Wolfe's Clothing
The Visited. By Joan O'Donovan. (Gollancz, 15s.) .
Some Came Running is so long that I wondered at first whether to save half for next week's review. Dave, an oafish ex-writer and ex-serviceman, returns to his native mid- western town after an absence of nineteen years. He embarrasses his social climbing brother, has an unconsummated affair with a girl who encourages him to start writing again, and marries a dumpy factory wench of easy ways. The English edition has been abridged, but Mr. Jones manages to pack quite a lot of lformless trivia into the nine hundred pages left: side-trips with girls and bottles to ondian apol is and Miami ; the marital infidelities sf Dave's brother; long, sophomoric conver- sations about the Bigger Things between Dave gnd the frigid girl's father (a poet and a eentleman). Mr. Jones writes as inertly as over, in the doubtful tradition that sprawls out from Thomas Wolfe, hurling handfuls of language at the shifting targets of his inspira- tion in the hope that some will stick. A very little does. The seamy angst of American small town life comes across, together with an overpowering sense of the sexual resentments of the American male: Dave marries his slut simply because she enjoys him. This would, in fact, be one of the most unconvincing portraits of a 'serious' writer in fiction if it didn't have the awful warrant of Mr. Jones's own incoherences to back it.
New Face in the Mirror is a pleasantly astringent, short novel about the experiences of a young Israeli girl during and just after her military training. Yael Dayan should know what she is writing about, since she is the .19-year-old daughter of a former C-in-C of the Israeli Army; but her competence goes further than merely documenting life with a rifle. Ariel, her heroine, is determined to dominate the people around her rather than succumb to the usual confusions of adolescence, and it takes a tangled affair with two young brothers, a stint of training her own Company, and the more-than-friendship of a much older man to pull her out of her wilful shell. The writing is clean and simple, the tone cool, Ariel's evaluation of herself and others alive with intelligence. The girl comes out of it all as an attractive person, honest and critical, living along a line from one rejoicing day to the next. Miss Dayan is to be congratulated on treading a feat path between the dryness of documentary and the lushness of romantic fiction.
The Visited is the account of a doomed love affair between two middle-aged people who really ought to have known better, a spinster held in thrall by a ruthless mother and a vulgar little accountant whose wife has supposedly left him. There are one or two good comic effects—a scene in a pub in Ireland (where they first meet on holiday), the old mother's wickedly trailing sentences—but the predominant mood is edgy and sombre and Miss O'Donovan works a startling reversal of dominations near the end. The whole thing is ingeniously constructed, after a staccato, short-storyish fashion, without being the least bit convincing or moving.
Beat on a Damask Drum both moves and C convinces at odd moments. A young English actress flies to Indo-China after a man and finds him, with four others, 'neutralizing', arranging small unofficial truces between the French and the rebels to save unnecessary loss of life and property. For a few hectic days she stays in their lair until the flaring tragedy of their lust sortie. If Mr. Kennedy Martin had gone a bit easier on 'the strangled nobility of his men and let allegory take care of itself, he would have had a better, though still fiercely improbablef
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