Freewheeling
A Circle of Friends. By Julian Mitchell. (Con- stable, 25s.) The Eye. By Vladimir Nabokov. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 18s.) Men at Work. By Honor Tracy. (Methuen, 25s.) Burster. By James Tucker. (Gollancz, 21s.) Too Far to Walk. By John Hersey. (Hamish Hamilton, 25s.)
It's Late by My Watch. By Ernest Frost. (Hodder and Stoughton, 25s.) DETECTION, like autobiography, tempts many un- detecting novelists, and J. B. Priestley, free- wheeling but readable as ever, comes up with a detective story that frankly isn't any great shakes as detection, since even I, the dumbest amateur since Dr Watson, guessed the murderer well before time; but is very much better as a novel about people than most detective stories, so that things are evened out. Also, it does what they often don't, gives you a feeling of ordinary life, of 'This could happen to me and what would I do if the sanest, most reliable and thoughtful member of the family suddenly vanished without a trace or any instructions about how to carry on the family business?' Salt is Leaving is about a medical sleuth called Salt, who's leaving after seven years' practice in a Midlands town but won't go till he finds what's happened to one of his patients, a girl with an interesting kidney he's been treating: he finds her, sinisterly and not too soon.
Though Mr Priestley is pretty sound on the present, he clearly doesn't love it, and nowhere does his writing take wing the way it does when he writes about the past (as in the splendid Bright Day, for instance). Even in his new book of essays, The Moments and Other Pieces (Heinemann, 35s., sold for Oxfam), though he deals mostly with current happenings, the golden moments (to me) are those when he goes back with what seems almost reluctant nostalgia to the days when Cut Cavendish was 3}d. an ounce. He probably hates people saying this, but there it is.
Freewheeling, too, I feel, is Julian Mitchell, whose A Circle of Friends is told by several mem- bers of an intertwined group in New York and a country house near Oxford; in particular, the virginal young hero whose unbelievable dimness is mistaken for depth, until the others discover it isn't and drop him. The magic circle then fades. The mistake seems to be mainly the narra- tive device of making several people talk, since they sound very much alike and it's hard to tell, till you're well past the first paragraphs, who's who; and, novelistic conventions apart, it isn't easy to credit a schoolboy of fourteen with a steady narrative flow and conversations stuck properly between quotation marks. "Were they good today?" she said. She was a big bosomy woman who always wore a man's dirty mackintosh and smelt rather offensively of wet wool.' That's Mr Mitchell talking, not young Lawrence, and Mitchell fan though I've been since his earliest days (Imaginary Toys, A Dis- turbing Influence), I have to admit disappoint- ment and, jaunty style notwithstanding, occa- sional boredom.
Vladimir Nabokov, to cheer things, is the week's delight. He never freewheels, or, if he want to relax, his relaxing is as exquisite as his efforts. He seems to me (offhand) the most purely satisfactory stylist in English today, ;which, when you consider English isn't his mother tongue, is rather like saying the world's best ballerina was born with a club-foot but got over it. The Eye was first written in Russian in 1930 and it has everything for Nabokov fans, mystery and psychological inventiveness, a plot all curlicues and riddles and riotous romance, and an offputting introduction 'apparently de- signed,' the publishers suggest, `to confuse uneasy novel reviewers.' It is about Russian 6migris in Berlin, but might just as well, Nabokov says, be about Norwegians in Naples (a less pompous writer there never was); and I recommend it to Nabokov admirers, who will purr, and Nabokov newcomers, who will surely at least exclaim at its silvery fireworks.
Honor Tracy must be one of the funniest women breathing (which isn't the same as wittiest: Mary McCarthy is wit in petticoats incarnate, but does one actually laugh?). She is funny with sobriety and apparent effortless- ness, with observation so exact and ears so per- fectly attuned to this or that soul, rather than mere manner, that recognition makes for delight, delight for laughter. The Men at Work in her new novel are literary ones, their habitat what one of its main carnivores calls the crocodile tank of English literary life. But no one need be put off for that : it isn't a matter of in-jokes and nudges and identifying individual croco- diles. Miss Tracy is funny, never mind who she's dealing with; and here more than (possibly) ever.
Observation can be too exact, or exact in the way a telephone directory is. I sometimes felt this about James Tucker's sad, clever, totally unfunny Burster, which is so neat and exact you almost cry out with recognition if you know anything of the milieu, but not for a second with amusement. The publishers call it a send-up of the Wardour Street ethos, but if send-up sug- gests fun they're wrong. Its hero is a creep of a publicity man who'll do anything for pub- licity, fake a publicity love affair for the girl he really loves, take a pious cripple to Lourdes for the newspapers to hear of it; it curdles your blood because it all sounds so true, yet nobody gets his deserts, exactly, except that everybody pretty quickly loses what soul (which isn't much) he started off with.
For John Hersey you have to be American, I think. His Too Far to Walk is so intricately knitted up with family and college mores that if you aren't familiar with the American ver- sion of either a lot of it seems incomprehensible, and at least doesn't touch one emotionally. It is a kind of psycho-sociological inquiry into the bored young who take to drugs for lack of anything else to do; the drugs induce some long- winded fantasies and the style is as stubby ,as a crew-cut. Finally, Ernest Frost's It's Late by My Watch is an agreeable oddity about a mild misfit, an elderly journalist trying to get by on the old-age pension, reprints of articles from his bicycling past (`Sunlight and Shadow in Un- known Bucks') and mean handouts from his sister. It is nicely unclassifiable, and Mr Frost is clearly not the least bit, in atlitude or manner or even subject-matter, like anybody else.
- - ISABEL QUIGLY
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