Big bangs
Peter Ackroyd
Tear His Head Off His Shoulders Nell Dunn (Jonathan Cape £1.95) Concrete Island J. G. Ballard (Jonathan Cape £1.95)
'Character', the last refuge of the humanist's noblesse oblige, is the most charming and predictable device of the realistic novel; it is an armchair which all of us can try out for size and snuggery. Miss Dunn's latest heroines are as predictable as any, but the narrative conveys a great deal of warmth and light. Jeanette is escaping from a love-affair more honoured in the breach than anywhere else, and she runs away to London, that retreat from the more serious emotions of life. It is in this pastoral wonderland that she bumps up against Queenie who, as good as her name, is a tart with a heart of fourteen carat, on the standard, unalloyed gold. She is also the oldest heroine in history stretching or rather lying, back to Mistress Quickly, the Wife of Bath and the remote Big Bang itself:
"One evening I was leaning on the window ledge looking out at the kittens in the garden and he's come up behind me, lifted up me frock and put it in me. I'll never forget that. 'Have some more kittens,' I kept saying to the cat, have some more kittens after that so I've got an excuse to be leaning on the window ledge."
Jeanette, a lady librarian of slender means, goes in for a more corseted vocabulary with phrases such as "he inaugurated violent sexual play" which are straight off the shelf. Like the contortions of her profound lust, it is very difficult to maker her more shadowy emotions interesting, and they are better off the streets and in the closet.
These two old, movable girls meet with little snacks which are consciousness-raising sessions under a better name: Jeanette continually reliving her first sexual experience, and Queenie her best. Of which there seem to have been a great many. And at the close of the novel an elderly gentleman known as Buff turns up for a quick one, and his gain is Jeanette's loss. The novel, like its protagnonists, falls together with a great deal of ease and it manages, like a child's drawing or a B-feature, to be comfortable, conventional and thoroughly entertaining.
Morality is, of course, the lowest form of wit, and poor Mr Ballard has been saddled with the liberalism of Jonathan Cape who will not turn a decent sentence when a cliché will do: Their blurb on the cover of his latest novel, Concrete Island, manages to suggest that it is all of Purgatorio, Crime and Punishment and The History of The English Speaking Peoples, being "a wrenching account of man's recognition of what he is. . . as we drive across the
concrete landscape of the twentieth century". Man is Robert Maitland, and what he is is an architect, of the least said soonest mended school. And there is absolutely nothing the matter with concrete, it is safe and useful. And anyway Mr Ballard's book has only a tenuous connection with clichés of any kind. Maitland skids off one of those delightful motorways which connect London with the nether regions and finds himself in the heartless, concrete, twentieth century version of a gooseberry patch — a traffic island, underneath that magical spot where three ways meet. As you would expect from a helpless victim of technological society, Maitland is quite unable to get off the island and back onto the road — Ballard renders the improbable quite credible, and he treats with some gusto Maitland's quick descent into illness and hallucination: "the atlas of wounds into which his body had been transformed went out like a dead sky". It is difficult to believe that anyone who writes with such a free-ranging lyricism can consider the twentieth century to be wholly bad.
But this entertaining and cautionary tale about dangerous driving skids off midway into a rather more conventional fantasy, when Maitland discovers that there are dropouts at the bottom of what is by now 'his' island. There is Jane (providing an apt symbiosis for a future Tarzan), who uses her spare time to drop onto the streets, and there is Proctor, a simpleton, a circus performer, a victim. We have here, of course, the ' constituents of primal twentieth century romance — and this island, set in a jewelled sea, this little haven becomes the landscape in which some of the more conventional theories of human nature find their appropriate ecological niche.
It is poor maligned capitalism which takes most of the stick, of course, as it is parodied and tortured almost into recognition. First, the traffic-struck trio engage in the ritual markings of human barter which slowly give way to a more artificial exchange; there is a suggestion of the common-or-garden Hegelian master/slave relation, a hint of male, penisorientated capitalist domination: all of those themes, in fact, we have come to know and love. Maitland is eventually left to his own devices, however, and that artificial notion of the 'primitive' comes back to haunt the final stages of the narrative. But it is a brief, fast and generally entertaining book and these little matters of morality and 'message' can safely be returned to the oblivion from which they came.
Peter Ackroyd is The Literary Editor of The Spectator.
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