Murder Most Foul

Fertig. By Sol Yurick. (W. H. Allen, 30s.) The Hard Thorn. By Renzo Rossi. Translated by William Weaver. (Alan Ross, 30s.) A Learned City. By Philip Toynbee. (Chatto and Windus, 18s.) The Game. By Thomas Fall. (Cassell, 30s.)

Fertig, an American novel, appears at a time

when multiple murders in the US have gained some prominence. Mr Yurick's zany satire, which if not quite a masterpiece is certainly a remark-

able tour de force, is about the consequences of the preposterous revenge of a little accountant,

Harry Fertig, on the staff and directors of a hospital through whose negligence his baby has died. Knowing perfectly well that what he is doing is 'wrong,' in sound mind, and wanting to be caught, he kills six people connected with the hospital, including a receptionist, a nurse, an eminent doctor and a Rabbi fund-raiser. He is discovered by accident, and immediately put under psychiatric observation. Meanwhile, a crooked and successful defence lawyer, Roy Bleakie, is secretly engaged by Fertig's employer, Grenoble—for otherwise it might become known that Grenoble's heavy contributions to the mur- dered Rabbi's welfare schemes were merely tax- dodges. . . .

Mr Yurick writes with extraordinary and in- spired gusto—only occasionally overdoing R- and he thus manages to demonstrate the supreme illogicality and frightening hypocrisy of Ameri- can society, both in its authoritarian and its pseudo-liberal aspects. His chief target is various kinds of psychoanalytical jargon and the way in which they are accepted as valid. Some of the speeches of the psychoanalyst whose crusade is that criminals do not exist, and who therefore wants to prove that Fertig is not 'average' (which he is), are unequalled in modern writing for their satirical brilliance. Mr Yurick is not by any means attacking psychoanalysis: he is attacking a false and invalid use of it in the interests of assuaging society's sense of guilt at its own undoubted wickedness. The contrast be- tween the admittedly guilty Fertig and the society whom he so embarrasses is that while he insists unequivocally upon his guilt, it tragi-comically convolutes itself in order to avoid doing so. Only Bleakie, Fertig's lawyer, who begins the case in a wholly selfish spirit, achieves some dignity: he becomes obsessed by Fertig's tragic simplicity, and ends by identifying himself with him.

The strength of this remarkable book lies in its refusal to go outside its own terms of reference. Mr Yurick could have pointed out that since children as well as adults are now being murdered in wars, with society's smug and righteous approval, then society has no right to criticise such actions as Fertig's. That is the terrible logic that lies behind his satire. But he does well not to be explicit about this abstract aspect of his theme, for his protest thus emerges with more shocking force. The commonplace accusations of the subjective 'demonstrator' be- come sharply articulated. To reveal 'what happens' in this book would be unfair—for it Is successful on that level, too; 1 feel confident in recommending it as one of the fiercest and most effective satires to come out of America in this decade.

Renzo Rossi's The Hard Thorn, excellently translated, is in its way as technically impressive as many more ostensibly avant-garde novels. It deals with the physical and artistic decline, after

the last war, of an ageing and womanising pianist, against the background of his native Trieste. Ermanno Cornelis, the pianist, is 'real' in every sense of the word; Sr Rossi evokes an actual physical presence—failing in health, amorously confused—with uncanny success. His novel may thus be interpreted in a number of ways; the element of creative 'intention' is as

startlingly absent as it is in the patterns of our neighbours' behaviour. Thus, some may see in Cornelis the artist as hero; others, as I do, will see him as a prototype for 'the selfish artist'— for he is in one sense a charlatan and a cold fish. His performances are syntheses of other people's; all his sexual affairs are calculated; he does not love the spirit of music, but only its form; all his reactions to other people's mani- festations have one lack in common—spon- taneous warmth. And yet his decline is affecting, and especially so against the beautifully evoked background of post-war Trieste. Sr Rossi is a sombre, delicate and talented novelist.

A Learned City, subtitled 'The Sixth Day of the Vindication of Pantaloon,' refers to Oxford. I have always respected Mr Toynbee's genuine contributions to the experimental novel in English, but his resort to verse as a form puzzles me. I note that the tributes to the pre- vious instalments of this work, quoted on the wrapper, refer to it as 'poetry,' a 'poem' and 'epic verse.' I doubt if this kind of thing:

Fuming Grampa!

A tiptoe, entering the quad.

Lift a bunched gown to my face. Fie, fie to hide my phiz, My gross mug as I teeter past - • • -

and there is a good deal of it, qualifies as good verse or good prose. One recalls Daniel George's Tomorrow Will Be Different, where the author's sights were much lower, and this seems very thin. The theme in itself—the differences between an old don and his undergraduate grandson, who `alternate in parallel monologues'—is one that Mr Toynbee could certainly have dealt with illuminatingly in prose. What he is aiming at in the use of verse is presumably the creation of certain flexible tones; alas, the results are too often facetious and merely silly.

The Game is one of those American dynastic novels and—yes!—by p. 22 you have got the other usual ingredient: 'In the blackness of the night she drew him to her and opened herself

urgently to him and, finally, clawed his back in her ecstasy.' The whole history of the Greers of Greer Point, Texas, is recorded at just about this level, although the three boys are by no means always in bed (or on the shack floor).

MARTIN SE YM OUR -SM ITH