Fiction
Fanfare in Blemont. By Marcel. Ayme. Translated from the French by The Piper's Tune. By George Blake. (Collins. los. 6d..) How common it is nowadays for novelists, especially young novelists, to try to make fiction bear a greater burden than it can carry ! I list these four books not in order of merit but so as to allow me- to. illustrate the remark. Conservatism in a reviewer is a middle-aged vice, and ambition, experiment and a sense of modernity in a novelist are all jewels ; but what makes for pleasure in reading in the first place is not the philosophy or contemporary sentiment or prose style of a novel but an element of play, of make-believe, in the novelist. This has very little to do with his views on the world. Modern-mindedness alone, at any rate, will sink any work of fiction. I did not read Mr. Gore Vidal's earlier novel, The City and the Pillar, which was well spoken of, but Dark Green, Bright Red seems to me a not very grown-up and rather pretentiobs piece of work. It is about a young ex-officer in the U.S. Army who gets caught up in an attempted revolution in a Central American Republic and apparently sees for himself the realities of power or power politics. The local colour is laid on in bright but smeary patches, several people around the young man are, like liimself, of the modern and " frustrated " kind, and their conversations and soliloquies are thickly interlarded with views of a youthful sort on literature, sex and the world's ruin. Mr. Vidal's preoccupations, intellectual and aesthetic, are serious enough in a perhaps exag- geratedly American way. He is by no means without talent, though -his is as yet an immaturity that might thrive better without publica- tion. There are momentary flashes of life in the flabby General Alvarez, in his tiresomely knowing and cynical French secretary, de Cluny, who once wrote novels, even in the empty and rather hysterical young hero himself, but none of the characters in the story really carries conviction. The Bamboo House is a less ambitious and better book. It is marked by a descriptive ability of individual and unobtrusive strength. The scene is a small stretch of the Chindwin valley in 1943, and Mr. Scurfield pictures it all—jungle and paddy fields, streams and thatched villages, bamboo and palms, Gurkha troops, dusty tracks and the burning heat and the drenching rains—in sharp, brief detail that always belongs to the movement of his story. This is possibly a little sparse for a full-length novel. A British officer named Forsyth volunteers for a small irregular unit engaged in reconnaissance in the jungle and discovers in a senior officer there the man who was his successful rival in love and whom he has never ceased to hate. ForsytNis obsession of hatred possesses him on a trip across the Chindwin for the purpose of spreading rumours, he thinks con- stantly of murdering the other man, and in the end he is devoured by feelings of guilt after Sherbourne is badly wounded in a Jap ambush and dies. The narrative manner is for the most part direct, firm, unaffected, but Mr. Scurfield also is tempted—partly, no doubt because he is conscious that his material is wearing thin— to show his paces in refining upon the interior monologue. The effect, unfortunately, as so often, is to lend a touch of hysteria to his thoughts.
Fanfare in Blemont (the French title was Uranus) is the fourth of M. Marcel Ayme's books to be translated into English. It is a novel about France and the French after—and before—liberation, and in many ways it is a brutal and revolting novel, though Whether wholly by intention I cannot tell. All too often, indeed, in reading a contemporary French novel I find it difficult to be sure that I really follow the author's point of view. M. Ayme has various gifts and graces as a writer, though humour of a spontaneous kind is not one of them. When, however, a character in this novel kicks his wife in the behind to show his disapproval of something she has said, I am left in doubt whether or not M. Ayme is enjoying a humorous little incident. Probably not ; for he seems concerned to display in almost every character in the story moral baseness, coarseness or cynicism. Sometimes the irony of his portraiture is apparent, but what bothers me is the frequent absence of any sort of ironical implication whatever. If this is a true picture of what non- collaboration meant during the German occupation, if the Com- munist and other heroes of the Resistance in the ruined little town of Blemont were typical of the rest in France, if Archambaud is fairly to be described, as he is described on the wrapper of the English translation, as decent and sober-minded, if the collabora- tionist philosophy of the wretched little Loin is to sbee attributed to the effects -of a lonely childhood, if the shallow and erratic lucu. brations of the schoolmaster Watrin represent a French and latter- day variety of sweetness and light, and if, finally, the concluding scenes of savagery in Bleinont in its pride of deliverance could in point of fact be enacted before a crowd of French men and women, then M. Ayme may indeed be a prophet not without honour. As a novelist, nevertheless, he seems to me rather mechanical and without depth.
Mr. Blake's new novel is the most temperate of the four, sound enough iri_method to be called old-fashioned. A fluent-and assured piece of story-telling, with " a great yachtsman of the old school," a coarse, arrogant, full-blooded old rip, heir to a Clydeside industrial fortune, for principal character, it takes in its stride the broad process of the levelling of classes between the wars. Rab Rollo is drawn, I think, a little larger than life, and one or two of the other characters, more especially the very, very elegant Mrs. Lamartine, the last and most fatal of his many mistresses, run too closely to mere convention. But the telling of the story is lively and sympa- thetic, while the sailing scenes in the Firth are done with real passion. Mr. Blake, in short, never ignores the common needs of novel-writing. Yet what his novel lacks, so that it is reduced in the end to the level of enjoyable reading, is perhaps most simply described as vision. That, after all, has always, and not only today,
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