An Oxford Novel
In the Spring the War Ended. By Steven Linakis. (Cassell, 25s.)
OXFORD and Alexandria have always been grave- yards of the reputations of minor novelists. I can think of only two and a half successful Oxford novels—Zuleika Dobson, Brideshead Re- visited and Toni Brown at Oxford; and not one wholly pleasing Alexandrian novel, though Scobie fans would doubtless disagree. Nobody really lusts any more after Hypatia or Justine; and the fame of their creators is as fallen as the Pharos lighthouse. And generations who wished to immortalise Oxford are now interred In Bodley's stacks, mortal and forgotten.
If Rachel Trickett's The Elders were success- ful it would be a tremendous event : a million readers could look for thunderclaps on the dust- wrapper as fit heralds of its publication. But no —it is an Oxford novel better than usual, but neither startling nor immortal. It is about the election of a Professor of Poetry at Oxford, con- tested by two poets who twenty years ago have had an intense relationship involving the novel's heroine, a spinster English don called Kitty. The past is revealed and reinterpreted .to give mean- ing to the present. The worst thing in the book is a modern undergraduate love-affair—learned quotes flung with breathless facetiousness over naked shoulders while nude-bathing in Wales. They are gay, pot-boiled young things.
But the relations between the elders are finely drawn. Here Miss Trickett has calculated exactly the limits of her talent. Her characters are perish- able, they lack deep feelings, their talk does not resound. But they are precisely conceived and quite unsentimental. The ending is just, in such a way that all the characters are finally enlarged. Miss Trickett's special gift is to have got the past to comment so cleverly upon the present; and to have written with such neatness. The Elders is an academic novel, intelligent and placid.
Karoton is about fourth-century Alexandria. Its hero is an Arian who goes over to the Athanasian camp when Constantine succeeds in beating down his rivals. Its publisher commends it for its 'colour' and 'many good scenes': the usual feeble claims made for historical fiction. It is as if the book has special literary merit just because of its setting—an assumption which, I suspect, accounts for the ruin of many an Okford and Alexandrian novel. And 'many good scenes' suggests that there are bits in-between which the reader need not bother about. On these terms, Karoton is a work of genius. On many others, it is boring and silly, the book of a bad film epic, no more. No Alexandrian novel is, of course, complete without sex, practised as variously as in Durrell. Characters are for ever lifting chlamys and parting peplos to reveal hidden fruits. It is entirely absurd, and for all the genuine re-creation of antiquity, it might as well have been set in Bournemouth 1966.
I don't quite know what to make of Mrs. Bratbe's August Picnic. It buys its good effects at the expense of too much metaphor. Thus: 'An army of dishevelled thoughts, raping and looting, advanced on the high town of his heart's hill' The prose is humped with lots of gawky images like this; it affects a sort of ugly lyricism. And Mrs. Wheldon seems to have misjudged her shifts from caricature to gravity. On the other hand, the relationship between Mrs. Bratbe and her daughter, the central concern of the novel, is built up, by perseverance rather than controlled writing, into something of substance. But I feel that Mrs. Wheldon has rather more industry than imagination.
In Voyage, ten people are on a pleasure cruise from New York to South America. They all change and interact in multiple relationships. In the end, a long-estranged husband and wife are reconciled, and their dughter is rescued from the lascivious attentions of a flashy film-actor. It would be an easy book to mock : the image of the voyage, inner and outer, is rather contrived; the Woolfian jelly of interior monologues hasn't quite set; and there are far too many people on board. Yet Laurette Pizer has written some subtle pieces—she is especially good at antagonisms. But I felt the novel has been concocted too much to recipe. It is like a collection of short stories. some dull, some affecting.
Roy Bongartz's short stories, which all con- cern an affair between Benny, a Manhattan parking-lot attendant, and his girl Flo, are much more cohesive than the fragments which Laurette Pizer has shored against her ruin. Mr. Bongartz writes very wittily, but not so that his wit distorts the realities of the deeper humours. Benny's trouble is that he doein't know whether his feel- ings for Flo are at all deep. He almost grasps that while he needs Flo, she may not need him. But he is not permitted a sentimental insight into his own condition. It is part of his nature that he is a no-hoper, a dull, ruminative fellow, who all the same responds (in a gauche and miscalcu- lating way) to the people around him—as he does when saying goodbye to the bored guests of a party he has held--`Hello, great people!' His every gesture is inappropriate but alive. He is lost, but lost at home. Mr. Bongartz derives his subtlety and his wit from an ever-present dilemma: do his characters run shallow or deep? The answer will tell Benny whether he wants or needs Flo. But Mr. Bongartz does not betray his realism by feigning a solution. Twelve Chases it very promising.
Patrick Raymond's The Lordly Ones is roman- tic fiction, with attendant vices, and perhaps one or two more virtues than usual. Miranda is the daughter of a disgraced Army officer expelled from the service, in Singapore or some Far Eastern situation. The story is about how her father retrieves his honour, and how she .wins the hand of the Admiral's son. I found its gentle- ness affected and creepy, and I suspect (again) that the author reckons his setting has special virtue. The happy ending is concealed Cartland. In the Spring the War Ended is about an Ameri- can deserter in Europe after the last war. It is burly and bloody.
BILL BYROM
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