New Novels
A WEEK of expectation and disappointment: Kate Christie's Harold in London (Collins, 12s. 6d.) brings the hero of Smith, her oddly-llavoured and rather more than promising first novel, on a further lap of his spiritual pilgrimage, this time on a some- what adolescently deliberate flight from his Lake District home and position to `discover himself' in a drab bed-sitter in London. There are two reasons, that I can see, why this is less satisfactory than the more sombre ramblings of Smith—the first being that while Mrs. Christie managed to hit her country people squarely enough off, and in the earlier novel gave a convincing picture of a hierarchical rural community, among urban and cosmopolitan people she flounders, and her characters seem oddly second-hand: a stage-debutante called Rose who lisps, and says things like : 'There's always a certain melancholy about one's second season', a stage-beauty called Julia (Wife of a playboy peer killed in a con- venient air-crash), in love with a very stage-Italian indeed called Toni; and various other types—scruffy painter, retired general, young City bore, slyboots dilettante,' energetic lion-hunter, etc., etc.—who all appear to be popped in as excuses for displaying Mrs. Christie's considerable talent with vague, off-centre conversa- tion and behaviour, with innuendo and the subterranean mutter- ings of eternity under a crust of rather melancholy jokes. My second complaint is that the style, already mannered enough in Smith, here lapses too often into mannerisms, and that Mrs. Christie's cleverness with detail has overwhelmed, as it already threatened to do, her meagre ability to organise and develop, to plan and marshal and above all connect. Nothing is pursued, explained, or concluded; everything evoked, and then left in the air. Perhaps I am being obtuse in asking for answers where none is available, but the danger of this sidelong, tip-and-run, excessively 'feminine' type of novel-writing is that it will slither
into mere whimsicality—which would be a pity in the case of a writer with as much originality and lyricism as this one.
Richard Church's The Dangerous Years (Heinemann, 15s.) is disappointing, too, though in a very opposite way, for while Harold in London lacks any central theme, Mr. Church's novel is only too firmly pegged to one. The time is the nineteen-twenties. As a study in contrasts we have a widow of fifty, still beautiful, and her daughter Joan, a St. Trinian's schoolgirl of twenty-five whom an academic and puritanical upbringing has never allowed to mature. Not unnaturally tired of a marriage unconsummated after four years, and a mountaineering physicist bf a husband who says things like 'My old dear, what a sport you have been', Joan is taken to Paris by her mother, who, instead of administering salutary amusements to her daughter, as she had meant to, falls in love herself with a middle-aged English colonel. The progress of the two love affairs—the mother's, and Joan's with her finally awakened husband—is a contrast between generations and be- tween attitudes. But more interesting, and very much odder, is Mr. Church's own attitude, for he writes, not as a man thirty years away from it, but as one still deep in the period, as a contemporary of Joan's who sees nothing to be explained about her, no cause for comment or surprise. Perhaps the 'Amazon blue-stocking of the Twenties—Shaw's New Woman a few years on—is one of the hardest periodic phenomena for a later generation to understand, and Joan and her husband, shown 'straight', are merely ludicrous. Style fits attitude: it is quite eerily uncontemporary, and the whole book gives the impression of being a lost manuscript, published out of period interest, after collecting dust for thirty years.
Seldom do you meet a novel as clearly intended for the best- seller stakes as Alec Waugh's Island in the Sun (Cassell, 16s.), a huge (552 large pages, closely printed) ragbag of all that ever made a best-seller sell: an intricate plot, lots of easily recognisable Maugham-type characters, an exotic setting in the Caribbean, local colour (voodoo, riots, high jinks at Government House), exactly the right mixture of realism and romance, sex and politics, flashback, murder, dancing, picnics, etc., etc., and above all the glossy, just off-cliché readability of a drawn-out magazine story (` "Darling," she said. At last, he thought, at last. It was a peace, a happiness such as he had never known, then suddenly, shat- teringly, he remembered. That body in the room behind the court- yard . . .'). It has, at least, a story to tell; but the vulgarity of tone warbles inexorably over whatever happens, like the flutings of a cinema organ when the lights begin to go down.
An interesting oddity—to my mind, the week's best—is Marvin Borowsky's The Queen's Knight (Chatto and Windus, 15s.), in which Arthur's Round Table appears, not in pale Tennysonian purity, but as a crude first effort towards peace and justice in a world incredibly cruder. Arthur, a middle-aged lout rigged up by Merlin from a ploughboy background into kingship as Uther Pendragon's supposed, but unlikely, son, is a 'straw-king', a puppet dependent first on his backers and later on the fascinating Launcelot; a rusty-haired, bristle-chinned oaf who revolts his Guinevere, bin who, in a language the people can understand, talks of a united Britain where every man will have a voice, a protector, and a living. There is no white samite, and precious little courtesy, about the proceedings, only a rough impassioned dream that gradually conies to take shape; and even when the Round Table has been chopped up for firewood to warm a starving garrison, the dream goes on, until, Arthur dead and the lovers free to come together again, Launcelot chooses instead the ungrateful manning of the northern rparches. A crowded, noisy, grunting, sweltering book with a style to match, it brings the half-barbarous loyalties and revenges, the battles and joustings, the food and stinks and noises, above all the tremendous crowdedness, the publicity and promiscuity of a walled-in, everlastingly dangerous existence, where punishment for mistake or treachery was terrible past belief, to ugly, high-coloured, and passionate life.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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