Fiction
The Loved One. By Evelyn Waugh. ("Horizon." 2s. 6d.) Bodies and Souls. By Maxence van der Meersch. Translated by Eithne Wilkins. (Pilot Press. 15s.) The Mountain Lion. By Jean Stafford. (Faber and Faber. 8s. 6d.) Mariner Dances. By P. 11. Newby. (Jonathan Cape. 9s.) No Resting Place. By Ian Niall. (Heinemann. 9s. 6d.) Prince Leopold and Anna. By Laurian Jones. (Michael Joseph.
8s. 6d.)
FOR those whose faith in Mr. Evelyn Waugh was shaken by Brideshead and only partially restored by Scott-King, The Loved One will act like a fresh baptism. It is the story of a young English- man in Hollywood (a sort of Paul Pennyfeather matured by war experience) who has already let down the side of the small but still nominally cricketing English colony by becoming a pets' mortician and is to let it down considerably further by the end of the book. This is a Hollywood peopled on the whole by less animate corpses than those we know so well, for most of the scene is laid within Whispering Glades, the vast fantastic cemetery park built by Wilbur Kenworthy, the Dreamer, as the Happy Resting Place of Countless Loved Ones. Nothing shall be disclosed here of the incidents which lead Dennis Barlow into this monstrosity—for though they are minor they are in some ways the most delightful of the book—nor of the hideous fascinating secrets of Whispering Glades itself. If there are a few dull moments they concern perhaps the Guru Brahmin—who though funny has been done in one form or another before—and the (prose) wooing by Dennis of Aimee Thanatogenos. But the wooing of Aimee by Mr. Joyboy, the chief embalmer, Mr. Joyboy's relationship with his Mom and the final solution of the Dennis-Aimee-Joyboy triangle form, together with Sir Ambrose Abercrombie and the early touching portrait of Sir Francis Hinsley, the decaying Georgian hack, one of the funniest pieces of writing that Mr. Waugh has ever done. And all, thanks to the enterprise of Horizon, for the price of a thimbleful of gin.
No one should let himself be put off by squeamishness from reading this macabre farce, for it is in fact a moral tale, bringing us face to face with the full fatuousness and bankruptcy of our own civilisation. If we are horrified by this story it is something in our- selves that horrifies us, and that is just. For the jargon of the mortuary hostess can be found in many fields considerably closer home than Whispering Glades. It is Mr. Waugh's greatness as a satirist that, although his characters are in themselves completely improbable, they are not impossible, for they are merely logical extensions of all too real human beings. One doesn't actually know a Joyboy, but one is surrounded by an ever-increasing number of horrible Joyboy embryos. Nor need anyone be depressed by all this, for a civilisation in which Mr. Waugh flourishes is still not entirely without hope.
Bodies and Souls, by Maxence van der Meersch, also contains a great number of corpses, but here any resemblance to Mr. Waugh's book ends. It is eight times as long (well over 200,000 words) and is a vast panorama of the French medical world during the nineteen- thirties, obviously written from a good deal of first-hand experience. It follows the fortunes of three main groups of characters rather haphazardly through the main incidents—chiefly medical—of their careers. There are a great many minor characters, and the three main strands are often skilfully woven together. The intrigue and corruption apparently inseparable from the French medical world are courageously exposed. But this is a clumsy book. The characters are wooden and the emotions mostly unconvincing. The human element is overwhelmed by a mass of technical medical detail, and there are accounts of more than fifteen operations. The translation by Eithne Wilkins is heroic.
Far more interesting as literature are The Mountain Lion, by Jean Stafford, and Mariner Dances, by P. H. Newby. Both are subtle, delicate studies of a brother-and:sister relationship, but each is an example of a different method of treatment. It will probably depend on what sort of person you are yourself—whether centred more on the heart or the head—which of these two books you like more, for both are equally good. Miss Stafford's is a warm delight- ful book describing with a great deal of wit and self-discipline all the jokes, smells, excitements, resentments and horrors of childhood. The story is set first of all in the home of the high-bourgeois Fawcett family in California, where Ralph and Molly, the two youngest children, keep up an alliance against their kindly but fatuous mother (" Our sort of people don't have cows ") and two sisters. When, however, Ralph and Molly go to stay with their sympathetic ranch-owning uncle in the Colorado Mountains the alliance becomes more and more precarious, finally breaking up com- pletely under the impact of adolescence. The study of the ugly Molly retreating more and more into her precocious Ralph-hating isolation is brilliant. Paradoxically, it is Miss Stafford's book, superficially the more gentle of the two, which has the tragic horrify- ing ending and P. H. Newby's which has the happy one.
Mariner Dances is cold and efficient. It occasionally takes on an almost Kafka-like quality of nightmare, but can also be amusing in its own way. It is Mr. Newby's technique to go over all his ground ruthlessly with a powerful magnifying-glass, showing up every blade of grass equally with each footprint. He can capture the intensity of a mood or a moment with great precision. "Mariner " is the surname of a hopeless self-centred neurotic whose inability to manage his life and love affairs impinges on the life of the narrator Fred Paul. This narrator, a queer almost overpower- ingly intense schoolmaster, has his own problems, for he has the strongest feelings of love and guilt towards his sister whom he accidentally crippled in childhood. Only occasionally does this very intensity lead Mr. Newby into a slight stiltedness of style (" The cross-currents of what he was and what circumstances should have made him created the ambiguous "), and the whole book is written with great economy. A possible criticism of Mariner Dances might be that its characters are too static, that they are all exactly the same at the end of the book as they were at the begin- ning, but then there is no rule that characters should develop in a book—and certainly very few do in real life. It is just that it is the sort of thing one rather likes to happen.
Mr. Niall's publishers announce him as " a discovery," and for once such an announcement appears to be justified. No Resting Place is an exciting, moving story of a family of tinkers struggling for life against the laws of nature and society. It is told with an admirable impartiality and lack of, sentiment. No attempt is made to gloss over the crude brutality of the tinkers or to gain one's sympathies against the police, though there is little doubt at the end where one's sympathies lie. The actions of human beings are recounted, even in scenes of violence, with a simple dignity, as if they were just one more aspect of the seasonal changes in the countryside which Mr. Niall describes so well. The first half of the book is the better, and perhaps the climax comes too early.
Both Laurian Jones and Caroline Rogers are out of their class in this field. Laurian Jones would probably do better if she wrote about things of which she had more experience than German officers invading Russia and their English-born wives helping escaped R.A.F. prisoners of war. And to Dust is a sort of flat South American Gone With the Wind, without, however, the slightest breath of excitement to ruffle its even surface, this in spite of the fact that it contains four generations, two earthquakes and a seduction by
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