A Note of Clammy Doom
The Watchers on the Shore. By Stan Barstow. (Michael Joseph, 25s.) The Fetch. By Peter Everett. (Cape, 21s.) A Dream of Fair Children. By Jean Morris. (Cassell, 18s.) I HAVE not read Mr. Barstow's A Kind of Loving, but find that its successor can be read for itself alone. In another of his books, The Desperadoes, I noted formidable observation, steady compassion, exact ear for colloquial speech. These remain, but the new narrative has the smell of something cooked up rather pat for hungry readers of the earlier success. The rather likeable Vic is unwillingly married (that word 'with its old note of clammy doom') to vulgar, boring but sexually attractive Ingrid. He wants the conventions his unpleasant situation never quite permits. 'Is this all?' he keeps re- peating, unwilling to surrender totally. Forced into the world of deviousness, anonymous letters, dirty weekends, he finally has to decide whether to beat retreat from Ingrid to Donna, the rep actress. But Donna, too, has her problem. The situation is only too real, but Mr. Barstow has books to write of more powerful networks of tension.
Other conventions too often seem to demand that when a poet writes a novel he must tactfully shed evidence that he is. a poet. In his auto- biographical novel on the Normandy landings, Mr. Holbrook is not at first immune. 'Made his blood boil,' Devilish contrivances,' moon like a bright cheese' would not, one imagines, appear in his verse. Early chapters recall the earnest, credulous university youth at the onset of war, who so wanted to help the community yet could excuse Stalin and, at a pinch, the Germans, with too many personal problems solved by catastrophe. But it is in the landings and battle that Holbrook achieves stature.
Factual experience is not always total advantage in novel-writing:. Zola notwithstanding, the last word has not yet been written even about Sedan and the painted emperor.
In this sort of book, reportage as much as novel, the personal memories are indispensable.
Emotional impressionism is stiffened with techni- cal insight. Editorial comment occasionally poaches : beauty, drama, 'empathy' are not always allowed to speak for themselves. 'In a suspended trance Paul found himself looking at the features of the sea and land as if outside time' is a spoiling preface to the fine evocations of the features themselves. But much of the de- scription has alarming force. Bullying, abnor- mal sergeants, ludicrous parades, a forty-eight- hour-leave idyll, invasion ships approaching shore, a tank roasting with men inside it, dead cattle with feet in the air, a corpse riding a motor- cycle, Paul awaiting death and watching a brilliant insect. Rich life becoming rich meat. The immediacy reduces recent screen epics to strip-cartoons.
Impressive in a very different way is Peter Everett. Bruno, a young motherless cinema operator, returns home after the death of his hated father. He finds an uncle installed, his father's double, a 'fetch,' drunken, half-dotty, a decayed Saint-Just, together with a woman with a taste for flagellation. The spare distinct prose, haunted by film imageries, itself re- sembles a film. Short vivid scenes sometimes reversed or in slow motion, long shots, enlarge- ments, isolated fits of dialogue. At times it is as though grotesque posturing figures of the silent screen suddenly acquire speech. The novel itself is by no means grotesque. Challenged by wretched memories of anger and injustice, Bruno should now be the master, though his kingdom teeters into the unreal. He must step boldly out of the screen or be submerged utterly. His pro- ducer is a writer to watch.
Jean Morris has also written a country-house novel, more conventional in form, yet creating singular and ominous atmosphere of jungle- nature kept only just at bay. She extracts, so to speak, the Kraken from the Tennyson. In a dense hot summer of extraordinary growth, the eird moths, a giant induced weed, overgrown, perhaps mythical, wild cats in the forest, all become active protagonists amongst jealousies and frustrations slowly boiling in the mansion. A widowed stepmother, haunted by her dead child, awaits with two stepchildren the birth of a stepgrandchild and the visit of a man friend from the past. The adolescent Mellony prefers indomitable weeds to tame flowers, can see an ,:arth leaning the wrong way to the wrong stars and must use the dead baby as a weapon against the older woman. Disturbing genetic speculations open up a drama otherwise tightly self-enclosed. The melodramatic ending does not invalidate :he preceding moments of subtlety.
Mr. Cole's six stories discuss young American intellectuals abroad, vulnerable, restless, con- ,cientious, seeking solutions of freedom, under- 'landing, love. in Russia, Greece, Italy, England. Threats are never distant. Sarah and Howard, for instance, have beauty, health, wit, he has ()cation, she . . . but this is the point. In Sicily, exposed to the more primitive culture he has come to annotate, their marriage reveals a fallacy increasingly sinister. An easy, very visual flow of words recoats this archetypal theme. Throughout Mr. Cole salutes the alternate bathos and fine grain of people who will be pulled up by Sophocles yet haggle over a tip.
`I was sitting at the dressing-table making up my face . . . in the mirror I could see my black brassiere through the net.' Yes, but Mr. Brown's figure is a man of twenty. The workings out of his situation make a wan small tale, intelli- gently told, getting just sufficiently under the skin to need sympathetic attention. Amongst some rather bleak clinical detail the narrator allows a surely unintentional drollery, 'No one 'aho reads the Daily Telegraph could be sus- pected of being a psychic hermaphrodite.'
If only the blatantly commercial novelist could sink a shaft into New York and send up a gush quite different from the Greenwich Village homosexual silently moaning about death, tied
to momma and best friend and with a puzzled young girl dangling between all three. I was unconvinced by Miss Fallaci's female script- writer, the two pivotal coincidences, the philo- sophising. 'Suicide isn't a vile act, Gio. It's an act of courage, an act of freedom . . . if you haven't got the courage to kill yourself you haven't got the courage to live either.' If satire is intended it is too thickly disguised. The author's imagination occasionally strays into the apocalyptic : some remarks about the role of the Hurricane in the American imagination show individual feelings, even passion, which a less stock novel might allow real scope.
PETER VANSITTART
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