Fiction
This England
Peter Ackroyd
The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge (Duckworth £2.35) Bring Forth The Body Simon Raven (Blond and Briggs £2.75) Miss Bainbridge is bearing up very well; she sets her face resolutely towards the sad and the seedy, the squalid and the sloppy, and yet she never aspires to cheap sentiment. Freda and Brenda share a room without a view, two consumers lying cheek to cheek, and they work together in the Italian factory of the title. Freda loves Vittorio, who is otherwise engaged, and Mr Rossi loves Brenda, who is otherwise occupied: all the elements of comedy are here. Miss Bainbridge compounds them in a marvellous comic heroine, Freda, a bit of a card, bossy and vulnerable, resourceful but frantic, prone to the giggles, too startling to be tacky. Brenda is the fall-girl to Freda's music-hall routine, and between them they put the sparkle back into the kitchen-sink. They organise an outing for the Italian workers of the factory "into," as one foreigner puts it, "the landscape," a jaunt which leads to more faux pas and more misunderstandings than anything seen on the French stage. It is often very funny indeed. Miss Bainbridge writes a dry and uncomplicated prose which spares her characters nothing; other people's aspirations are always comic, and Miss Bainbridge is so much the outsider as to be almost omniscient. Italians are very passionate and cannot help but be amusing, too, what with the "Aye, aye, aye" and "No, no, no," the broken syntax and the rolling eyeballs. All good comedy, of course, eventually breaks its own spell and there is at sour and haunted strain through the book which reaches a crescendo during the outing to Windsor Park, where Freda barks her final command, "And don't you dare try to follow" and goes suddenly ca put. The removal of the ultra-heroine disturbs the narrative somewhat, and without Freda's "drinkies" and "Know-what-I-means?" the prose becomes a little damper and a little more forced; the final sequences of the book are devoted to a
who-didn't-do-it line which finally runs dry
when the comedy turns into a fable. Freda's death is the final incongruity, and when she is all over there is nowhere else for the book to go. What good are knickers without the pantomime Dame?
Which may not be the best way to introduce'
Mr Simon Raven. He treads, in Bring Forth The Body, that square but golden mile which is flanked by Simpson's and by Regents Park and
which he proceeds to level with a marvellous combination of bitchiness and boyish exuber ance. Somerset Lloyd James has been found
dead in his bath in Albany, which is rather like carrying coke to the North of England. His childhood friend is a certain Captain Detterling who, being both an MP and an ex-soldier, has a great deal of time on his hands and can afford to seek out the truth' of it all. He is accompanied by a small man from Jermyn Street and, as is the custom nowadays, they have a great many conferences in St James's Park. There are a great many novels concerned with political intrigue, but none of them have Mr Raven's peculiarly steely glint. He is a master craftsman, who can change scenes and characters without overt discomfort; his prose is always amusing, elegant, intelligent
and never below the belt. Where else except in a Ray -at novel could you find an old whore called Maisie who calls everyone "duckie" and paints
her clients, as it were, in oils? Or a maid known as Dolly who is both honest and hardworking? A certain Peregrina Lloyd-James who is bored rather than tired, and a detective sergeant who looks like a "jacketed barrel"? An,.lo-Saxon attitudes are alive and well and being ruthlessly sent up. There are some odd moments, of course, but there are no more serious than the occasional cross-bat stroke. It is only in a night-club known as Annabel's (which must surely be a fictional creation) that matters go seriously wrong. It is here that an orgy is held, but unhappily it turns out to be an orgy of sentiments. There is a masque with a moral, and it is a moral which becomes all too painfully clear when Somerset Lloyd-James, the deceased party, is found to have been disturbed, by religious doubts before his suicide: "God is not mocked" was his password to Hell, which only goes to show that the upper classes have forsaken their old virtues of self-reliance and stolidity, and have come to rely upon cheap sentiment. But, all in all, Bring Forth The Body is a British fiction of the most traditional and entertaining kind, and all the more solid for being self-consciously so.
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