Hallo to Hollywood
THE only place Gavin Lambert has allowed him- self irony in his devastatingly deadpan 'scenes of Hollywood life' is in his titles. The Slide Area is both those sections of the Californian coastline that crumble under unwary picnickers and the famed insecurities of the dream-factory itself. 'People should be a little careful and not live too near the edge, that's all,' shrugs an engineer. In 'The End of the Line,' Countess Marguerite Osterberg-Steblechi sits blind among the bric-A- brae of a fabulous past, last of a dynasty of patrons and pleasure-seekers, while her two middle-aged nieces fake her a farewell trip round the world with tape-recordings of seagulls and flamenco and, a railway carriage in the living- room, Monstrous Julie Forbes (cineastes may recognise the original) forbids all visitors during shooting, and that is one meaning of 'The Closed Set,' but it may also refer to the possessive horrors of her private life. 'May' is a keyword : Mr. Lambert's artful approach to his material is per- missive, not categoric. His affinities with the Isher- wood of Goodbye to Berlin will be quickly apparent : no man is a camera, but the art does lie in what is selected and not in any tinge of 'directing' comment by the narrator; the 'I' who drifts from one interlocking story to the next is
passive. With the right eyes and ears on the alert, this can be an enormously effective kind of fic- tional rap portage and Mr. Lambert has the sort of respectful patience with his characters that allows him to follow eccentricity into its most revealing detail and bring it back alive. It is an art very far from caricature, and Mark, the sun- worshipping amoral ist, and fourteen-year-old Emma Slack from Galena, Illinois, who ends up in High School Ghoul, move gently into that minor pantheon where Sally Bowles sips ever- lasting prairie oysters.
A Call on Kuprin is a very superior thriller, strong on documentary background and political insights, a bit weak on the emotional impulsions that are presumed to drive on the action. The Russians have just launched their Chelovyek, the first manned satellite, brain-child of a brilliant scientist, Kuprin. Two men who had known him at Cambridge—Laye-Parker, an MP with a skittish wife, and Smith, a Lobby Correspondent —decide to go to Russia unofficially and attempt to persuade him to return to England, so restoring the balance of powered missiles and making the world safe for diplomats. But a chance word from a secretary ends up in a Russian ear and the ground is soon thick with agents provocateurs and counter-spies. Laye-Parker is caught in a fashionable Wolfenden snare and Smith, who has meanwhile fallen heavily for Kuprin's cousin, Vera, is left to go it alone. Mr. Edelman hustles one knowingly along from the Chess Pavilion in the Park of Culture and Rest to the Prager in Gorki Street and sun-bathing to a whistle on a plage in Yalta. The MVD bogeymen are inevit- ably there, but for once on something recognis- able as their home ground, and there is a splendid peasant woman, Marfushka, who speaks almost exclusively in thought-stopping proverbs (Russia's most deadly weapon to date): 'A wife isn't a balalaika; you can't hang her on a wall.' There is some skilled, inconclusive debating (as one might expect from an MP and Vice-Chairman of the British Council), some light-hearted comic relief and much sinister suspense; it is only after- wards that one realises how unlikely it is that such a trip could ever have taken place and that some fairly substantial questions go begging in the closing pages.
In his second novel Fred Hoyle takes us for a ride that has nothing to do with Ossian. The time is twelve years on and the place Ireland. Thomas Sherwood, a young Cambridge graduate, has been dispatched to discover the secret that is baffling the Big Powers : the massive expansion of an industrial corporation in the south, which is tossing out thermo-nuclear reactors and con- traceptive pills after only a decade in business. A deal of Irish jiggery-pokery goes on before young Sherwood arrives at the truth, decides to stay and sends back the report Which is Ossian's Ride. The chase over bog and moor takes one back to the wholesome days of John Buchan, sex is kept to a discreet minimum, and a fine mystery en- shrouds all. But Mr. Hoyle keeps promising wonders of trick-taking if one only hangs on and there is bound to be a sense of let-down when the bland ace he finally plays doesn't belong to any of the four customary suits and poor Sherwood's frenetic wanderings are reduced to the dimensions of a charade. The Affair in Arcady is about an unsuccessful (but good) novelist who temporarily leaves his beautiful wife to a film-career in Italy while he writes the family history of the Tylers of Arcady, Illinois. He is tugged into a fierce and painful affair with Abbie Tyler, the nympho- maniac daughter, warned off with gangsters by her oafish, raping stepfather, and there is a double death. Mr. Wellard writes a workmanlike Eng-
lish and is perceptive enough about a variety of nostalgias and fears to lift this book a little above its plot, but one is tired of characters who, 'offered the chance of happiness,' turn a resolute back in the interests of complicating a bald tale. Bond of Perfection is a classic case of this. Sensitive, artis- tic Nathalie (she has foreign blood) is married to what must be one of the biggest wens in fiction. To ensure that one takes the point, the wen's bitchy possessive sister comes to live with them. Miss Zilliacus then concerns herself with Natha- lie's deepening levels of compassion towards a man who torments her with pathological in- genuity. We are presumably invited to admire such a capacity for immolation, but Miss Zilliacus loads the scales so heavily that the predicament of wife, husband and sister becomes ludicrous long, long before a solution dawns.
JOHN COLEMAN
Previous page
