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WILLIAM BUCHAN

Salmi in Paris Jack Kerouac (Andre Deutsch 21s) Queen Victoria's Bomb Ronald Clark (Cape 25s) The Bright Cantonese Alexander Cordell (Gol- lancz 25s)

In a good year, the number of novels which could really be said to be about something, which offer any real nourishment to those concerned with the business of living, would not need all the fingers of one hand for count- ing. If there was ever a main stream, it has shivered into rivulets fingering rock or desert, running uphill, dying into sand, or forming puddles, sometimes bright, sometimes muddy, always stagnant. Only a very few writers, now, have to the power to make us believe that somewhere the stream still runs strongly, and of these Frangoise Mallet-Joris is one.

Signs and Wonders requires attentive read- ing, and the English reader, getting little help from a rather pedestrian American translation, may thiss something of this author's close- textured, subtly illuminated style. The story of Nicolas Leclusier, in Signs and Wonders, although extreme in some of its misfortunes, is in no way far-fetched. One of the two love- children of a brilliant Russian girl and a staid, cultivated French lawyer, Nicolas can remem- bet a high-coloured upbringing before the war. His mother, although not Jewish, is deported to Germany by accident, and thereafter be- lieved dead in a German camp. The father steps in to care for Nicolas and his brother Simon. Nicolas grows up to be a writer. Simon becomes a priest, a choice Nicolas can- not bear. The book which establishes Nicolas's reputation is about war and the mother who died at the hands of the Germans. When news comes that, in fact, the mother is not dead, but has survived to marry one of the German camp guards and is living with him in Ger- many, not only is Nicolas's book, as he sees it, falsified, but another unacceptable factor has been brought into his experience. Nicolas, then, is no accepter either of his own world or the world at large, and it is no accident that the word 'absurd'—for human action, human organisation—occurs so often in his thought and speech.

Yet he cannot, either, take the traditionally 'French' attitude of ironic detachment. Nicolas cares and questions, conducts a running dia- logue with God in a tone of desperate flip- pancy. He writes, is reasonably successful, loses one love in death, and then settles com- fortably into a routine between his father, who loves him possessively and with apprehension, his mistress Colette and his career. When he and a girl called Marcelle are chosen to go south (this is 1962) to write up the pieds noirs and displaced people arriving from Algeria, for a magazine about to be launched, he wel- comes the chance to break loose from his stale routine and embark on a venture which (well- paid anyway) he sees as magical, as full of signs and significant adventure as a favourite childhood book.

Frangoise Mallet-Joris is in perfect control of her characters from start to finish. Marcelle, who at first seems the very type of an aspiring young woman journalist, is not only beautiful and amenable, but capable of gnaw- ing, of broadening and deepening spiritually, as the love between her and Nicolas develops.

The news that the backers of the magazine are highly suspect, that the magazine was in fact to

be a tool of the OAS, that the excellent salaries

will not be paid, and that the magical assign- ment is ended, comes to Nicolas and Marcelle when they return for three days to Paris to collect their cheques. It coincides with the critical moment, the true breakthrough (for both of them) in their love affair, and they decide to go on travelling together.

In the end Nicolas is forced to certain realities. He sees, once again after very long, his brother the priest, and together they meet their mother and the former camp guard. Nicolas has to take the German seriously, respect him even, as a person, and to see why he and the mother had to remain alive to- gether, for the very reason of their guilt. Altd, finally, Marcelle (who had proclaimed herself sterile) becomes pregnant. Nicolas must also recognise that a new life, through him; is to

be brought into so hateful, so absurd, a world

and, still not quite capable of acceptance, takes his own particular way out. All characters in this book have reality, from the snide, accomplished backers of the magazine to Paul, Nicolas's father, who transfers his posSes- siveness to Colette, his son's ex-mistress, and

Colette herself—surely the pattern of a con- temporary detraquee=always furiously seek-

ing the explosion of a soul incurably mediocre

and filled with all the fear and courage its narrowness could contain.' Signs and Wonders is properly a novel, of wit, weight and icor portance, and its appearance makes this year a good one.

Paris again, with Mr Kerouac, and a hectic, rather enjoyable romp through bars and trains and more bars, to Brittany and back again. Jack Kerouac, who announces himself a drunk and also a 'strange solitary crazy Catholic

mystic,' is in search of his Breton ances his full name being Jean. Louis LebriaNte Kerouac. The title, `Satori,' is a Japanese word

for 'sudden illumination,' sudden awakening,' or simply 'kick in the eye.' Mr Kerouac, a com- pulsive talker and maker of friends/enemies

in bars, is fun to read in small doses. This short book seems just right for his tumbling narra- tive and buttonholing style.

The point has been made.that nuclear fission, with hideous consequences, might not be new in human experience. Others may have got to it before our time, coming from quite other scientific directions. Hence, perhaps, some great, unexplained historical disasters. Working frOni the knowledge that uranium was discovered in the eighteenth century, and that quite im- portant supplies of it were available in Corn- wall, Mr Ronald Clark has imagined a nine- teenth century scientist, Professor Franklin

Huxtable, who, working on his own, discovers the principle of a weapon he thinks capable, because of its horrific possibilities, of bringing war to an end. Being a man of means and influence, he goes straight to the top with his discovery, sees Peel, Wellington and, very soon, . the Queen and her consort.

Time passes. The secret begins to leak. The device is about to be used in the Crimea, but is prevented by a natural accident. Once again, when Huxtable and the Queen are old, it is about to be' tried -again in an African crisis, and is again frustrated, by both accident and the Queen's command. This book is fascinating, a brilliant performance. Real historical charac- ters—always a tricky business—take their places credibly; real events, interpreted in the light of a shared secret, make admirable sense. Hux- table, for all his scientific impatience and con- ceit, is attractive. Only one query remains: how did he escape the effects of radio- activity?

Reviewer's words for the kind of book Mr Cordell has written in The Bright Cantonese can only swivel about between `gripping,' ab- sorbing,"compulsively readable' and the like. It is all of those, and more, this uncomfort- able study of an atomic disaster in China, triggered accidentally (or on purpose?) from an American destroyer, seen through the eyes of Mei Kayling, a Red Guard and trainee spy. Mei's job is to find the negro deserter from the destroyer, who holds the clues, and then to follow her clues to America and an assassination. Only at the end does the book flag, seeming to run rapidly to a not quite con- vincing (or so one hopes) conclusion in a Chinese attack on the United States. But no one who has read it will feel quite the same again about China, nor hear the words 'Sea Entry' without a shiver.