Saloon bar soldiering
Auberon Waugh
Come Like Shadows Simon Raven (Blond and Briggs £2.25) The Call-Girls Arthur Koestler (Hutchinson £2.251 There are certain problems which this reviewer — and, I dare say, many like him — must overcome before settling down to enjoy a Simon Raven novel. The first may be described as sociological, or pedantic or even as snobbish. The people he chooses to describe as gentlemen are simply not recognisable as such. They are the sort of people one meets in the saloon bar of provincial hotels, if ever one has the misfortune to visit one. They may well have held the Queen's Commission, and even, such have been the social upheavals of our time, in a sound regiment of the line. But one knows perfectly well that they are bores and misfits, or they would not be hanging around the saloon bars of provincial hotels, and they are as remote from any true resemblance to the English gentry as Mr Jimmy Savile and Mr Alan Brien are from any resemblance to the English working-class — or Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Lord Clark of Civilisation to the English aristocracy. Obviously, one must make allowances for all these people to the extent that they are concerned with the show-business projection of the type they have chosen to represent, and one could excuse Captain Raven some inaccuracy of observation if his intention were anything except didactic. In his earlier novels, one has the impression that he is anxious to teach those who did not have the good fortune to be at Charterhouse with Mr William Rees-Mogg and Mr Dick Taverne, or to serve in the King's Shropshire Light Infantry, something of the virtue attaching to such things.
Captain Raven's other fatal flaw, it has often seemed to me, concerns the vexed question of sex. He writes of other people's sexual behaviour with a quivering distaste which would only be acceptable if he offered his readers any alternative. What, we ask, is the Raven way? Or should we all retreat into monastic meditation? If the latter, I can only say that his methods of persuasion are extremely unpleasant, like the cruel habit of making an alcoholic vomit every time he sniffs a glass of sherry, or showing a homosexual photographs of Grenadier Guardsmen and then giving him a violent electric shock.
However, when one has overcome the sociological and sexual horrors of a Raven novel, one must admit that the Captain's plots are better constructed than those of almost any other regular English novelist of the moment, and that in between some rather bad jokes there are other extremely good ones.
Come Like Shadows (I think the word " come " may be a sexual pun, but have no way of knowing) gets off to a very bad and long-winded start but is memorable for an excellent middle — usually the most difficult patch for a novelist. Major Fielding Gray goes to Corfu to write a film script of the Odyssey. This is backed in part by the Og-Finck Foundation of America, which demands artistic excellence, and also by commercial sponsors who require box-office appeal. The conflict between these two aspirations is quite boringly presented for the first hundred pages, until a committee from Og-Finck arrives and reveals that the Foundation, tied to Montana University, now requires a left-wing interpretation of the Odyssey, exposing the exploitation of the workers in the late Bronze Age.
Major Gray (a rank higher than Captain Raven, and obviously from a slightly better regiment, but still not quite convincing) promises to supply all this, and the committee departs leaving Sasha Grimes, a neurotic progressive who plays Nausicaa, as political commissar. The Major is already rather taken with Sasha, having ejaculated in his trousers while watching her act (I am sorry, gentle reader, but this is what Captain Raven writes about) and with the connivance of a former mistress, Angela Tuck, seduces her. This involves playing out various masochihic fantasies about the crucifixion, but gives the Major control of financing the film, which he then uses to blackmail the film company.
Angela's reward for bringing them together is to watch them at it, but the excitement is too much for her and she dies of a heart attack (or perhaps suffocation )in a cupboard behind a transparent mirror. Her funeral reveals the Major at his most embarrassing, but I feel it necessary to demonstrate here Captain Raven's failure as a sexual writer. Major Gray is musing at the open grave: "Goodbye, Angie; Angie, goodbye . . . Oh Angela, I wish I'd fucked you more often myself. Only that once in Hydra . . . Christ, your honey thighs in those stockings, your wet crotch on my belly, I could almost come just thinking of it. My God, how you'd laugh if you knew; me standing over your coffin with a cock as stiff as you are."
I don't wish to dwell on the matter, but I don't think that this passage achieves quite the effect which the Captain wished it to achieve. The last bit of the book, I am afraid, is pure self-parody. Alarmed by Major Gray's attempt to blackmail them, the film people arrange to have him imprisoned by the fascist Greeks under suspicion of being left-wing. The Greeks and the CIA are just about to start him on a course of heroin addiction to break his spirit when our old friends Lord Canteloupe, Somerset Lloyd James and another break in and rescue him in their dinner jackets — "Whoever you may be you dare not lay hands on a peer of the British Parliament and a Minister of the British Crown."
W. S. Gilbert made this joke in Pirates of Penzance and P. G. Wodehouse has been working at improvements on it for seventy years, but Captain Raven still plays it very nearly straight. But the importance of his latest in the series is that Major Gray is at last identified as an anti-hero, a total cad, and this, somehow, makes him much less irritating. I read Arthur Koestler's novel last week and now find I have almost completely forgotten it. This need be no very serious criticism in a novel, but suggests that it is not quite as heavyweight as a few critics have claimed on its behalf. A group of pundits gather together in Switzerland to discuss ways of preventing the end of the world which is thought to be imminent. The doomsday case is carefully tabulated and various remedies discussed and found wanting. As a somewhat nihilistic satire it would be agreeable enough if one did not have the sneaking suspicion that Mr Koestler really does want us to believe that the end of the world is imminent. As it is, he tries to get the best of both worlds — alarming us with his ponderous quasiscientific predictions and sniggering at the pretentiousness of it all. But I have no doubt it will find a market among those who are not sure what they should be thinking about but are certain they should be thinking about something.
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