There's a similar detachment about Rayner Heppenstall's The Greater Infortutze,
a revised version of a novel published semi-privately during the war. Its hero, Leckie, is also a dis- placed person in his society: a melancholy, slightly schizophrenic wanderer on the fringes of pre-war Fitzrovia. The only order he imports into his shapeless existence is astrology: Saturnine, his horoscope predicts death by falling masonry, a fate he courts through the crumbling pubs of Charlotte Street and Euston. He almost meets his doom in Baker Street, but lives to,father a child and go to war in 1940. Mr. Heppenstall writes with that neat, unastonishable irony which seems to mark a school of Thirties writing—a kind of dandy superiority to events which include one's one and other people's dowdiness, deriving on one hand from Isherwood's Berlin stories, on the other touching Anthony Carson's farouche con- fessions. All very funny but slightly chilling. James Purdy's Malcolm comes trailing the reputation he made with the Confederate-Gothic stories of 63, Dream Palace, and intimations of even greater immortality from Edith Sitwell and Dorothy Parker. I missed something, I suppose: it seemed to me the same old camp-of-Capote whimsy, with homosexuality providing the occasional delicious thrills of horror which Barrie, in similar vein, derived from ghosts.
RONALD BRYDEN
Flash in the Pan
Klondike. By Pierre Berton. (W. H. Allen, 30s.) WHAT any one of the stampeders set out to do in 1898 would, today, bring him sponsors from the glucose and camping kit firms, a fat publisher's advance and a meeting at journey's end with Noel Barber. After reaching the Alaskan Pan- handle in a rotting, overladen ship he had to spend three months lugging a ton of goods through the snow of the 3.500 ft. Chiltook Pass (if he brought fess than a year's supply of food the Mounties might turn him back), saw his own planks to make a boat at Lake Bennett. and finally paddle 500 miles through the Yukon rapids to add another log cabin to the outskirts of Dawson City. Even then he would have done nothing exceptional: no more than 22,000 other men and women who took the same route to almost certain disillusionment in the Klondike. However, it's not the scale of the migration, its lemming-like folly and Outward-Bound jingoism,
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