Grotesquerie
Peter Ackroyd
The Hawkline Monster Richard Brautigan (Jonathan Cape £2.50) Turtle Diary Russell Hoban (Jonathan Cape £2.95) "This novel is for the Montana gang" and so immediately The Hawkline Monster plunges into that world of rough and tough guys which, judging by a rather limp photograph of Mr Brautigan on the cover, is going to be sent up rotten. He describes his book as a "Gothic Western," and it certainly has that mid-Atlantic and cross-cultural flavour which I associate with extremely bad novels. Cameron and Greer are professional hit-men, who will do anything for the money. Richard Brautigan has obviously learnt something from them. He rattles out his jokes like wax bullets, he almost hits his targets—it is surprising he doesn't get a little closer, since they are the remarkably large ones of conventional horror and conventional adventure — and he uses that ironic and dead-pan manner which is supposed to imply everything but which actually means nothing. A young lady called Magic Child hires Cameron and Greer for five hundred dollars; they all 'sleep' in a barn together; they travel through the Dead Hills until they reach Hawkline Manor or, as Mr Brautigan puts it in that delightfully ironic way which has won him the plaudits of American hippies and underdone English academics, "the road stopped like a dying man's signature on a last minute will." There speaks the authentic voice of the. American tradition. Meanwhile, Cameron and Greer meet a second young lady who is identical in all respects to Magic Child; Cameron and Greer then go in search of the Hawkline Monster, which, delightfully and ironically turns out to be an itinerant light that has escaped from a somewhat mad Professor's retort. When I tell you that an umbrella stand is transformed into the Professor after the monster has been put out, you will see how ironical it all is.
The Haw;dine Monster contains a great deal of fancy but no imagination at all — this is presumably what the publishers and Mr Brautigaii mean by "gothic"; fortunately, the novel is arranged as a series of brief chapters, and the print is very large, so the tedium of its self-indulgent whimsy is camouflaged for quite long periods. But you can never hide your darkness under a bushel, and Mr Brautigan's prose eventually becomes flat and uninventive, his narrative stale and repetitive. The publishers, of course, tell us that it is "beautifully evocative, funny and observant" but I presume that none of them actually read the book.
I hear that Russell Hoban has been compared and contrasted with Richard Brautigan, and this seems very unfair to Mr Hoban. His Turtle Diary is a pleasantly sentimental novel and, being a sentimentalist myself, 1 found it lovable. and entertaining. Sentimentality is, of course, an extremely powerful force since it can contain any number of disparate emotions without noticing the strain. And there is a special kind of sentimentality which attaches itself to brute animal life (if there are no animals around, children will serve) at the same time as it lets out a few mawkish yelps at the generally depressed condition of 'life,' reality' or whatever. Mr Hoban's characters, William G and Neaera H, swim in this particularly fishy soup. They both suffer from the helpless and debilitating loneliness which comes from acquiescing in something optimistically known as 'fate,' and both of them are searching for the romantic self-sufficiency and natural mindlessness which elderly turtles seem to represent for them.
The novel is composed as a series of inner monologues as William and Neaera float towards each other, arms outstretched, and watching their slow movements with expressions ranging from surprise to horror. Their plan is to, free the turtles from their cosy aquarium in the local zoo and to thrust them back into the cold and unpredictable currents of the ocean. I would have thought that the aquarium was at least one ecological niche above the Atlantic, but William and Neaera are fantasists — Neaera writes books for children and William works in a bookshop — and they cannot be expected to see it like that. They drive down to Cornwall and set the poor creatures 'free,' and then the two of them drift back into the sheltered aquarium of their own lives: dreaming, naturally, of the great beyond.
It is a very attractive story and, despite the characters' fascination with their own lives, what emerges is Mr Hoban's individual and very distressing imagination. He collects his insights like bright and tiny stones, and he uses a ferocious but slightly awkward prose which keeps everything to one side. Now the side-line is a very honourable position to be in, since it is the only one which encourages the warm glow of sentimentality, but Mr Hoban is continually fretting and straining to be somewhere else. There are continual references to the small scale on which he is forced to work (there are descriptions, for example, of those small but perfectly complete model towns through which sentimentalists love to wander), and Mr Hoban probably hates himself for those moments of great preciousness and whimsy which I much. appreciated. It is an eclectic but at the same tithe highly organised book, and one that is full, of stray insights and descriptions which are united by Mr Hoban's mercurial creative temperament. My only complaint is the, dialogue, which is uniformly artificial: real sentimentalists — like turtles — never open their mouths except to be fed.
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