Fiction
My Brother, 0 My Brother. By Harold Kampf. (Chapman and Hall. 9s. 6d.) Now and then Mr. Waugh seems to pause in his longer novels to write a long short story on the side, and these doodles in the margin, as it were, of his increasingly serious work have included Scott- King's Modern Europe, The Loved One and now Love Among the Ruins. It is here that his satire exists in more and more concentrated solution as the main body of his work increases in solemnity. . The setting of Love Among the Ruins is circa 1984, but no such date is mentioned, and the only reference to George Orwell is made indirectlY by the publishers, who point out that " other writers have treated this theme with gravity. ' Whether gravity is altogether excluded from Mr. Waugh's visions of Neutralia, the Whispering Glades, and now from the Welfare State, I am not sure ; certainly he sees these twentieth-century phenomena with a ferocity from which any glimmer of hope or sympathy is as absent as from the final work of Georg Orwell. Mr. Waugh's satire, too, has ceased to be a laughing matter. In the Welfare State, finally established as much by the Conserva- tive Party as by anyone else, young Miles Plastic, the ideal product of State education, burns up an Air Force station together with half its occupants. These incendiarist tendencies, which remind one of the hero of The Loved One (" The fire roared in the brick oven. Dennis must wait until all was consumed"), do not, of course, amount to a crime, because it is " a first principle of the New Law that no mafl could be held responsible for the consequences of his own acts.' Plastic Plastic is confined to Mountjoy Castle, most pleasantly reminiscent or Brideshead, for a course of rehabilitation and Remedial Repose, and it is only on coming out into the full boredom of life, as an official of the Euthanasia Section of the Health Service (a Tory project "designed to attract votes from the aged and the mortally sick' '),that Plastic reverts to incendiarism. His downfall is caused by an affair with a bearded ballerina, the product of an experiment in sterilisation. Love Among the Ruins is less than half the length of The Loved One, and although there is no increase in his fury, but, more promis. ingly, a detachment which turns into an almost resigned despair, I find it difficult to place Love Among the Ruins in the same class, Incendiarism and Mountjoy Castle apart, there does not seem to be enough to interest Mr. Waugh in this grey and dismal landscape he is left more or less speechless, his good ideas clearly noted down, but the working out of them insufficiently imagined, and the ideas themselves seem unlikely to prove as memorable as Orwell's. On the other hand Mr. Waugh has some exceptional fun with line' drawings which appear to be in large part collaborative efforts between himself and the earnest Canova.
With more than a dozen novels to his credit, Mr. L. A. G. Strong writes with a freshness, conviction and fertility of invention which stamp him as a novelist from his fingertips to his heart. In The Ha of Howth he chooses a most difficult subject. The hero, about whon3. we know nothing, finds himself on a cliff outside Dublin suffering from complete loss of memory. His slow re-discovery of himself, which forms the body of the book, is only achieved by a painful recognition of weaknesses of character which he would have give0 much to ignore. This enlightenment of himself and the reader is worked out in an extraordinarily convincing manner (apart, perhaps, from the choice of an actor as the agent of psychological investigation and discovery), and it is here that Mr. Strong shows the technical quality in his fingertips. The latter part of the book is mainly con- cerned with a group of Dublin characters in the house which shelters the hero during his recovery, and, although some link exists between these characters and the hero's peculiar psychology, I felt that the book lost-integration as it progressed. It is here that Mr. Strong is saved by his heart, for he is incapable of imagining an uninteresting or an empty character, and any reader who goes with him at the be ginning will carry on to the end of what is an original and fascinating story. Mr. Lister's Rebecca Redfern may be recommended without, reserve to those who like the pages of their novel to turn over as it by themselves. If dull moments might have occurred in this post" war comedy; of simple-minded men and light-headed women, theY were triumphantly averted by the technique of letting the characters tell the story themselves in turn. We are thus not only entertained, but given an illusion of first-hand experience of a world without the mediation of its Self-effacing creator. , My Brother, 0 My Brother is the not very illuminating title of an investigation into ourprobable treatment of Christ if He returned into the middle of the twentieth century. Mr. Kampf writes cont. pactly and on the whole convincingly, boldly, but with restraint and a genuine quality of reverence. I found his book the most" interest' ing " of this list, but the interest, of course, lies beyond its qualitY, as a novel, which is considerable, and belongs partly to religion anu, ethics, and partly to that fascinating but slightly discreditable field or the "ifs " of history, It is rare for a historical novel to withstand the temptation to indulge in sentimentality of a luxuriance which would be intolerable " in a modern setting, and Farewell, Catullus is notable for this restraint. Sir Pierson Dixon is too good a classical scholar to betraY his subject matter, and too sensitive a writer to stray beyond his imaginative limits. Farewell, Cain//us is an addition to the small library of historical novels which extend our knowledge of historY
Previous page
