Pseudo-history under a pseudonym
Patrick Skene Catling CHIEF OF STAFF by William Coyle Chatio, £14.99, pp. 426 NOW AND IN TIME TO BE: IRELAND AND THE IRISH by Thomas Keneally, with photographs by Patrick Prendergast Ryan, £19.95, pp. 208 Wham Coyle', the publisher pro- claims, 'is the pseudonym of Thomas Keneally'. Why would anyone assume a pseudonym and announce it?
'Chief of Staff isn't by the real me,' the author of Schindler's Ark seems to say, dimpling coyly behind his transparent mask. It must be just that the publisher wants to sell the book, and the Booker laureate doesn't want anyone to think that he thinks it is up to his best work.
Coyle is Keneally's mother's maiden name, a derivation which makes one won-
der what he thinks of his mother. Chief of Staff is a pseudo-novel, or pseudo-history, about a pseudo-hero. The book must have been aimed first of all at the sort of people who produced the melodramatic television mini-series about Eisenhower's affair with his chauffeur. But if Keneally feels that this enterprise is beneath him, what gives him the right to insult us readers?
Judged simply as a money-making device, a soap-operatic fictionalisation of the history of the second world war in the Pacific, the novel deserves beta-plus. The author 'drew with gratitude' upon non- fictional accounts of the era, particularly biographies of Douglas Macarthur. Coyle's portrait of that most arrogant and ambi- tious of modern generals, re-christened Drummond pig Drum') Wraith, is good for a few wry chuckles.
General Wraith, like his model, while keeping his promise to return to the Philip- pines, always has an eye on the presidency of the United States. All his military decisions are evaluated according to their possible political side-effects. Like General Macarthur,
in profile Big Drum looked like a sham, an aged character actor in an old buffer part.
The main difference between them is that Macarthur was usually photographed with a folksy corncob pipe; Wraith more elegantly flourishes an empty cigarette holder. Unfortunately, the novel's timespan covers only the years of Macarthur's ascendancy; it does not extend long enough to provide the gratifying spectacle of Macarthur being sacked by President Truman. Though the ill-starred, five-star general is the biggest figure in Coyle's gaudy waxwork tableau, for the sake of further licence the eponymous principal character is apparently a fictional invention called General Gallon Sandforth. He is an execrable hero, a career officer as greedy for advancement, and as ruthless, as his famous boss.
The Chief of Staff exploits his position of privilege and power to conduct a doubly adulterous affair with an Australian army woman half his age whose job is to procure films and other entertainment for the Americans as they island-hop from Aus- tralia north to victory. General Sandforth resorts to all sorts of tricks to keep young Dimity (`Dim') Lewis available to him, including entrapping and blackmailing a homosexual major, sending her husband on a suicidal mission into Japanese-held territory, and getting her a commission in the United States Army. Among her charms are 'rich, symmetrical thighs'. He probably wouldn't have gone to so much trouble if her thighs had been lopsided.
One of the crucial twists of the plot depends on an engineering officer's ability to influence Big Drum by telepathy. The telepathist is part-Cherokee, you see. Even Coyle tires after 423 pages of this charade, and concludes the novel with a two-page `postscript', brusquely assigning various persons to their post-war fates.
Thomas Keneally writes much better as Thomas Keneally. He is an excellent travel writer, as he demonstrated picturesquely in Outback (1983), his survey of Australia's innermost desert, and Towards Asmara (1989), his polemical novel in support of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. Now and in Time to Be is a casual, straight- forward, lively account of his recent tour of Ireland, the land from which his grand- parents migrated to Australia.
A third-generation Irish-Australian is able to appraise the countryside, villages, cities and people of Ireland with a nice balance of sympathy and objectivity. He reports his sentimental journey with well- informed awareness of 800 years of tribula- tions and with a sensitive appreciation of the difficulties, achievements and pleasures of Ireland now.
Guided by the shrewd advice of Tim Magennis of Bord Faille, Keneally experi- enced the hedonistic comforts of some of Ireland's finest country hotels, such as the elegant Park Hotel in Kenmare and Bally- maloe House on a farm in County Cork, internationally renowned for its food and wine, where, by the way, Trevor Howard spent his last days in Ireland. Being gener- ally so well cosseted, Keneally was able, in a mellow mood, to enjoy to the full the plain rustic pubs of the Republic and to tolerate benignly the spiritual grittiness of parts of Ulster. His analysis of the North- ern troubles is nationalistic but tactful, unlikely to offend readers who may dis- agree with his conclusions.
The book is profusely illustrated with colour photographs by Patrick Prendergast. Well displayed on large pages, they show all the familiar sights — mountains, cottages in green fields, old churches, horses, Georgian doorways, men in flat caps with faces like red leather contemplat- ing pints of Guinness. They may be Irish pictorial clichés, but images become clichés because they are truly representative.
If Thomas Keneally feels another William Coyle novel coming on, perhaps he should write it under a new pseudonym and keep the author's true identity secret.
Previous page
