NOVELS
Two of the Best
The Dark. By John McGahern. (Faber, 21s.)
Voices of a Summer Day. By Irwin Shaw. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 16s.)
The 'Q' Document. By James Hall Roberts. (Cape, 21s.) Three's Company. By Alfred Duggan. (Faber, 21s.)
SECOND novels are notoriously difficult; so diffi- cult, indeed, that case-hardened reviewers hesi- tate to predict a future until the author of a `brilliant first novel' has proved himself capable of a repeat performance. For this reason it is something of an event to find in one batch of review copies two second novels so good it is difficult to decide which should have pride of Place. Both are written by Irishmen and each author achieved a succes d'estime with his first book. Mr. Trevor liVes in London and has be- come sufficiently anglicised to satirise the 'enclosed' novel form beloved of English middle- brow writers. Mr. McGahern draws inspiration from the green gloom of the remoter parts of Ireland.
As Mr. Trevor is, I believe, the elder, I will place him first. The boarding-house that encloses the action of his book is a mock proscenium that serves to enhance his unconventional treatment of a conventional theme. The house, situated in the red-brick jungle of SW17, has been the property of Mr. Bird, a man of sinister 'good- ness,' who enjoyed collecting beneath its roof the eccentric and the deprived. Observing them with detached curiosity, only occasionally guid- ing them with a touch, he has been conscious of power. At his death it seems that the inmates will be dispersed, but he has left the property to the deadly-Nurse Clock and the blackmailing Studdy, who are required to carry on his `great institution.' Nurse Clock has other ideas. While Studdy writes his anonymous letters and the major, Mr. Obd and others pursue their private dreams, she, the realist, decides to evacuate the house completely and fill it with more profitable prey.
The author's imagination works on his charac- ters like a powerful fertiliser on the greenery of a Palm Court Hotel. Before our eyes his suburban derelicts develop exuberant individu- ality. The complex of their relationships is beauti- fully handled. Unlike other satiric writers of this genre, he does not dazzle us with slapdash cleverness, but pins down his fantasy in prose of a simple 'exactness. The novel starts slowly, but its middle sequences are enthralling. The final holocaust that thwarts Clock and Studdy seemed to me too convenient a get-out, less a travesty of convention than convention itself, but when one is given entertainment at this level, one may take it all without carping.
1 did not read Mr. Trevor's first novel (though 1 now intend to do so), but Mr. McGahern's remains with me, a vivid, almost painful, memory. Both The Barracks and The Dark might have been written as antidotes to the whimsy that has come out of Ireland during the last hundred Years. The Dark portrays a family of motherless children victimised by a father who is himself
the victim of •poverty and frustration. The eldest boy wins a university scholarship (two places; hundreds of candidates), but his ambition has• been wrecked by his upbringing. Imbued with sexual guilt by cross-questioning priests, his con- fidence destroyed by the terrible love-hate rela- tionship with his father, he falls before a first rebuff and chooses the dismal security of a posi- tion with the electricity board. For this is a story that belies the tranquillity of the Irish countryside and the seeming gentleness of its people. It is as well we should realise that the tourist's Ireland, extolled for the emptiness of its roads and strands, is also a homeland where youth despairs because of the emptiness of opportunity. Only humour, one feels, has saved Ireland from becoming a madhouse and Mr. McGahern will not resort to humour. He writes, instead, with poignancy and passion. He has been likened to the early Joyce and he has the same spare artistry, but in his sombre sensuality and emotional depth he re- minds me more of Mauriac. It will be interest- ing to see how his gifts develop when he turns his attention to a world wider than that of his boyhood years.
The rest of the week's novels are of a more usual kind. The trouble with Voices of a Summer Day is that we have had it all before. We are over- familiar with the East Side Jewish boyhood, the handicaps of a Jew in the States, the war from the American angle and the reactionary Ameri- can bourgeoisie that has formed a club no worth- while person can, or wants to, join. Mr. Shaw writes well, but the book carries an atmosphere of intellectual romanticism. The 'Q' Document is a highly competent thriller that describes the tracking-down of a papyrus that purports to disprove the divinity of Christ with a story very like Lawrence's `The Man Who Died.' Is the document genuine or is it a Nazi fake? The detective work is ingenious, the ddnouement satis- factory. The whole is a skilful entertainment that would help to speed the wheels on a long train journey.
As an addict of the Robert Graves approach to classical history, I found Mr. Duggan heavy going. His conversations and comments are solidly informative and not much lightened by generally joky treatment. Still, Mr. Duggan had his admirers and for those who want to read up the Julius-Augustus era, here recorded from the point of view of the dullest of the triumvirs, Three's Company is a good guinea's worth,
OLIVIA MANNING
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