Auberon Waugh on Peter Ustinov

Krumnagel Peter Ustinov (Heinemann £2.10) Farce creates a degree of goodwill which enables the reader to overlook occasional jokes which are unfunny, episodes which fail to carry conviction and even major characters whose faults would completely spoil any novel with greater pretensions. If the criterion of a farce is whether or not it makes the reader laugh aloud, then I must report that Mr Ustinov's new novel is the most successful farce since the Crazy Gang. I laughed more than I can remember laughing at anything except my twelve most favourite Wodehouses. But Mr Ustinov's expressed intention is not only to amuse but also to engage the sympathies — the book is intended as a tear-jerker nearly as much as a farce. It is for this reason that one feels justified in dwelling upon its faults. If it had succeeded in this second intention, it would have earned itself the right to be considered as a major work of art, like the roof of the Sistine Chapel etc, and it is only because it so nearly succeeds that one chooses to dwell on its few failings rather than list gloatingly its many excellences.

Krumnagel is the tragi-comic police chief of a mid-western state capital, whose stupidity is such that he fails to see how the city mayor, the judge and many other leading citizens are racketeers. Presented with round-the-world tickets for himself and his wife — Mrs Krumnagel is another delightfully sketched character: sexually voracious, sentimental and ruthless, she would make a very good archetype for American womanhood in British literature — they arrive in Britain.

There follows an excruciatingly unfunny description of their progress through customs. If, as I say, the book was merely a farce, one would skim through these pages eager to find the next joke which succeeded in making one laugh. Even in judging it as a farce, however, one might gasp slightly and rub the eyes that any writer who had already shown a deftness of touch nearly amounting to genius in his account of Krumnagel's eve of-departure seduction by his wife could suddenly be so heavy-handed. Rather than dwell on the unfortunate episode in the customs shed, I give the seduction scene. Krumnagel is watching television on the evening of his presentation luncheon. Both he and Mrs Krumnagel are slightly drunk: It was towards the end of the programme that Edie appeared at the door. The mixture of drinks had not left her insensitive. Now she brushed her hair into a wild bush, some of it falling over her eyes. She wore a black transparent negligee over black transparent pyjama trousers, both culminating at the wrists and ankles in fringes of plastic fur. On

her chest, vaguely visible through the twilight transparency, she wore a spangled bra which cupped her breasts, while leaving the nipples ludicrously exposed. She was smoking a cigarette through an ivory holder.

"Hi, lover man," she said gruffly.

" Ssh! He's just made one hell of a mistake. Christ!"

"Who?"

"Lein Craddocks."

" Who in the hell's that?"

"Private eye. Tipped off the Chinaman, see, without letting the old guy know, see, and . . ." He glanced at her for a second, and whistled.

" Sex anyone?" she enquired.

"You look so good I could eat you," he said, looking back at the screen.

He goes on watching the adventures of Lein Craddocks over her shoulder until she discovers him at it and forces him to switch them off.

After the unhappy incident in customs, which makes the reader fear innumerable unfunny jokes about the English of the type already enshrined in the CarltonBrown-of-the-FO Carry-On-Nurse coda, there is a deliriously funny episode in a country pub, where Krumnagel meets an odious old bore of a trade unionist and discovers to his horror that the old man is a member of the Communist party:

"You a Yank?" asked the Scotsman blinking with malice.

"I'm an American, if that's what you mean."

"I thought so . . coming in here with your blustering way . . marvellous, I call it." The three old men began to cackle. "That's right, give it 'im Jock," one of them called.

Eventually goaded beyond endurance by the Communist Scotsman, Krumnagel misunderstands a move the old man makes to get out his handkerchief and, with years of police training behind him, shoots him dead. Pleading self-defence, he is found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to seven years' penal servitude.

It is at this point that the book's least convincing character makes his appearance, as Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Neville Nym. Nym possesses every quality which Mr Ustinov apparently admires in the English. He is highly intelligent, humane, witty and reckless. He belongs to every reputable club in London, and uses his membership to wangle things with counsel, policemen and everybody else. His burning sense of justice cannot abide the thought that anyone as innocent and hopeless as Krumnagel should be kept in prison and so, with various police officers who are similarly persuaded, and with the acquiescence of the Home Secretary, he contrives that Krumnagel should escape.

Perhaps such paragons of intelligence and chivalry exist in England. It would be a waste of time to assure anyone so plainly blinded by love as Mr Ustinov that I have never yet met such a one in all my thirtyodd years' experience, and would certainly least expect to meet him in (a) a Home Secretary (b) a Director of Public Prosecutions (c) a Detective Chief Inspector or (d) a leading Treasury Counsel. Acceptance of such a wildly unlikely combination of circumstances is just possible within the conventions of farce. In any other framework — most particularly a didactic, moralistic one, showing readers what is good and right and intelligent, to compare against what is stupid and wrong — one can only describe it as abysmal.

On top of this, Mr Ustinov is plainly bored by detail. Perhaps only a pedant can complain that a minor character introduced as Lord Paul Hore on page 138 becomes Lord Hore on page 139. Of course, it is not impossible that he was the second son of a living Marquess whose older brother died somewhere between the two pages, allowing him to assume the heir's courtesy title. But the improbability of this sequence of events somehow casts doubt on the validity of various other fascinating allegations which Mr Ustinov makes about our public life — for instance, that the department of the Director of Public Prosecutions is a branch of the Home Office; that the Office of Director is held on a three-year unrenewable contract. And if one begins to doubt the authenticity of his picture of English life, how can we be sure that his much more vivid description of municipal politics in the American mid-west is any more authentic?

Never mind. Krumnagel eventually escapes from his open prison, with the connivance of police officers who give him a lift in their police car, and crosses the Atlantic most suitably in a hell-ship captained by a Greek heroin smuggler. His wife has married his successor as police chief; appalled by the corruption of American life, he shoots the Governor of the State at a football game and makes his protector, Sir Neville Nym, look rather foolish.

In my copy, all the pages between page 222 and page 239 were in the wrong order. It must say something that instead of throwing the book away and calling curses on the head of William Heinemann and his printers, C. Tinting and Co Ltd of Prescot and London, I patiently threaded my way through, breathless at the end of each page to find its successor. Almost all the book is highly enjoyable, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who still lacks holiday reading. The character of Krumnagel himself is beautifully described, convincing and, ultimately, completely sympathetic. It says much for Mr Ustinov's skill as a writer that he can make such a monster sympathetic. The best summary of the book's quality is to say that it just falls short of perfection. Mr Ustinov has given us an extremely pleasant read, and one for which I would like to thank him from the bottom of my heart, even if he is not quite to be compared at this stage with Michelangelo at work on the Sistine Chapel, or Beethoven composing his well-known Eroica Symphony.