New Novels
A Rogue With Ease. By M. K. Argus. (Rupert Hart-Davis. 10s. 6d.) MR. LIPSKY'S bopk has the clean outlines of the better Saturday Evening Post serial. It cannot avoid being made into a film; and no one but Spencer Tracy should.(Mr. Lipsky makes it clear) be allowed to play the name part. This is an able piece of writing, the plot is firm, the characterisation is tidy; but the deliberate externalisation' of person and event confines the scope of Lincoln McKeever to that of a good story.
This is New Mexico at the turn of the century. An old man is killed cold-bloodedly in an ambush. Suspicion falls on Don Carlos de Niza, leader of the Spanish clement, who has been defrauded of his land by the Americans. He is illegally extradited from Mexico and put on trial in Hogarth County which is run by Dan Hogarth, de Niza's defrauder and hated enemy. McKeever, a widower, who has retired from the law to look after his sick son, is persuaded to defend the old, fiery Spaniard. The second two-thirds describe the defence, a bitter struggle against a prejudiced judge and jury in an atmosphere of violence and mistrust, where one wrong word can start a war between the Anglos and the Mexies. Mr. Lipsky only falters on those rare occasions when he tries to go inside his characters; McKeever's relationship with his tubercular son, for example, and the boy's death just before the end of the trial add little to the book. But his ability to tell a story makes this a highly readable, occasionally exciting but not outstanding novel.
The strengths and weaknesses of Horseman, Pass By make it a fascinating comparison with Lincoln McKeever. Mr. Parry has written a book which is about as successful as Mr. Lipsky's but which succeeds and fails for entirely different, and very British, reasons. Like McKeever, Kilfoyle is an unwilling hero in late middle-age. A man with a shady past through no fault of his own, he is earning a quiet living as a water diviner when his ex-wife, an amiable slut, asks him to visit her at the seedy transport café where she and her seedy new husband are—he discovers—dealing in stolen American equipment; they have double-crossed the gang they are working with and are worried about the consequences, Kilfoyle becomes involved despite himself. Contrasted with this seamy atmosphere is the equally polluted but superficially respectable air of the head- master's house at a nearby public school where Hughie Kilfoyle spends much of his time, not altogether successfully resisting the Advances of the daughter of the house and not altogether successfully trying to turn the son into a mart. Everyone in the book, indeed, is unpleasant except Kilfoyle who is simply weak. Ultimately a lot . of people are killed, Kilfoyle is brave, and his ex-wife moves bock in.
Where Mr. Lipsky sticks to the point Mr. Parry lags and stumbles. But where Mr. Lipsky's characters never move, at their best, in more than a rather blurred 3-D, Mr. Parry probes delicately and percept- ively into relationships and attitudes, Kilfoyle, for example, is eting his ex-wife's bragging little new husband for the first time:
Hughie began slightly to revise his opinion of Jackling:.his initial dislike gave place to a more tolerant contempt. At first he had looked as if he might have an aggressive vein. But soon it become clear that his boasting was not designed to assert superiority over his companions; it was a humble attempt to raise himself to the level where they might accept his friendship. It was pathetic, but it did not inspire confidence; Hughie had. always found that the most dangerous cheats were those who had some motive deeper than gain.
Mr. Parry slows down his plot with this kind of remark; but they are remarks well made. There is too much of the Graham Greene of England Made Me in Horseman, Pass By, too much of Angus Wilson's seediness-for-seediness' sake with too little of the construc- tional skill of either. But in the liveliness and verisimilitude of the minor characters—Jackling, the little would-be tough guy, Everard, the pompous lawyer, Mrs. Leggett, the masseuse who speaks in capital letters, Doctor Castanier, the learned, lost headmaster—in this there is a deal of promise.
I don't quite know what Miss Tracy.is trying to do; nor I suspect, does she. Like Horseman, Pass By, The Deserters is filled with un- pleasant people engaged in unpleasant activities. The heroine, Sgt. Sophie Lewes, is in charge of a detachment of female military police. A prisoner escapes from the cells and Sgt. Lewes is given a week to find her again. The other policewomen of her detachment who help and hinder her in her chase are as unappetising a collection as can be imagined: either witchlike in their bitchiness, or moronic in their stupidity. Miss Tracy's attitude to her characters wavers uneasily between hatred and affection and one is never quite sure whether she is writing farce or fictional autobiography. There is just about enough in the book to make a perfectly sound short story, but in trying to stretch her material to make a novel Miss Tracy has taken all the life and elasticity out of it. The few pages that there are of first-rate observation and dialogue, which show what Miss Tracy can do when she is really in command of her writing, only increase the sense of disappointment.
By contrast, Mr. Argus knows exactly what he is doing the whole time. There are no pretensions about A Rogue With Ease: it is farce at the Wodehouse level with a touch of the astringency of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the perfect book for a train journey up to sixty miles. Mr. Argus's hero is a poor Russian emigre in New York in the mid-Twenties who decides one day that he will become a Prince. His career in New York and Hollywood is charmingly delineated; the satirical needle is deftly but sparingly used; above all Mr. Argus seems to enjoy himself and his hero.
JOHN METCALF
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