NEW NOVELS
Grey days
MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH
The Man Who Had Power Over Women Gordon M. Williams (Seeker and Warburg 30s) The Converts Rex Warner (Bodley Head 25s) At the Jerusalem Paul Bailey (Cape 21s) The Winter Should Pass Nigel Patten (Ohatto and Windus 25s) The Lowest Trees Have Tops Martha Gellhorn (Michael Joseph 25s) The Man Who Had Power Over Women describes the aimless, alcoholic existence of Peter Reaney, unhappily married fantasist, per- petual adolescent and highly paid promoter of pop-stars in whom he does not believe. Reaney is intelligent, sensitive, cynical, weak; his metaphysics, such as they are, resemble those of a non-teetotal Shelley. He can't stand the world he inhabits or himself for inhabiting it, but his sexual and financial appetite will not allow him to quit. His main obsession is the `accelerating Niagara of grey, greasy forget- table days.' Commercially well rewarded, he is unlucky and comically humiliated in his private life: he decides to leave his wife, she leaves him; he seduces a girl, she wants him to beat her with a wire coat-hanger. Towards these reverses, even towards the commercial success that so sickens him, he maintains a crazily drunken panache that almost amounts to courage. The fantasies of his immaturity are heroically creative. With the exception of a few flat jokes, Mr Williams writes with energy and gusto. His narrative moves along at effectively high speed, evoking a ghastly but faithful picture of the world of London show-business. As a fast, witty, deadpan satire The Man Who Had Power Over Women is a success, if distinguished from many similar books only by the quality of its writing; as a psychological study in cor- ruption it is ultimately disappointing. There is a subtle irony involved in the contrast between Reaney's sheer likeability and intelligent aware- ness of the shortcomings of his environment, his capacity for shame, tenderness and pity, and the hideous crassness of his actual life; but eventually this more serious aspect of the novel disintegrates, and it ends in a too familiar semi-picaresque manner. Reaney has at last encountered tragedy and the possibility of a serious relationship; but we are flippantly prevented from seeing how he really reacts. He relapses into his usual mode of life, as he well might have done; but the way this is described is as sentimental as it is vaguely cynical. Nevertheless, this is a more serious book Than its attractive lightness might immediately suggest, and Mr Williams is an interesting writer. Rex Warner's is a distinguished talent. Out of scores, only his English Kafka novels of the 'thirties were at all successful; others copied Kafka's procedures, he used them for creative purposes of his own. But Why Was I Killed?, in which a soldier returned to ask that question, revealed a mawkish and yet at the same time cold strain in him that proved dis- comforting to his admirers. After two more novels less successful than the early ones, Mr Warner excised his mawkishness and turned his remoteness to brilliant account in two remark- ably objective novels about Julius Caesar. It was an admirable creative tour de force. Now he has tried to use the same form, of the his- torical novel, to express himself more subjec- tively. His narrator in The Converts is Alypius, the greatest friend and admirer of St Augus- tine; the book tells the story of his early life in fourth century Rome and Milan, and ends with his conversion. Mr Warner's standards of historical accuracy are perhaps unequalled by any contemporary historical novelist, and there is a strictly non- fictional element in this book that alone renders it fascinating and valuable. But as a novel The Converts never seems to me to get off the ground. The prose is antiseptic, deliberately purged of imaginative content: Mr Warner the teacher has completely taken over. It is as though he had taken Alypius aside and 'trained him in modern teaching methods before letting him speak: the writing is too mechani- cal, too oversimplified, too condescendingly discursive and self-consciously 'educational.' And the actual conversion scene, upon which the novel must largely depend for its effective- ness, is, alas, totally unconvincing: consisting largely of religious clichés (`the infinite love and the infinite wisdom of God' are the final words), it remains an explanation, and never becomes an imaginative account. Superb his- torically, The Converts is a novel only in name. Paul Bailey's At the Jerusalem is a laconic, merciless, appallingly accurate description of life in an old people's home. The predicament of old people thrust by their families (perhaps unavoidably) into homes is well known and has been made the theme of a number of novels and more TV plays. However, I doubt if it has been done more fairly or evocatively or tragically than in this excellent short book. Everyone and everything is presented with com- plete detachment. The hideous home itself, 'The Jerusalem'; the staff, responsible, correctly sympathetic but largely without insight; the bored, selfish relatives; and the inmates, upon whom all the humiliations of senility are in- flicted. This is the very simple tale of how Mrs Gadny is rejected by her family, enters `The Jerusalem,' hates it and withdraws from it into herself, and is sent away to a mental hospital. It is so well done that it is often not bearable—which adds up to a most promising debut for Mr Bailey. The Winter Should Pass is an account, some- times rather heavily reminiscent of J. C. Powys, of the spiritual regeneration of Isaak van Veldt, an inarticulate giant who kills his sweetheart in Holland and flees to North Wales. He be- comes a farmer, takes in a tramp woman and raises a family by her, and becomes a part of his community. Tragedy strikes again, but not before Isaak has expiated his guilt. The author's descriptions of Snowdonia and of Isaak's farm- ing activities are excellent, but his style is often ponderous and self-consciously 'impressive.' Martha Gellhorn's The Lowest Trees Have Tops is a clever semi-satire on the cosmopoli- tan community of Tule, an idyllic Mexican mountain village. This is light-hearted, but funny and deftly executed. The goings-on in ',rule are dramatic but never sad, and the snapshot- accuracy of the writing is pleasantly captivating.
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