with his smile that "was neither cynical nor bored." The tedium of being neither eventually reaches him, and he ejaculates. "God, you are lovely . . . lovelier than I believed it possible for any woman to be." Which leaves one to ponder his private life, were it not that a series of small dots presage an all too furious burst of passion; as Camilla says, "I must ... go...." Of course she doesn't, being all too keen on the Captain — although their sex life is confined to riding horses rather quickly. If there is one golden rule in Miss Cartland's novels it is that sex has something to do with whips and that true love has something to do with horses.
But there is more to Miss Cartland than the scarlet passage, and she knows her audience too well to overestimate it. She says something and then says she has said it and she never uses a conjunction when an adjective or adverb will do; the whole effect is of a dandelion dissolving in slow motion. There are certain ritual signs and gestures that are as comforting as they are transparent — "it is impossible, everthing is over, Anastasia" — and wishes, dreams and lies become the ordinary staple of domestic reality. Miss Cartland's style is as a consequence flat and repetitive, the literary muzak of the hypermarkets. When an unnamed gentleman holds something "long and thin and evil," we might guess that he is Chinese and that he is about to pierce a dagger through our heroine's heart, just as we guess that the dagger will miss. The adorable little goose lives to sigh another day, and blush her way to further disasters.
In Camilla's case, it is her betrothed. The Royal Household of Meldenstein have swept straight out of the pages of Ronald Firbank, refusing pointblank to talk with the townspeople and closing innumerable teapots with a snap. "We will sit down," says somebody to nobody in particular, "two hundred personages for luncheon." But the Prince, whose hand she is about to marry, is not all that he's cracked up to be: being in a drugged state and with a Chinese mistress to boot. At this point there is too much story and not enough plot, as Hugo and Camilla ride off together and Hugo becomes a Duke proving that kind hearts can sleep with coronets. The latest on dit is that Miss Cartland has another novel panting in the wings, or rather in the factory.
Miss Cartland's only rival must be, at the more sweaty end of the paperback trade, Timothy Lea. His Confession of a Private Soldier is the latest in a series of 'sexploits' for blokes like you and me. Our Tim is now out of the clink or nook or chokey (where, you remember, we left him in what they call group therapy) and is ready and willing to regale us with another saga of life below the belt. It is in the "And so I said to her ..." public bar vein; some monosyllables in search of an author. The moral — if that's not too highbrow and pouffy a word — seems to be that deep down, or low down, we're all really 'the same,' and that you need only mention a few unmentionables to get a stock titter. Mr Lea, if I may be formal for just a moment, spends a great deal of space, if not effort, trying to prove that he is not and has never been a "poufdah," or ginger as they are known in the trade. There is no intellectual stuff about character or plot and Lea gets, down to the heart of the matter with a series of birds, slags and bints. He is not, unfor tunately quite as good at pillow-talk and he treats his prose as he treats his partners: it lies there helpless under his onslaughts, pantiflg. broken-backed and pleading with him to stuP. The policy of the paperback novelist par el: cellence is to cultivate illiteracy because its good for sales. But back to Lea, or rather his "mightY,, wurlitzer" or "old man" or "Percy," by Nolo. he attaches himself to young ladies as quiclq and as briefly as possible. For someone who IS attached to the best opposite sex that Men have, he spends a great deal of time insulting and escaping them. The women he exults over are all either birds of prey or sisters of the Gorgon, and sex is only a little better than a journey through a cement mixer. Lea cant wait to get back to the boys, of course, and la this particular case it is the Army (Y°°, remember, or rather Lea reminds us, tilt place where horrible little men say, " horrible little man!"). All good dirty fun, Not" a lecherous WRAC and some night exercises' There is a general grubbiness about thaf book, like a large and nervous wink. It is as; a machine called Percy (no disrespect inteno"f ed) was churning out a keyhole vieW.e,, modern cliches. There is a flatness and inanit; about the writing which comes from trying( far too hard; if I hear another joke abo,Ui 'thespians' or 'immaculate contraception s shall cancel my subscription for Christina crackers. Or, as somebody puts it somewhere,' "One more crack out of you and you'll bunch of fives up your hooter." Blimey, rna,te,; But the worst is to come, when the c h et'r chappie is discharged from the Army a"".a' 1 infiltrating a strip show into an American. „ base: "Sid winks at me and the train goes .int's the tunnel." Are all those good resolution( about to break? But that's the beginning ° another paperback.
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