New Novels
LIEUTENANT-COLONEL SCORESBY gets into a dust-up with his superiors for refusing, without being given the full story, to remove from his command a certain Captain Creedy, an unpleasant but able tech- nician engaged on secret work. Creedy may be a Communist, or Perhaps his wife is, and even though Russia is our ally (this is 1943). Scoresby had better obey orders and no damned nonsense if he wants to avoid a court-martial. Scoresby is exactly the kind of man to object to these methods, and the dust-up spreads to involve his wife, his father, his brigadier, his general, a military grey eminence, Creedy, Mrs. Creedy, and an old family friend who, in the intervals of doing the narrating, starts falling in love with Scoresby's wife. The progress of the dust-up is plausible and exciting, offering a vivid glimpse of Service life at the medium-senior level. The dialogue sustains a pitch of vigour extremely rare in contemporary fiction; even if the Whole bunch talk like the old family friend, or Mr. Crankshaw, at least they can talk. The book reads at top speed by virtue of that alone.
There is, of course, more to it than that. Worked in with, and at times forming, the course of the story, there is a moral debate on Creedy's case moving round the questions of the general good vs. the individual good, or is it decency vs. expediency, or is expediency a polite name for thuggery, or is it really ends vs. means? The characters try to find out in mid-debate and keep having to adjust themselves to fresh facts on Creedy. The big merit of the book is not only that the issues it raises are important, but that it raises them in realistic, not literary, form: nothing is straightforward, not enough is known, there is a time-factor, people change their minds, other People not directly involved must be considered. The Creedy Case realises with outstanding success its aim to be serious and entertain- ing at once.
I can also heartily recommend A Pride of Lions, which deals Primarily with the efforts of a young American, Tom Osborne, to come to terms with his native environment. He has moved via Princeton and the Services to a job with a New York publisher and 411 attachment to a New York girl, and at the opening of the book is invited back to his home in a medium-sized provincial town. The invitation is ostensibly to come and fix the downspout,' which won't drain off the rainwater properly, but behind this Tom reads an aPpeal to come and fix the family, which is having trouble keeping Its pristine grip on town affairs. In particular, there is a nasty oil company which wants to build a refinery in the area. Torn soon finds that the family don't really want to be fixed, that he is the one In need of fixing. None of this, perhaps, is very new, but doing something well is preferable these days to doing it first. Mr. Brooks does it well. There is a longueur or two in the middle, and a sadly rhetorical quasi- deathbed speech near the end, but there can be no doubt about the author's gifts of realism and humour. His chief strength is knowing What he is talking about: he shows just how characters fit into their environment, just how both individuals and groups show their differences and likenesses, their sympathies and exasperations. The result, aided by a remarkable power of evoking a sense of place, is retrospect of old-fashioned provincial America which will convince and engage even the English reader, a finely-drawn picture of a life both petty and dignified, given to absurd crises which tap extravagant reserves of prejudice and generosity. There are two kinds of mysteriousness in Black Niklas. One kind kindred the hero in his efforts to unearth a palace revolution and kindred skullduggeries in an up-to-date Levantine Ruritania; the other kind confronts the reader in his efforts to unearth an allegory, or a political moral, or a system of aliases bearing on some real situation. I couldn't find any such truffle, but I wish I had, because the book won't quite stand up as plain Ruritania, even as a Hope- Ambler mélange. There are some exciting bits of shooting in the middle, and on either side of these some amusing and malicious Portraits of the kind of people—Legation staff, political advisers, territories and cultural missions—who probably do turn up in backward Ierritories liberated from the Italians. But for long stretches we get DenPle and their thoughts described cleverly and amiably without anything looking like happening. A curious fog descends on these Patches, exacerbating the scrabblings of the inquiring reader. How- ever, what he will sense in the end, buried rather deep, is Mr. Cadell's distress at violence, greed and injustice, and it is this which, all considered, makes him a novelist to watch.
Tombolo is about Tombolo, a marsh-island near Pisa which, about 1945, sheltered various outlaw groups: negro GI deserters, Nazis evading capture, local black-marketeers, displaced whores and so on. Mr. Nicholas Ferscn makes it clear that this first novel repre- sents personal experience written up into fiction. Its wer.kness is having been written up much too high. Although a love-affair between a negro GI and an Italian girl is retailed with great sympathy, and despite some striking moments of gloom, tenderness or horror, the general tone is a crooning poeticality, rising to a bawl at each of the many emotional crises. Mr. Fersen scorns the prolixity of phrases like 'It was dark by now,' preferring just 'Night' followed by a full-stop, and compound epithets worthy of Endyntion are given a last twist of the knife by that appalling typographical foppery, the diagonal hyphen. A straight account of the milieu would have been quite affecting enough without the author having to ensure a reaction by digging his thumbs into the reader's windpipe.
KINGSLEY AMIS
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