New Novels
THE reviewer hopes for an interesting book once every few months ; four in one week destroy his carefully constructed attitudes ; and worse, keep him awake at night doing the one thing that worries him : reading. A *Kid for Two Farthings is Mr. Mankowitz's second short novel. His first, Make Me an Offer, was exciting enough to stir the air in the offices of the most respectable weeklies. Now, he hasn't (thank God) done it again—in terms of supremely confident insolence— no, he's done something new : he's gone gentle. He's declared himself unafraid of sentiment ; he's written about an East End childhood with the cocky, unselfconscious humility of an East End child. Where his first book was all winks and wisecracks, a brittle shell over a vulnerable core, his second is simpler—and smiles, where the other grinned. It tells the story of Joe who lives in Fashion Street with his mother, with Mr. Kandinsky the trousers-maker and his assistant Shmule, an embryonic wrestling champion known in the game as " Hammer," and with Africana, Joe's unicorn. There is nothing more to the story than the arrival and departure of Africana. And inside the carefully limited confines of his (overtly) JeWish-folk- story mechanism the chat acters move surely, confident of their places. There is no straining for effect ; nor, more importantly, is there any withdrawal. Weight for age, this is a magnificent performance. Mr. Mankowitz as a two-year-old showed great promise ; A Kid for Two Farthings demonstrates beyond doubt that he is a potential classic winner. Potential ? Yes, the qualification remains ; for the full size, the full breadth and depth of chest need to come yet.
Where he openly welcomes and weaves feeling, Mr. Bates rebuffs it. The three long-short-stories that go to make up The Nature of Love are so disparate in weight, while being identical in texture, that they should be dealt with separately. After all, Mr. Bates is one of our most able prose technicians. I have yet to read a single page of his post-war writing that is not admirably achieved. And yet ? Dulcima, the first story, is quite the best. Hardyesque the blurb says ; let's say ourselves (unfairly but in better taste adjectivally) a cross between Stella Gibbons and Simenon. Visually, it is far stronger than the others. Here too, the dry-mouthed, pounding moment of passion is realised with brilliant economy and force. Ugly Dulcie, greedy for acceptance and surprised by her own power to arouse desire, takes her thick body into miserly Mr. Parker's bed, gives her awakened heart to a gamekeeper and—by playing one against the other to get the maximum of long-craved satisfaction— breeds violent death. Sordid, under-written, Dulcima has the real, gritty taste of suburbanised country living in it. Judged on this alone Mr. Bates is moving towards Hardy in all truth, blurb or no blurb ; but— But The Grass God picks up every weakness of Dulcima and waves them, like a—what would be the word ?—a laundry of dirty hand- kerchiefs. Full of Lawrencian echoes, the story traces the rise and fall of a love affair between a virile temporary dweller on the land and a decadent land-owner. Echoes ? A white peacock struts through the weed-filled shrubbery ; the woman yearns towards the sun " her body going deeper brown, a pure corn-colour " ; the grass her pale homburg-hatted lover worships is a god with roots ; and—the most telling echo, perhaps—the woman
" stood close to him, so that her body almost touched him thread- ing a pink-white bottle-brush flower into his buttonhole."
In Lady Chatterley you remember the threadingLat an equally important moment in the character development—was significantly lower down. Here one knows from the first page or two that the destructive element, clearly apparent in Dulcima but softened there by an internal awakening to beauty, will win brutally and finally. The retreat from feeling becomes a rout.
In The Delicate Nature the rout becomes a farce, worthy of a Bluntschli. This is no more than warmed-up Maugham, highly competent, as is everything that Mr. Bates does, but yesterday's mashed potatoes nevertheless. This is the one about the woman the young man dreams of, who's married to the older man he loves-but- hates and, who uses him to make her husband jealous, and then— when the husband's killed—says " I hate you. Now you suffer " to the young man.
Three stories, very different in weight I said, but identical in tex- ture, all of them withdrawing from feeling. The heart of them is as clammy as wax. Something central that beat strongly in The Purple Plain and, muffled but still there, made Dear Life memorable has got lost. So women are bitches, seems to be the moral of The Nature of Love. And the waxwork feeling stretches over page after page of brilliantly worked dialogue and narrative. Were Mr. Bates not such a nearly-great writer it would be irrelevant (let .alone ungrateful) to say this. But unless warmth comes and acceptance conies, it is hard to see how the final flowering, of which he has given such bursting promise, can be achieved.
With Mr. Pudney one is on much firmer ground. He tries less hard, he goes for a limited objective—and he succeeds. A Ring for Luck is a Third Programme thriller, as exciting as you can hope for and as real as smoked salmon. Here is Glen Jessup in the Caribbean, an up-and-coming executive, stumbling in his stupidly efficient way on the sort of mysteries usually described as Unspeakable and managing, at the same time, to operate a Hemingway sort of love- affair which actually clicks in with the plot. Schematically the book builds up in three parts, to a cymbal-filled climax, as suspenseful (as they say in the film reviews) as anything I've read for a long time. Literate pieces of exciting entertainment like this are extremely rare ; let's rejoice ; and hope that Mr. Pudney will produce some more, soon.
Lastly The Alien Sky by Mr. Scott. It's been so damnably hard to look any serious novel about India straight in the eye since Forster. But here is a unsitive and ambitious study of the reactions of the Anglo-Indians to August, 1947 ; and one mustn't shirk it by saying, that it's just not as good as. Mr. Scott wisely, and very ably, uses the device of an American with a personal preoccupation unrelated in any way to those of the English, to throw the characters the book is really about into sharper relief. By and large the trompe l'oeil is successful. And, by and large, so is the book as a whole. There is no doubt that Mr. Scott is an extremely clean and competent writer. Johnnie Sahib demonstrated, that within a small circumference he could write movingly and tightly. But the overall feeling that The Alien Sky leaves me with is one of not knowing enough about the vast, tortuous problem that Mr. Scott sets out to describe ; or enough about the people he manipulates in front of the problem ; that he has bitten off more than he can chew. Somehow the book lacks a focal point, a centre around which the characters, in relation to each other—and to India—could swing and swivel into a newly truthful place. Nevertheless, this is an extremely able and delicate piece of sustained writing. And anyone who has the courage to tackle the theme is deserving of every (silenuraw:ment and praise.
JOHN METCALF.
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