Fiction
African comic
Peter Ackroyd
African Horse David Pownall (Faber and Faber £3.50) Mr Wrong Elizabeth Jane Howard (Jonathan Cape £2.50) The Untouchable Juli James Aldridge (Michael Joseph £3.50) Letters from England John Symonds (Duckworth £2.95)
It never occurred to anyone that you could be funny about black Africans without being patronising or even bigoted; David Pownall changed all that with his first novel, The Raining Tree War, which turned Africa's 'Liberation' into the material of farce at the same time as it brought the native breed into a new and sympathetic light. African Horse goes back to this emerging world and makes it even more colourful, violent and awkward than before — and I have a feeling that Mr Pownall has created a comic landscape which will supersede Blandings Castle, Ambrose Silk, Lucky Jim and the rest of the old boys. Doctor Mulombe and his Progress Party still rule Zonkendawo with the well-known charm and tolerance of black politicians, having set aside such counter-revolutionary slogans as 'One Man One Vote Once' and having fostered the bloody conflicts of bwanas and kaffirs with a policy of benign neglect. Great things can only be done by stealth, and an impromptu but bloody rugby match between the All-Blacks and the All-Whites is only one indication of the way things are going: Coronation Pork Mbaba is set against M. Van der Merwe, Honey Balls Mukambo is set against D. Van der Merwe, Salvation Tuba Mkana is set against N. Van der Merwe and so on . . . the struggle for racial justice is an eternal one. Which is just as well, since Mr Pownall's characters are fit enough to sustain a great many other novels. Honey Balls and Salvation Tuba are members of the notorious 'BucketWheel Excavator Gang', a group of shiftless workers who cause more problems than a barrel of monkeys: there is also their "Great Writer of Lies", the peacock New Zealand journalist Pyper — "Most of these ugly deadbeats have had the clap more times than they've had the common cold"; there is the nymphomaniac Staff Officer, whose thighs are the wonder of the Excavator Gang and who can certainly stuff things away — "... with only four participating tonight, things could be more personal"; and there is Hurl Halfcock who, as good as his name, has come to this liberated nation to prove some theory about The Three Races of Man which is far too boring for me to remember.
The thing which keeps all of these foreign elements together is the astonishing and sustained inventiveness of Mr Pownall's prose. The sexual, political and alcoholic adventures of Hurl Halfcock provide the tenuous story-line of the book, and its sheer linear force and the constant accumulation of new jokes and new situations place it close to the spirit to such narrative epics as Tom Jones and Don Quixote. In this sense, African Horse is not a particularly subtle or witty book, but it is an extremely funny one. I know that comic novels, deep down where it never really matters, are supposed to be profound or at least 'serious' but Mr Pownall never quite gets that far. There are, however, some moments of subdued lyricism, sharp polemic and blunt description which would do credit to a different kind of novel altogether, and there are some fast changes of tone and language to enforce the variety of moods which Mr Pownall creates around his adopted country. As Ironheart, the friendly prostitute, puts it to Hurl Halfcock in one of her many rhetorical moments: "Don't you forget that Mother Africa eats her children. We suffer and die here like nobody's business. The old sow eats her young! Goodnight!" This comic version of Africa, this "Cradle of Man", this "Garden of Eden", is both mother and spoiler, both violent and serene. African Horse is the only novel to bring this puzzling life into the light without pomposity or the slow, grinding tedium of 'serious' novels.
Elizabeth Jane Howard employs the language with quite a different force; it becomes a careful, controlled instrument for checking and verifying certain states of unease, a prose which never knowingly means more than it says. Mr Wrong is a volume of nine short stories, and not one of them fails to achieve its purpose. The title story is an exercise in 'horror'
but there is something so unsympathetic about Miss Howard's exact observations that she manages to avoid all of the extraneous, gothic sentimentality. But her prose can change direction very subtly, and in 'The Devoted' a variety of voices and moods is used to recreate the horrors of a small family 'group'. In 'Three Miles Up', a ghostly theme has its latent romanticism curbed by some quiet prose. Elizabeth Jane Howard is an intelligent and perceptive writer and it is good to see her apply herself to marginal, wayward and spooky situations. They are revived in the process. James Aldridge, in The Untouchable Juli, is unashamedly telling a very corny story. Juli Cristo, who never quite lives up to his name, lives with his overwhelming mother in a small Australian town. He is a silent, stubborn and preoccupied child, who turns out to have great musical gifts but who is condemned to live among people who do not appreciate him and, perhaps more importantly, whom he never understands. The theme of the sensitive 'outsider' living within a gossipy and vindictive community is a familiar one, but Mr Aldridge invests his story with a good deal of simple veracity which keeps it continually interesting. The most important scenes, of course, are those in which characters are presented, conflicts struck and suspenses created but, in the middle of all this, a picture of the grinding Australian life of the 'thirties is adequately conveyed. Much has already been written about John Symonds's new myth, Letters from England, but it didn't really turn me on. This creepy little tale of Germanic guilt, English werewolves and frustrated love has its compelling moments, but most of them are retailed in a flat and only vaguely expressive prose. Mr Symonds prefers denotation to connotation which, for a weaver of fables, seems a retrograde step. In this book, war and love, classical myth and Hampstead life, novel and romance, lie uneasily together and are never quite resolved.
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