Books
Baste frequently
Christopher Hawtree
Maia ITIhe truth was that this evening Maia I was beginning for the first time to grasp something of the difference between style and the mere show of opulence,' remarks the narrator a third of the way through the course of the 1,056 closely- printed pages which he has chosen to devote to her adventures. Richard Adams is certainly right to see that a distinction should be made between well-chosen, res- trained items of decoration and the sort of brass rails, sunken beams, carriage-lamps and mock velvet that, smokey and scuffed, brewers all too often think will add a touch of class to their establishments; the wonder is that Mr Adams himself did not observe this rule in Maia, for one can only marvel at the compulsion which led him to fill page after page with a Berni-Inn style of prose.
When the producers of such well-known television series as Thunderbirds, which made ingenious use of puppets, went over to real actors in order to keep down costs, they were startled to find that the effect was less realistic. Whatever his reasons might have been for abandoning the role of the 'Whitehall Aesop', as Jeremy Treg- lown once described it, something similar has afflicted Richard Adams since he published The Girl in a Swing four years ago — indeed, such was his unfamiliarity with human wiles that the first version had to be withdrawn quickly for fear of a libel action.
It would be a brave, not to say foolhardy being that retained counsel and ventured into the High Court armed with a copy of Maia in the hope of securing a large tax-free sum. 'Wading to the bank she paused, straddling her thighs to make water in the stream . . . She had neither seen nor heard anything to suggest to her that she was observed. In fact, however, she had been watched for some time by a man hidden among the trees . . . As soon as she had gone he stepped out of hiding, hastened along the bank, flung himself down on the turf and in a matter of seconds gratified himself, panting with closed eyes and in his transport pressing his face into the grass where her naked body had lain. He was her step-father.' Back home, he, Tharrin, is given to 'smacking her buttocks and telling her to bring his supper'.
One day she is down by Lake Serrelind, in this kingdom of Bekla familiar from Shardik, which, given the number of times that the characters say 'any road', would appear to be somewhere in the Midlands. Tired by the repairing of nets, Maia dozes in the sun, when along comes Tharrin and in due course 'took each of her hands in one of his own, fingers interlocked, and held them back against the net . . . He slid his hand beneath her torn dress, fondling one breast.' Maia does not cry out as yet, but 'sighing, she pressed herself against Tharrin and waited, shuddering as he caressed her. The moment he entered her, Maia was filled from head to foot with' good heavens — 'a complete, assenting knowledge that this was what she had been born for . . . Tharrin's weight upon her, Tharrin's thrusting, his arms about her, were like the opening of a pair of great, bronze doors to disclose some awesome and marvellous treasure within.' With one mighty heave, Richard Adams has left behind the lucrative educational market which Watership Down brought him and, as he did in The Girl in a Swing, set his characters on a course that makes rabbits appear the model of priapic restraint. (It is hardly surprising that, as the acknowledg- ments record, there should have been so high a fall-out rate among Mr Adams's married, female typists.) 'Never seen a man's zard before, pretty girl? Come on, you're a woman now!' Such language suggests. something that might have been recorded by the Opies; other linguistic innovations include the frequent invoking of the deity Cran and the oath of 'basting', which brings to mind the kitchen rather than the carnal act intended by Mr Adams. `That's your tairth. And you've been basted,' Tharrin tells Maia back on this side of the bronze doors.
Her mother's suspicions aroused, Maia is drugged and sold off to some passing slave-traders while the rakish Tharrin is off somewhere, occupied in matters that will become clearer many hundreds of pages later, and for which he will pay a hideous price. As happens in so many picaresque novels, Maia chances to find an ally with whom to struggle against the events which fate has set in store for them. The myster- ious black girl, Occula, gives advice to Maia about the best way of dealing with the forthcoming difficulties, the upshot of which is to lie back and enjoy it; Becky Sharp, whatever else she did, would not have told her companion to 'take off your shift' at the end of one chapter, while the beginning of the next finds them lying `together under a single blanket, perspir- ing, relaxed and easy', as they make their way to the capital which is 'bung-full of randy sods with standin' rods'. Once it is reached, one debauched party follows another and everything is described in such sprawling, sickly prose that considerable — ah — effort of will is required to keep one's eye on the page. The girls are sold to the obese Sencho, who is involved in the plot which turns around civil war, dissent in the provinces, a jealous-minded Sacred Queen coming to the end of her second term of office, not to mention rampant economic upheaval. Maia watches as he dangles cherries from Occula; 'her fellow-feeling for the game pleased Sencho, who at length resumed his dinner by causing Occula to remain beside the couch so that he could lick the creamy confection from her body; while Maia, crouching, made use of the frothed egg-yolks to indulge him in a somewhat similar manner.' Is this the sort of novel that you would wish your slaves to read? `"Hurtin' you?" cried Occula,' 500 pages on, 'kneeling down beside her, pulling out her breasts and biting her nipples. "Hurtin'? If I have any more insolence I'll stuff a nutmeg-grater up you and work it in and out."' It is no wonder that the starving poor are in revolt if this is how the country's precious resources are squandered.
So it goes on. The narrative (which in a few places does have a certain excitement) every so often breaks into tortured plati- tudes and clumsy, would-be Latinate con- structions; one lithe soldier, one frantic swim, one decaying body follows another as this innocent child of the water is entangled by the struggles of war and peace. Time and again the image brought to mind by this larded, failed epic is of that scene in the travesty made of Gore Vidal's Caligula when John Gielgud gratefullY expires and escapes from the gallery of naked breasts with which he is surrounded.
One exceedingly distinguished Amer- ican novelist and essayist has recently given it as his opinion that Mr Adams is 'certifi- able'; one would hardly wish to go quite that far, but, gasping for breath at the end of Maia, it is difficult not to help feeling that his time would have been better spent meditating in a strait-jacket.
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