Dubliner Displaced
The Luck of Ginger Coffey. By Brian Moore. (Deutsch, I5s.) The Hosts of Rebecca. By Alexander Cordell. (Gollancz, 16s.) A Number of Things. By Honor Tracy. (Methuen, 15s.)
CAN talent travel? Of course there have been such writers as Turgenev and Conrad who have needed richer, foreign soils before their imagina- tions could take root and flower. But can a talent full-grown in one culture ever successfully trans- plant to another? Brian Moore, who by all accounts showed himself in Judith Hearne and The Feast of Lupercal a very full-grown talent indeed, should make one of the most interesting test cases. His first two novels were ripe, crabbed fruit of the environment where he was bred: those northern Irish counties where the sombre conscience of Calvinism takes on a mad, par- ticular Celtic darkness. But in fact since 1948 he has lived in Canada, and in The Luck of Ginger Coffey he has tried not merely to work against a Canadian setting, but to write a North American novel.
Its theme is the one which takes the place there of tragedy, the form in which fate works for Dreiser, O'Neill, Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller: failure. Ginger Coffey is a harmless enough blusterer. At home in Dublin, his little Alpine hat and big, silly moustache would mark him as nothing worse than a pub-Micawber. But in the strange, snowy air of Montreal—more like a Russian city than an American one, with its domed churches and booted, muffled crowds— failure settles on him like a disease with a smell. His jobs have run out, the return fares are spent, the one friend he has made in the city, it transpires, tolerates him guiltily for love of his wife. While she—long-suffering, fortyish, much- lied-to—is determined to seize the chance, if Ginger cannot, of the luxury of the New World for herself and their daughter. It is the classic
North American nightmare of Death of a Sale man; except that in booming post-war Canada, one does not die like Willy Loman, one simplY learns to settle for disillusion.
It is an impressive try, thick, comic and frightening. If it doesn't wholly come off (the wife is a cipher, her lover a satiric stook of Canadian banalities, the ending is spelled out a trifle flatly), its shortcomings aren't so much fel' sities as holes in the experience of Mr. Moore's new environment. What he has mastered, he has mastered brilliantly: the odd, drifting Canadian underworld of winoes and lonely men in YMCAs, taking mail-order muscle-building courses, rambling on about fabulous jobs uP North; the bleak, neon-lined sprawl of the sub' Arctic city, with its tough French police and anonymous apartment-blocks. It's a panoramic picture which also extends in depth; dell enough to raise the hope that he has not me relY transplanted a talent, but found soil to lira into the novelist who will speak at last for the huge, cryptic country he has chosen.
By comparison, Shirley Jackson's novel seen more elegantly achieved, but wispy. There's nothing more annoying than being told that such a novel should have been a short story, but here it's true: The Haunting of Hill House is 3 literary experiment, an exercise in effect, with deliberate omissions and dangling ambiguities where fullness would spoil her artificial iota' tion. She wants to build an old-fashioned ghost story, but reinforce it with a strong, worrying skeleton of psychological reality. The font people who gather under the scaly Victorian roof of Hill House (even the hanging New England woods which isolate it seem fringed and tasselled) to investigate its unpleasant legend know that psychic manifestations are psychic: the horrors which happen to them will be the result of some kind of flaw in one of their 001 minds. Is it Dr. Montagu, who organised the experiment party? Luke, the weak, charming black sheep of the family who owns the house? Theodora, beautiful, mischievous, possibly Les' bian? Or the lonely, mother-ridden Eleanor? It's not clear what causes the final tragedy whether the house takes possession of one of them or that unhappy one possession of the house. But that uncertainty is Miss Jacksons story, and she tells it with enormous style. I 003 deny its piercing effect. I do deny that ati eat makes a novel.
I begin to see how the conflicting raves and boos for Alexander Cordell's Rape of the Fair Country arose. Its sequel, The Hosts of Reheat,' continues to trace the fortunes of the Mortynter family in South Wales a century ago, and td evoke from their struggles with landlords. iron' masters and coal-magnates a kind of romantic epic of British radicalism. Heaven knows the Shelley tradition could stand revival, and one has to honour the ambition and scope of the at' tempt. But it's executed in a tangled, high-floor' spate of Welsh pseudo-rhapsody, all moonshin and proud white bosoms and back-to-front sell' tences, which reduces it to the costume-picc bogusness of a Jeffery Farnol Regency roman As for A Number of Things, it appears that Honor Tracy took her gift for demure Irish cattiness on a cruise to the West Indies tw" winters ago and found the West Indians—'d° way, the young hero of the Scoop-ish satire find' them—ungrateful, gratuitously rude, smugly convinced of the superiority of their own cultur,e, and a good deal less charming than they thin' themselves. The score, I should say, is now even'
RONM D UR)
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