Winter's Tale
The Transfer. By Silvano Ceccherini. Translated by Isabel Quigly. (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 25s.) The LB.I Brigade. By William Wilson. (Mac- Gibbon and Kee, 18s.)
Mate in Three. By Bernice Rubens. (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 30s.) The Green Shade. By Robin Maugham. (Heine- mann, 21s.) WREN I read novels I am occasionally reminded of the opening remark made to me by a leading and powerfully charming educationalist on our introduction, 'I like people,' to which two answers immediately suggested themselves: `Do they like you?' and 'What degree of sensitivity can lump together unique and disparate individuals under that currently fashionable collective noun?' Novels, of course, are people-oriented; they can be as claustrophobic with mediocrities, bores and contrived stories as the lounge of a hotel where
poetry opens no windows on to a wider or deeper life and humanity. Novels, academics tell us, are the instruments through which
democratic bourgeois culture examines (and often congratulates) itself. At times the critic yearns for epic, romance, tragic drama. I like people. But does one? The best novels, certainly, are as much concerned with the author's vision
as with the character he deploys. And the novel constantly strives for a form which will express something beyond mere 'people.'
No Andric, a Yugoslav awarded the Nobel Prize in 1961, wrote The Woman from Sarajevo twenty-two years ago. Fable or even cautionary tale as much as novel, it is a rock-hard little book about a spinster's obsession with thrift. Raika Obren never recovers from the dying advice of her father, a respected and honourable mer- chant whose business has collapsed: 'All our emotional responses are at bottom weaknesses, and make us the target and prey of everything around us.' Still a very young girl, she dismisses her servants, drastically curtails her household expenses, restrains the 'soft' inclinations of a mother for whom she shows remarkably little feeling, despises and ignores her conventionally- minded relatives and, in the wider world of the Sarajevo bazaar, sets the family business on the road to recovery. In the course of this she dis- covers the delights and cruelties of a discreet sideline in money-lending; the 'first million' recommended by American manuals on self- help becomes her only goal. Apart from visits to her father's grave, she allows herself no emo- tional outlets, although a feckless uncle obvi- ously attracts almost as much as he repels her.
Framed as it is in winter reminiscence, night- mare and death, this story would make bleak reading were it not for the skill with which Mr Andric indicates the warmth of the political and social background, and the positive compas- sion of his treatment of the central figure in what must seem to some extent a Communist fairy-tale. 'Once upon a time there was a scrawny old maid darning by a window because she was too mean to switch on the light . . .' declares Mr Andric. 'Once upon a time there was a man who went on a journey . . .' says Mr Silvano Ceccherini, and the man is a middle- aged convict with a weak heart—like the author himself, who wrote The Transfer in prison during a sentence of twenty-two years, and must have encountered several similar train journeys from one place of confinement to another. I found this a splendid, heart-warming book, a picaresque fable with strong implications of allegory. The journey is from Civitavecchia to Saluzzo: a special locked van on an exceedingly slow train which wanders from prison town to prison town, taking on and disgorging convicts, with the journey broken twice for waits of several days at Pisa and Genoa.
The theme is, I suppose, the life-hungriness of the hero, Olgi, who has taught himself literature and is now a writer—`because I suffer and love life and because I must express my- self'; the incidents are no more than what is seen through a crack in the door—landscape and sea, derelict railway yards, a girl, an old woman, a boy drinking—together with the
mingling of the characters, naive, vivid and - strangely tolerant, as they talk about food, the judges who sentenced theni and who have since died, the mothers who await their release, their taste in film stars. Twice Olgi, who loves Kafka, Edgar Lee Masters and Liz Taylor, has the
chance of discussing books with another charac- ter. There is a fine moment when a Sicilian vengeance-killer finds a woman in the next com- partment and realises that he can just about kiss her through a hole in the wall. All this could be sentimental, jejune or worldly pretentious, but Signor Ceccherini is in the tradition of Maurice O'Sullivan; he is a natural and his story is simply and beautifully done.
William Wilson's The LBJ Brigade is required reading for anyone concerned (and who isn't?) with the ghastly business in Vietnam. This is, in fact, an entirely gripping, and horrifying, account of a young soldier's encounter with the realities of death and the cynicism of survival —one inevitably thinks of The Red Badge of Courage, although that is a much happier book —and I imagine that anyone who reads it will place it alongside Remarque, Barbusse and Cobb, although I am not sure that the last part, after the hero's capture by the Vietcong, quite sustains the quality of the rest. Fighting, or, rather, instant massacre, is wonderfully expressed, and the American sergeant who maintains that the war is purely one of race (shoot everything brown) sounds quite appallingly credible.
Finally, of two more orthodox novels, Miss Bernice Rubens's Mate in Three, the study of a young Jewish couple whose marriage only works when it is thrown into relief by some sort of third party, is suffused by the gleam of intelli- gence and wit. While Mr Maugham's account of a middle-aged man's pursuit of a young girl in The Green Shade seems, despite a pleasantly evoked excursion to Morocco, to offer no more than the competent story-making which can prompt the reflection, 'Yes, of course—but does one really care?'
PATRICK ANDERSON
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