NEW NOVELS
Lesson books
BARRY COLE
The Dance of Genghis Cohn Romain Gary (Cape 30s) To the Slaughterhouse Jean Giono trans- lated by Norman Glass (Peter Owen 35s) Wages of Virtue Stanley Middleton (Hutch- inson 30s) The Last Summer lain Crichton Smith (Gol- lancz 25s) The Devil is a Single Man Montague Hal- trecht (Collins 25s) Margaret Drabble seems to believe—at least in her fiction—that we cannot have art with- out morality; and she sets out in The Water- fall to prove it. Jane is a girl who lacks the ability `to reconcile the practical and emo- tional aspects' of her sexual life. She is married to Malcolm, a successful musician, but minutes after the birth of her second child realises that her real love is for her cousin Judy's husband, James, a garage owner and inept racing driver. The book alternates between a third person narrative which presents the 'isolated world of pure corrupted love' and a first person narrative which kicks the truth—as she sees it—where it hurts: Romantic versus the harshly real. Miss Drabble describes it herself as a toss up between 'all this Freudian nexus' and the 'schizoid third person dialogue.'
The story concerns Jane's love for James
and her rejection of Malcolm. But Miss Drabble is too intelligent a writer to leave it at that; she gives an extremely thorough analysis of a failed marriage, discusses the definition and 'morality' of love, and pres- ents us with literary precedents too numer- ous to mention. 'Reader, I loved him: as Charlotte Brontë said. Which was Charlotte Bronte's man, the one she created and wept for, or the poor curate ... ?' Jane herself seems, however, a sort of sexually emanci- pated Maggie Tulliver. Eventually, her re- lationship with James is resolved, the ardour fades, and Jane is left philosophising on the 'price of love'. Her conclusions suggest she has moved from the Romantic to the pre- cariously stoic. There are few flaws in this beautifully written, impeccably constructed novel, the only possible irritant being a penchant for intellectual rhetoric.
Romain Gary's new book is also a novel —but so different from any of the others here that it might well belong to a different medium, let alone genre. The Dance of Genghis Cohn is an allegory, a savage and witty one marred only by its tendency to chase its own tail. The main characters are Cohn himself, a sort of surrogate Christ, the Indomitable Jew; Lily, an aristocrat's wife representing 'Humanity,' incapable of sexual sAtisfaction, and Florian (Death). Cohn, a third rate Jewish comedian shot in 1943, is a dybbuk inhabiting the body of Schatz, an ex-Nazi officer turned police chief. In the Forest of Geist a large number of trouser- less males are found murdered, on their faces a look of utter bliss. It is Schatz's job to find the killer, Florian, who murders each of Lily's unsuccessful lovers. If this reads con- fusingly, M Gary's telling is barely less so. Here is Florian addressing the frustrated but insatiable Lily: 'Your lovers are work- ing towards an orgasm the like of which the world has never known. You'll taste at last absolute fulfilment ... the true absolute. Not just the small change they all keep offering you ...'
M Gary mixes two attitudes. The first. oddly echoing Miss Drabble, is that of the Romantic, the search for the impossible: 'Two beings who never meet.' And the second is a condemnation of 'collective guilt', i.e. the Jew/Nazi syndrome. The end is multivocal, with Cohn as an American colonel in Vietnam, a would-be lover of Lily, and Christ ('You've had him before: remarks Florian). There's some powerful satire but the intention remains muddled.
Jean Giono's To the Slaughterhouse resus- citates the novel of the First World War and hits us again and again with the lesson, 'war spells ruin'. Heavy with a rustic religious symbolism, the conclusion is unequivocal: man is born again and hope shines eternal. The unoriginality is stiffened by M Giono's professionalism and by his tendency towards a blood and guts depiction missing from most of his contemporaries' reappraisals. 'There was a naked, dead infant underneath the sow's foot. The sow had torn off a shoulder and eaten the chest. It leaned over the little belly, dug its teeth way in to swal- low the child's guts.' Strong stuff.
There's little I can say about Stanley Middleton's ninth novel except that it main- tains with ease his reputation as the finest chronicler of provincial life writing today. It is, of course, a very particular life. The characters he portrays rarely move avia from their tight, city-bound environment. and are more likely to be lower-middle and Amiddle class than otherwise. In Wages of Virtue we are shown the adolescence of Dan Cleaver in the Midlands of the 1930,.
The book concludes with its hero reaching maturity at the outbreak of war and the writer draws together with admirable skill both private and public events. I hope I am not unique in having read all of Mr Mid- dleton's novels (several of them twice); he has something to say, and he says it with a lack of noise that is unusually pleasing.
lain Crichton Smith's The Last Summer, his second novel, comes off badly in com- parison with Middleton's. Set in the Scottish highlands it follows a similar theme, telling of a sixteen year old boy's last term at school during the Second World War. The story is excellent entertainment but it is surprising to find an established poet writing so lazily: 'The slanted look in her eyes as if she were eternally laughing, bubbling over.' And it's hard to imagine him writing, in a poem, that a skylark would sing 'deliriously'.
Montague Haltrecht's The Devil is a Single Man is very poor. The first paragraph alone contains more clichés than should occur in any complete novel and the follow- ing, 180 pages later, is typical of the stand- ard of writing: 'Her breasts were the mir- acle of the world. They dazzled him.' Six or seven, shaped like electric light bulbs?
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