Witnesses
Nick Totton
Season in Purgatory Thomas Keneaily (Collins 0.75) Looking for a Lullaby James Harris (Macmillan 0.95)
Season in Purgatory has the bare, appalling authenticity of an eye-witness account. The Person who can say, 'I was there. It was like this' ; interpretation disarmed in the face of remembered suffering. Yet Thomas KeneallY---and there is a certain evenness of texture in the novel to hint at this--was nine Years old, and in Australia, during the Yugoslav partisan cainpaigns against the Germans which are his subject. The authenticity is something like an absolute human quality: as if there is within each of us a well of Pain, consistent through time and space,
hich we can tap to discover 'how it was'.
David Pelham, a junior medical officer in the British forces in Italy, intrigues for a Posting to active service out of his ambition for high-level surgical experience. He finds himself seconded to Tito's partisans, almost their only modern medical resource. On the Adriatic island of M us, Tito's offshore base, he improvises and then runs a precarious hospital and faces an endless army of dreadful mutilations. Under threat of the partisan Penalty of death for sexual fraternisation, and of the anticipated German assault, he makes love to Moja Javich: an older woman With a history and character perhaps too alien for him to touch.
No one has much to say in explanation or excuse of the nightmare in which they find themselves: a detachment of taut, halfInsane British. commandos; the partisans, half-insane in Pelham's eyes in their acceptance and infliction of suffering; Pelham and Moja; Sergeant Fielding, Marxist schoolteacher become medical orderly. Finally Pelham becomes 'the pacifist that he was to remain for the rest of his life. In his bloodstream were two simple propositions: that the savagery of the Germans did not excuse the savagery of the partisans. That the savagery of the partisans did not excuse the savagery of the Germans. That the masters 01 the ideologies, even the bland ideology of democracy, were blood-crazed.'. These are not propositions for the present, Wholly taken up with an exhausting routine of saving life and alleviating pain; they are few later, for Aldermaston marches and Peace committees. As ineffective then, perhaps, as on Mus. But they are what Mr
, eneally offers to justify the thesis of his that this nightmarishly lucid survivor's ciccount is a message of hope, an account of Season in Purgatory.
. If P. G. Wodehouse had been seriously involved with psychoactive drugs, then he might perhaps have written something much like Looking fOr a Lullaby. Bungdale Head, who cannOt remember his children's names, who wanders through life looking for an angel (he knows from Rilke that they can be recognised by their inability to tell the living from the dead)—Bungdale Head is .Bertie Wooster cast adrift from social reality. There are aunts here, as well as acid, and lots of Wodehousian facetiousness, and floating literary tags; even the same fondness for Keats. But all has suffered a sea-change into something rich as a pluni-pudding, and certainly somewhat strange.
Mr Harris clearly keeps a notebook, and empties it periodically into his typewriter. The result is a lot of bright moments, several passages of ingenious metaphysics, and a general abundance of invention (sometimes borrowed). This degree of surface ornamentation needs a very strong architectonic behind it, or it will come over as vague, nervous chatter. True, in the face of the surreal experience which is described here, a jumpy facetiousness is an understandable protection against anxiety; and the novel's attempt to say everything at once may be not just the first-novel fear of leaving something out, but a drug-mystic's morning-after awareness (frayed around the edges) that everything does connect—somehow.
These themes have all been around before, though. Mr. Harris is a voracious snapper-up of weird oddities of all kinds, keys to the doors of possibility; and he is a witty and intelligent writer, not quite as sophisticated as one suspects he thinks, but quite sophisticated all the same. Looking for a Lullaby is a tour de force, certainly; but force will not . open every door—and Mr Harris will surely not stay content to be just a tourist.
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