Fiction
OBJECTIVITY, whatever that may be, is a jewel, but the more frequently a reviewer passes judgement the more likely it is that judgement will be weighted by mere taste or prejudice. Experience teaches, after all, in the sense that it establishes individual preferences of one sort or another. For this reason I am not at all sure what to say of Invisible Man, a first novel by an American Negro writer of very considerable talent about the American Negro and about first and last things in American society. An apocalyptic Negro variant, bruised and bitter and brooding, of The Great American Novel, it seems to me an impressive performance in its own way but is not a type of novel to/which I am specially drawn.
In a first-person narrative which alternates between fevered incanta- tion, a savage facetious irony and a habit of fantasy that is sometimes
a little ghoulish and sometimes a little opaque, Mr. Ellison tells the story of a young Negro educated in the South who comes to New York and arrives, by way of insult and injury to his Negro conscious- ness, at an exaltation of cosmic disgust and horror. It is a strongly felt piece of work, undeniably powerful in its scenes of purgatorial or sulphurous comedy, which draws some quality of the universal from a protest against the enforced American preoccupation with the colour of a man's skin. And yet, I am sorry to say, the novel left me rather cold. This for several reasons, all of them perhaps no more than a rationalisation of my distaste for the immoderate and the obscure. There is, first, a plain want of coherence, it seems to me, in this display of undisciplined energy, with its random shifts of mood and style. The energy, too, is often of the more superficial American variety, derived from the rhetorical use of terms like " sonofabitch " or phrases like "I almost wet my pants." And —again, perhaps, an American literary trait—Mr. Ellison's revolted sense of human brutality does not appear to exclude a certain satisfaction in revoltingly brutal scenes. Finally, irrelevant though this may seem, why need delighted reviewers in the United States have dragged in Kafka once more ? Any element in a novel that can be described as fantasy serves as pretext nowadays for coupling the author's name with a writer who belonged entirely to the experience of Central Europe and who, however "significant," is harder to read at any length in English than those who have not read him apparently realise. In returning to Invisible Man, let me say that I particularly admired the paint factory scenes and relished the earlier passages of not so very veiled political satire of the invisible man among the Brotherhood, though without warming to them as I no doubt should. In brief, a remarkable novel, though not my kind.
Who Goes Home is an altogether lesser piece of work'but—certainly for the English reader normally equipped with a week-end reading list—a more comfortable one. It is, indeed, a very readable job. Not so much a political novel as a novel about the House of Commons, it draws very neatly and engagingly upon Mr. Edelman's extra-Parliamentary powers of observation. It is all there—the Chamber itself, the corridors and the Terrace Bar, the front benches, the back-benchers in the Smoking Room, the Civil Servants, the secretaries, the policemen, the lobbyists, the ritual, and No. 10 Doivning Street thrown in—and with it a cautionary tale, shrewd and often entertaining, of a youthful Minister ripe for the Treasury who comes to grief through indiscretion and, what in the House is so much worse, bad luck. The beginning, which describes a week-end country-house- party of sorts, is surprisingly laboured, but the story promptly picks up within Sight of the Palace of Westminster and, though the psychology is never quite so sound as it might and should have been, gains steadily in pace and excitement. Did I believe in the elegant, assured, actor-like Erskine, prospective Chancellor of the Exchequer, the rotund and impassioned Welsh Leader of the Opposition, the aged, cautious, wine-bibbing, Latin-quoting, cricket- memoried Prime Minister ? I believed, at any rate, in the two villains indirectly responsible for the appointment of the Select Committee, the warped Lobby Correspondent and the bland American public-relations tout, both as it were after my heart—just as I believed in the Royal garden-party, the Trinity May Ball and the Battersea Fun Fair as described by Mr. Edelman.
I haNe not in the past appreciated Mr. Bruce Marshall's novels as much as have others, but The Fair Bride has obvious merit. Is it, I wonder, in some degree, an imaginative rejoinder t6 Mr. Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls? Mr. Marshall, of course, stands by the Church in the Spanish Civil War, though his hero, the priest Arturo, to whom is entrusted, in the Church's ordeal by loot, arson and murder, the sacred relic of the finger of St. John of the Cross, is rather a sceptic, rather a coward, rather a political radical, who as a prisoner expounds historical materialism to ignorant Republican militiamen. He all but suffers, too, the pangs of earthly love for the innocent and adoring prostitute to whom he owes his life. At the somewhat melodramatic last, however, courage and something that might have been faith, maintained under torture,. restore him to the bosom of the Church. The style is smooth and skilful, though the priest talks far, far too much on the most unlikely occasions and Mr. Marshall's habitual failings appear in the smart phrases and in the incongruous harping on the delights of the flesh.
The last of these books, like the first, is American, a slight, repetitive and portentous story of a devoted father who was thought by a half-witted small-town community to have murdered his idiot son. It was, as it happens and as the reader knows from the start, just one of those cases of sudden death, and the author's solemn elaboration of the trifling and the irrelevant is really rather trying.
R. D. CHARQUES.
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