Puppet show
Frances Hill
Morning Star Simon Raven (Blond & Briggs £8.95)
This is strictly a novel for addicts. New readers are unlikely to push their way far through the tangle of heavy, explana- tory dialogue, patches of parched, barren Prose and thickets of names. (Of the book's 46 characters, well over half appear or are mentioned in the first 20 pages.) Raven fans may struggle on further. They will hope to reach fast-moving scenes, lively talk, tracts of good writing. They will struggle in vain. Continual, unrelieved effort is needed to get to the end. Only readers hopelessly hooked on the army of Characters brought into being in the Alms for Oblivion series may perhaps get some fun from this dismal production. But their craving may quickly be dulled by the sad alteration of what used to be shallow but lively and credible creatures to what are here merely puppets.
The novel is the first in a new series Called The First Born of Egypt. The action Mostly revolves around Marius and Rosie, teenage children of Gregory and Isobel Stern (née Talbot) and Tessa, 'niece' of Maisie Malcolm of Buttock's Hotel. It happens partly on the familiar Raven ter of politics, money and sex but partly in new, otherworldly regions of the occult and telepathy. (These were first explored in the tenth and last novel in the Alms for Oblivion series, The Survivors.) The plot, dreary and not at all credible, hangs on who is doing what to whom — in terms of spiritual, not physical, possession. A sub-plot, concerning Vanessa Salinger's death, looks for a time as though it may link with the main plot, relieving the tedium. Alas, it does not. The novel's end reveals the theme of possession to have been a red herring in solving the narrative's mysteries, though hinting that it may recur in some form in the novel to come. But the true solution is no less incredible than `possession' itself. The end is almost a triumph of anti-climax, where anti-climax might have been thought hardly possible.
What, one wonders, did Simon Raven set out to do in this novel? As in The Survivors, he hints at a link between human lust, baseness and greed — his perennial themes throughout Alms for Oblivion — and metaphysical evil. It seems as though he might, ambitiously, be en- quiring into the fundamental nature of the human soul. He has certainly abandoned almost all mere observation of human behaviour, The novel's blurb says that the theme of the new series is 'the purposes, beliefs and ways of life of the growing young as observed, deplored or encour- aged by their elders'. But one of the most noticeable things about the 'purpose, be- liefs and ways of life of the growing young' in this volume is that they are virtually indistinguishable from those of 'their elders'. To be fair, there are occasional attempts at giving 'the growing young' up-to-date attitudes. The purposes and beliefs of the twins, Theodosia and Carmil- la, Cambridge undergraduates, include avoiding sexual intercourse with Jeremy Morrison, on the ground that this might jeopardise, in Carmilla's case, her prize- winning essay-writing and, in Theodosia's, her badminton.
This is perhaps the 'new puritanism'. But there is no real social observation here. There is mere striving after effect. Of course, Simon Raven's observation of character and society was, at its best, broadly rather than subtly accurate. But his fictional universe, even at the end of the Alms for Oblivion series, when his charac- ters and plots were growing zanier and less believable than in the earlier books, had some distant, tenuous link with 'real life.' In Morning Star he seems to have aban- doned any attempt to make characters, plotting or dialogue the slightest bit credi- ble. Characters' motives and actions are never convincing. The most unlikely coincidences are given hopelessly weak explanations. Is Raven really trying for something more symbolic and 'fabulist', less naturalistic, than before? Alas, the sheer badness of the writing suggests that any such claim would be merely an excuse, not a reason, for change.
Raven's characters have for some time had a tendency to speak a 'remember'
brand of dialogue. They say things to each other like, 'You're a Tory MP, remember' and 'I've been away for six months, re- member'. It is one of the symptoms of the kind of explanatory dialogue that is an ineffective substitute for dramatic scenes, description, narrative prose. There is far more of it at the end of the Alms for Oblivion series than at the beginning. In Morning Star almost all the dialogue is like this. (And almost all the writing is in dialogue.) The style reaches what must be its apotheosis in the scene in which Vanes- sa Salinger lies screaming at the bottom of a well. Someone called Titus stands at the rim, explaining to her loving husband why he, Titus, hates her. Her husband listens politely, saying things like, 'So it seemed from what she said.' At one point he says, `This screaming. We must go for help.' But he does not move off until he has listened to another page of explanation. This might all seem too crude not to be intentional. But it exemplifies the badness of the writing throughout the novel. One cannot believe in a serious purpose behind it. It appears that Simon Raven's energy, im- agination and technique have all failed him.
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