Love Knocked Out
The Right People. By Peter Forster. (Hutchinson, 16s.) The Autumn Equinox. By John Hearne. (Faber, 15s.) The Ruling Passion. By William Camp: (MacCi ibbon and Kee, 16s.) The Light Infantry Ball. By Hamilton Basso. (Collins, 16s.) The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. By Mordecai Richter. (And y$ Deutsch, 16s.) LOVE walks back into the novel this week and takes a hiding. In The Right People its sad vulnerability is implicit from the start. When Mark Lemming, a penniless young painter, falls for Ellen Stonor, a rich young bitch on the re- bound, all the conventions of popular fiction, if not private life, prepare one for tears after bedtime. But this novelettish thread of plot is treated with unusual sophistication: what really engages Mr. Forster is the social context through which it winds, the entrenched positions of money and the arts-racket, privilege and cultural cant. Mark, the innocent abroad in London, gets `taken up' and it is the snobbish conventions of life in the in- groups, utterly accepted by Ellen, that finally put him down again, his own man and free. This is an uneven work, possibly because Mr. Forster has tried to pack too much in. The key-figures of Mark and Ellen carry less conviction than many of the subsidiary characters (Mark has a bad foot and a Jewish mother--why?--the mother to bring out Ellen's unconscious anti-Semitism?) and there are too many people with simply walk-on parts, some of Leo Stonor's 'Cronies,' for example. The satire is laid on with a truncheon in places: anger seems to have fogged Mr. Forster's otherwise excellent lenses in his look at that weekly BBC programme on what's new in the world of culture. Yet there are sentences, scenes, whole chapters that go devastatingly to work, where the
emotional pressure seems exactly right. I cherish Addison Jones, the book-reviewer : 'A special streamer on the dust-jacket of a current best-seller proclaimed this to be the best first novel written by a Czech about Poland in 1892 that . . . (he) . . . had ever read.' As a Young Person's Guide to the Phonies of 1959, Mr. Forster can rarely be faulted.
John Hearne is a West Indian writer and The Autumn Equinox the third of his novels to be set on the fictitious island of Cayuna. There is nothing quaint or narrowly regional, however, about this particular talent. The story is told, turn and turn about, by three voices, those of Jim Diver, the young American who has come to set up an illegal printing press for Castro's rebel army in Cuba; Nicholas Stacey, the patrician store-owner who covers up for him; and Eleanor, the beautiful bastard daughter of Stacey's dead wife. Stacey sees Diver as essentially feckless, avid for lost causes to prove himself on, and is deeply concerned when he and Eleanor fall in love. But one day thugs break up the press and physically humiliate Diver to such an extent he decides he can only regain himself by going to fight in Cuba. Mr. Hearne handles all this most impressively and, if the slightly wooden nobility of the principals reminds one of Hemingway, his ' patient sounding-out of the depths of that nobility has some of Conrad's forceful intelligence. But he does over-write. It made me uneasy that all three voices should be dowered with the same gift for language. This is Nicholas: 'The fireflies opened thousands of glowing, ice-blue wounds in the black body of the night.' And this Diver : `A warm, salty wind blew a faint, petticoat swish- ing from the fronds of the coconut trees along the east horn of the bay.' Given the monologue form of the novel, this is bound to come over as somewhat gratuitous beautifying. But Mr. Hearne is a man to watch. Two memorable minor portraits—of Diver's wretched assistant, Conroy, the cool happy-talk fat man, and of Pierre- Auguste. the old lunatic dreaming of revolution in his battered boat—indicate his range.
William Camp's The Ruling Passion sets out as a toughish light sexual comedy, spattered with changing-room talk of `rogering' and `putting in pod,' and then starts to take itself with a disrupt- ing seriousness. Anguish and frivblity jostle each other to death. A young Private Secretary falls for his MP's unsatisfied wife—and she for him. They toy with their mutual desire, putting off consummation with a good deal of mutual self- congratulation, so much so that the PS has a spot of trouble when they finally get down to it. The wife's gesture of renunciation at the end left me cold. There are some quite amusing moments when the ageing cuckold has to nurse his con- stituency. The Light Infantry Ball is a solid, ex- pertly constructed novel based in Pompey's Head, the small Southern town of Mr. Basso's previous novel to be published over here. It leads up to and into the American Civil War and concerns itself with the divided loyalties of John Bottomley, a rice planter of good family, who has been taught at his Eastern school that slavery is evil. He is in love with the wrong, married woman for most of the story but finds his true love (cleverly planted earlier --will hz? won't heT) just before the cur-
tain. It is a much more intelligent book than this curtsey-to-formula suggests, all the documenta- tion thoroughly digested and made over, though unlikely to repeat the success of that livid epic, Gone With the Wind.
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is really a straight formula book, from rags to riches, but with the slight twist that Duddy is at heart quite a crook and the inestimable advantage of being saturated in Jewish humour. I wish I had more space for it here. The Montreal backstreet boy sets his heart on buying some land, runs three or four jobs at the same time, promotes everything from poker games to films of Bar Mitzvahs (the scenario of one of these, directed by an avant- garde lush, is one of the funniest things in the book), goes bankrupt, recoups and, amid the tangled wreckage of friends and relations, defying a gangster, gets his heart's desire.
JOHN (01 i,N1
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