Fiction
Life is a
drag
Peter Ackroyd
Royo County Robert Roper (Andre Deutsch £1.75) Regiment of Women Thomas Berger (EYre Methuen £2.75) There was once a poem, in those days when poetry smelt of disaffected truth, which came to a point with "Which goes to show I've, reason to be frightened/Not of plains, 0' course, but of me." The lonely begetter was' , of course, WA, who taught us a thing or two. And now Mr Roper has come along with, a fable of American plains, kicking sau humankind and confirming the diagnosis. There is something rotten in our state. Roy° County casts a warm eye on these staples of twentieth century mythology, sex and violence, and proves them to be as real as fantasy itself. The novel opens with some plain-billy speechifying: "Well, this county is, awful flat, it's wide and flat like an ocean 01 land. There's but one big hill, called Mount Lana, and a couple of tiny hills off in the south east corner." Topography of _scare, prehistoric failure. This particular variety es prose is, of course, as factitious as anything in the recesses of Lancelot Andrewes, imP0sing as it does a flat and broken language upon the heart. But it burns with a small flame, and so casts the longest shadows. The parish-pump orator is Herbie Hartman' the Holy Fool of these heartlands. He opens, the novel with an appropriately lighthearted account of the killing of some "mex" or other: a little local relief amongst all this dead laria, a land once teeming with brute life and ritual, but now holding only enough heat to, quicken bad dreams. There are a number 01 stories which must get told: chicken bora with human hands, the child with no face–lust, a layer of skin, and the hens' eggs full 19' blood. These are the omens of dead gods,' ghastly parodies of genesis proclaiming On' this is the Drought after the Giant Race. And, yes, it is dull, terribly dull. Violencl and sex are dull, being merely the pale prirl, of average frustration. But Roper rev: those mysteries which keep people in the, place, wearing them down to a smooth all final shape, keeping them vacant and cupied. He suggests very well the sporacIN oddness whichis daily living, the sudden noises and smells which take the breath awa.Yo ' and twist the world all out ot Shape. All
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Roper observes with more than a little slynes, the things people see and tell, those moment' of confession which take a soul of its oft dinariness, and those occasions of insignA which catch the forked person unawares suggest something other than itself. And, tui continue this litany, Roper catches the casnaie inflections of speech which give the wil° game, away: "That's nice. That's a nice nain% a very unique name. Tonight my name Lilian." but ". . . there's just nothing to Cie; You'll see after a while; it gets He' tiresome." Right it is. The novel is very shad/ indeed, as deadpan and as funny as a police report. For once the appaling clichés can b.! sounded: it is a good book. I didn't put down. According to Thomas Berger, there i5 nothing to do for our liberation except wait in the horror of it, the future being a hall of fai(e and cracked mirrors in which only the reverse is the case. Regiment of Women elaborate5 upon an age of future shock when woraeS wear the trousers, and the shirts, and the
socks, and the ties. It is very conventional of them, I suppose, but then power rarely corrupts.
The novel positively rattles with the clicking of the innumerable stilletoes of Working boys; perpetually breathless and excitable, they exchange masculine confidences, fingers running nervously down the seams of their thick nylons, occasionally having a good old-fashioned cry, nails and lips as red as the Paperback cover of Durkheim's Suicide. It is difficult not to get caught out by a fit of the unliberated giggles: "Charlie as usual was ill-shaven and there were grease stains on the front of his dress ... Imagine a man of his age vvearing satin. It was almost too disgusting to be Pathetic ... the troweled on pancake was heavily eroded." Thomas Berger wields the calm of a true comedian like a sphinx, his heroes bearing their cross with the arch composure of a Stanley Baxter caught, twisted, in his knickers. And Berger has a cheeky prose which does nothing to dispel the illusion of a grand, oPeratic joke. Art-history, for instance, has been rewritten and there are ticklish references to Mono Liso by Leonarda, and he Rape of the Sabine Men; this is a world of "brunets" "switchboard boys" and dolls Which squeak "Hi. I'm Larry. Won't you be Y friend?" Mary! It's enough to make an 'nlazon gag. Regiment of Women is set, fashionably enough, in that haven for minority groups and other practical jokes known as New York. By this epoch, it has tilted to a slight angle, Which makes life even more difficult for Georgie, an ordinary working boy. In his silly, rnasculine way poor Georgie tries on some t„le-and-trouser drag and is promptly arrested. rte Puts on some big feminine act and busts °ut of jail, only to land up in the even worse Predicament of "Men's Lib." Like all boyScout movements, it is a terrible bore and
sists upon employing poor Georgie as a
Yrnbol." He is forced to swim against the t,Ide at a local sperm bank, where he learns tne new facts of life: "Sex is unnatural, obviously. It could result in a disease called ,Pil,egnancy." But Georgie is just another dumb Lue-head: "Is it true that in ages past women uore children in their own bodies?". "They alSO burned people at the stake for saying the ei4rth was round, Georgie. It took human bertie a long time to understand a lot of things; "-Pr centuries they reproduced like animals. Lnere is no answer to that. r, BUt it's enough to make any man wild, and ("feorgie escapes with an ex-FBI agent \szeinale) ending up on the urban trail in some s-,rt of Camp Cassidy routine. This happy pair w°se the novel as Ur-Straights in the deserted rvioodland wilderness of Maine, a kind of adam and Steve of the brave old world. Like "nY Genesis, it is a happy ending. And, as 1111)atters turn up, an end which neither of them
ad the right to expect.
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