Auberon Waugh on a social document

Mr Brata prefaces his second novel with one of those tortured little apologies which writers still imagine to possess some magic power against libel actions. The problem is always to square this disavowel with the writer's traditional artistic integrity and re- gard for truth. This is how Mr Brata sets himself to the task : 'No character described in this book exists in total congruence with real life. In fiction, as against professed autobiography, real persons and events are used as launching pads for the imagination

I quote him at such length because Mr Brata's formula seems to describe a whole convention of autobiographical romance or romantic autobiography, and to describe it with greater honesty and precision than one usually finds among writers discussing their own work. One can call it the tradition of telling lies about oneself, under which head- ing it would probably embrace such works as Casanova's Memoirs and Frank Harris's My Life and Loves, not to mention W. E. Gladstone's (or whoever's) My Secret Life. We must await Harold Wilson's memoirs before deciding to which shelf of the library they belong, but well-appointed libraries should have an extra shelf for books which are half-fiction, half-fact.

Mr Brata's lies are almost exclusively concerned with his sex-life, and this again is in a well-established literary tradition. His hero, called Amit Ray, is a sexual Baron Munchausen, boasting at great length about conquests—in India, Italy, London, and Copenhagen—with a wealth of anatomical detail which regular readers of novels like myself find almost tediously familiar. But it would be unfair to use Mr Brata's novel as a peg on which to hang the mind-shattering propositions: Sex is the great literary cliché of our time; sex is killing the novel; sex is a bore. What his novel succeeds in doing very well—at any rate in parts of it —is to describe exactly the sort of society he finds in England which can only produce novels of this sort: the bedsitter land of Fulham, Earls Court and Hampstead, where sex is the only excitement and a pub pro- vides the only companionship. As a visiting sociologist, he is detached, ironical, humor- ous and sometimes even profound. As an erotic storyteller, he is less impressive.

Amit Ray runs away from his rich Brahmin parents in Calcutta as a virgin and sets himself up as a bootblack in Delhi, finally being hired as a reporter for the Statesman on the strength of an article describing the injustices done to bootblacks by municipal authority. He has a once-only affair with Mimi, a glamorous half-caste lady who works for the wireless. Next he flies to Rome, being much shocked by the behaviour of a Swedish man with a Norwegian girl on the plane. Anybody who has ever travelled on these dangerous machines will know that you frequently see a couple making friends on a long flight, the man then persuading the girl to mount him where he sits. Such incidents are commonplace in the exper- ience of the western traveller who reads novels, but it is rather touching to see the effect they have on a strictly brought-up Brahmin. Next Mr Ray lands in Rome for an expeve interlude

lowed by bed with two Roman prostitutes.

If one disregards the aeroplane incident, which might even be the product of Mr Brata's imaginative launching pad, and therefore belongs in the realm of art, his other adventures acquire a certain poignancy when one reflects that they are exactly the experiences which the modern world offers to the young writer seeking experience. Mr Brata chronicles them with deadpan honesty. He destroys any hope the reader might enter- tain that the story will have an unexpected ending by assuring us half-way through that he is still 'an itinerant bachelor bum!'

In a novel, this would be inexcusable. It destroys in one sentence all the dramatic suspense—just as careless novelists some-

times put in the middle of the narrative she left the l'0017? and I never saw her again, imagining that this ties up a loose end neatly.

In fact, it kills the reader's interest. But Mr Brata's book is not a novel in the sense of having a plot. It is fictiopal autobiography—

not a new art form, but a respectable one, and Mr Brata revives another old tradition by introducing real characters into his narra- tive. Ted Hughes, Muriel Spark, Al Alvarez all put in an appearance, as, I have no doubt, did various other famous people whose names I did not recognise. This is a very welcome revival—has anybody tried it since Disraeli?—and I hope he gets away with it.

These people enter the novel during a highly enjoyable excursion into literary

London, where our hero becomes drunk and insults everybody by candidly criticising their work. It would not be nearly so funny if the hero were not an Indian—nor would his occasional excursions into polysyllabic and pedantic humour : 'Consistency was not Mr Tuffman's forte, nor was that quality which could be described as the antithesis to hypocrisy'. This would be unforgiveable if written by an Oxford don, whether he had ever been Senior Censor of Christ Church or whether he hadn't, but it is rather sweet when written by an Indian lavatory cleaner, is it not? In fact Mr Brata plays his Indian- ness very prettily, except for one appallingly banal passage where he complains about colour prejudice. He is particularly moving when he describes the revulsion of a Brah- min who is forced by circumstances to clean the lavatory after a particularly incontinent English visitor.

Between stays in London, he makes a rather unconvincing journey to Paris, and a

positively disgusting one to Copenhagen.

Wherever he goes, by now, girls start taking their clothes off and begging him to pleasure

them. Perhaps this is an accurate picture of what it is like to be an Indian in Europe. Certainly it is preferable to the faux-naïf attitude to sex he shows at the beginning.

But the real value of the book—caddish as it is, and boring, and hackneyed, and odious

in many ways—must reside in its meticulous description of the sort of society which gave birth to it : bored, lonely, selfish, degenerate, detribalised London. Its pathos is in the spectacle of a man uprooted from his cul- ture, broken away from his family, in the shifting, rootless society which such people have made for themselves in all the capitals of the world.

Whatever illusions the narrator ever had, he has lost. Starting off with his volumes of Connolly, Orwell and Marx, he slowly dis- covers that Orwell was a well-heeled Old Etonian. Next, his experiences as a lavatory attendant teach him that the poor were just as despicable as the rich, and they had cruder ways of showing it. There was noth-

ing noble about the working class; they were as greedy, selfish, mean and vicious as any group of human beings could be. He finally accepts that the bedsitter society is a gloomy refuge for those unable to belong to the 'sage, planned, caring, loving world' outside it, but feels condemned by some character inadequacy to remain there. It is a sad and rather touching social document, even if it Is not a novel.