Maiden Voyage
Solitaire. By Kay Dick. (Heinemann, 13s. 6d.) PATRICK WHITE'S The Aunt's Story was first pub- lished in 1948, long before all the excitement about Yoss; but loath as I am to exercise retro- spective wisdom, I must say that the earlier novel is in some ways equally remarkable. It concerns a stringy girl evidently destined to be an old maid, her rural childhood in Australia (happiness and dear, understanding Father), her thwarted youth and middle years (selfish, greedy old Mum), and the travels on which she embarks, when nearly fifty years old, after her mother's unmourned de- cease. She has always been an odd girl, cryptic if not Delphic in utterance; and as she wanders through Europe and on to America her fan- tasies gradually become more dominant and more absorbing, until in the end she is completely lost to our world but entirely secure and fulfilled in a world of her own.
Now it is plain that such a story, concerned with a gradual mental transition over a. long period of time, could easily be very slow, very boring and at some stages very muddled. After all, many writers use their people's mental con- fusion as an excuse for splashing out almost anything which comes into their heads. But Mr. White is remarkable, firstly, for his tremendously exciting variations in pace—and this despite the length and straightness of his course; secondly, for his ability to make a clear issue out of some- thing as uncoordinated in its processes as his heroine's mental withdrawal; and, lastly, for his humour, which has much salt, no whimsy, and is responsible, half-way through the book and quite unexpectedly, for a truly Firbankian essay in social portraiture.
A. J. Cronin can tell a story in such a way as to arouse more than mere pleasure or interest : he positively makes one a partisan. It is there- fore humiliating to reflect, as one always does the moment his books have been put aside, that he has succeeded in making one a partisan over a grossly simplified issue of exaggerated urgency which has been presented in terms of nursery morality. So it is with The Northern Light. A long-established but humble provincial news- paper is shown in a struggle for survival with one of the great press combines. The prOvinciat 'paper persists in its.dull but honourable presenta- tion of local and national news: the streamlined rival uses every trick which money can implement or blackguardism contrive to capture the local readership. By the end of a few chapters. one is choking with indignation and getting ready to throw bombs into every glittering mansion in Fleet Street. And this, of course, is the time when one must pull oneself together and remember that no owner of a provincial newspaper could ever • be quite so wise, courageous, liberal, cul- tured and unfortunate in his family life as Dr. Cronin's hero, no Fleet Street jackal quite so vile as the anti-hero, and that perhaps the whole thing has been weighted just a tiny bit. When all is said. presenting issues in unrelieved . black and \\ hite
is the oldest and most reprehensible of all gutter- journalists' devices, and it should not be used by a Gollaticz novelist even to discredit gutter- journalists themselves.
The first half of Kingdom Come is triumphant. A young Regular officer of the Indian Army de- plores the state of India—and the Army—in 1942, goes on a splendid and poetic drunk, but then shows resource and intelligence in a frontier in- cident. This is lovingly analysed in a passage. that will have enormous appeal not only to pro- fessional soldiers but to anyone blessed with a glimmer of imagination. So one up to the Raj and Mr. Clark. But, but, but. For the hero is then adopted by a kind of Buchmanite-lmperial league, an undercover organisation which pro- poses to preserve the Empire by ruthlessly purg- ing it of all impure elements—these ranging from stripe-trousered bottoms in Whitehall to spotty cadets who pout for chola pegs. As far as that goes, my sympathy to the conspirators. But what follows is such silly and meaningless—or, where meaningful, distasteful—drivel, all mixed up with dedication, brotherhood, Kant and trial by ordeal, that Mr. Clark finally leaves one alienated and exhausted.
Solitaire is a 'delicate' 'account of a four- cornered relationship, rather irritatingly inter- spersed with long passages about how difficult Miss Dick found it to write. SIMON RAVEN
Previous page
