Word child
Duncan Fallowell
The Child John Symonds (Duckworth E3.45) John Symonds's The Child leaves me cold. The whole set-up is designed to make one fall at the feet of an Original in a posture of respect. According to the flap credits, quite a lot of people from the Sunday Times have discovered 'sudden piercing insights', and 'such heartblows so meticulously delivered and his 'strange and hypnotic talent, bY
turns devious and deceptively direct'. One lurches on, hoping to bump into what they had in mind. A couple of characters from the
New Statesman have in their time found Mr Symonds 'remarkable' and 'appallingly clever'. And then one returns to the current reality—The Child—and all this puerile Jargon doesn't fit by any means.
You see, what the public does not realise is that the Reviewer Today is in a position of some torture, i.e. how do you come to terms with an unnatural diet of what is by and large biodegradable garbage without losing your self-respect ? For the first few years you can express righteous indignation, which is What I'm doing. After that, the answeris : Close your eyes, think of England, and try to convince yourself that it isn't garbage after all. Most people can manage this very easily, having destroyed their feel for excellence by indulgence in phantom worlds and having come into the business of reviewing—saynovels by way of avocation. Unlike (naturally) Your Own Fiction Correspondent, they have no proper regard for the fate of the written word.
Now, when these people are not pruning the chives or playing Reader's Digest editions of ballet music, they are describing books like The Child as 'remarkable' with a thesaurian ebullience which almost passes for conviction in a soft pink light. Many of these soapers have a vested interest in calling an incontinence of gulch water 'piercing', because when they are not handing on recipes for Dying Swan Chive Salad to the computer programmers next door, they are in fact writing books themselves along very similar lines.
It is in a sense fortuitous that John SYmonds's (who is he anyway ?) latest should occasion what is intended to be a wide-angle Observation. But considering the Photograph of him in a cowlick, with his hands at the throat of a portentous tabby, his face a frozen psychosis of boredom, the man has Obviously been lobotomised by these victims of literary brain damage (Martin Seymour-Smith is one, Maurice Wig& another). A bit of heavy mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is not amiss.
• In The Child he has tried to vindicate his reviews, tried to be experimental, tried to be elliptical and perspicacious, 'absolutely fascinating', 'always convincing' and all the rest of the idiot mumbo—and he has succeeded. Or in other words, he has Produced a book which is without qualification trivial and unreadable.
The Child is ostensibly about Christ returningto Earth as a girl in Czechoslovakia Just before the Communist take-over. 'The Aquarian Age is about to begin and she will welcome it in'—you grasp the level ? The Huh: Influence? What it's really about is this old Pen-pusher who hopes to maintain his Op on the Now through an injection of With-It monkey glands, supported by fadeaway columnists who are equally worried nd erneath. It is a good job that true literary adventure is alive and strong in some other Places ... like America.
Previous page
