Read without rest
Peter Ackroyd
Harvest Home Thomas Tryon (Hodder and Stoughton £2.95) Rest Without Peace Elizabeth Byrd (MacMillan £2,50) Pollow, Follow Alice Glenday (Collins £2.25)
There is a line which has resounded through 8-films, soap-operas and pulp fiction and it goes something like this: "Ned, wait! . . . Are You familiar with what are commonly referred to as the Greek mysteries?" There is a pregnant pause, and Ned whispers, in a tone somewhere between shock, anguish and determination, "No! And that won't stop me!" My first quote is taken verbatim from Mr Tryon's new novel (he is already famous for The Other, the other one), but I must admit to Writing the second quote myself. The Ned is Theodore Constantine and indeed he doesn't let it stop him; his abysmal ignorance of classical ritual accounts for most of the plot of Harvest Home, and he wouldn't know a Vegetation symbol if one got up and tickled him. He and his family have joined the back-to-Ecology rush, leaving New York City for a New Etigland township, Cornwall Coombe, which is as cute and as predictable as its name. But Fate harasses this nuclear family from the beginning — their own house, as Mr Constantine puts it in that engagingly American way, being "Kismet in clapboards" — and the village turns out to be something more than cakes and ale. Who is Widow Fortune, and why does she keep crying Drat!" and "Where in the nation!"? Is there something which the villagers will not or cannot reveal? And why is everything so damned rural? Read on, Mr Tryon keeps
hinting, and you may see something nasty. And indeed, eventually, we do. At first there is only the occasional glimpse of darkness visible; the villagers mutter about something called the "Waste" and at one of their simple country fairs there are enough phallic symbols to make an academic blush. But Tryon writes very discreetly, and the first climax comes almost without warning. A lamb is sacrificed, its entrails inspected, and the scarlet finger of fate points to Ned himself. It is not that there aren't more rustic pleasures, or what the hero calls rather bravely "God's great outdoors," and Mr Tryon includes the occasional but obligatory moments of sin. But the outdoors isn't all that great, believe me, especially when Nature becomes rather more red than dead; elegant frissons ran down my back in the face of a screaming skull and the amputation of a tinker's tongue, which cannot now tell its ghastly story. Mr Tryon is sometimes bad at it, too, with some awkward interventions and 'flash-backs' which smack of the midnight serial.
The story in question has something to do with the Earth-Mother and the Eternal Return; English schoolboys of the more respectable kind have been studying this sort of thing for years, and it may be that familiarity breeds noblesse oblige. But, whatever his education, Mr Tryon is a shade portentous about these perfectly harmless pagan rites; he reacts to them as an American dame would react to Stonehenge, and his final Dionysian touches are too bloodstained to be interesting. I know that America is a matriarchal society but this, Mr Tryon, is ridiculous.
Rest Without Peace has as its subtitle 'A Novel of Burke and Hare,' those two wellknown social workers. But Elizabeth Byrd avoids any high-flown moralising or mythologising and gets down to the bones of it. Burke and Hare, you remember, were the Edinburgh couple who ignored grave-robbing and went for the real thing. They stifled, suffocated and broke the backs of some sixteen victims, and then carted the poor and unloved corpses to the remarkably unsuspicious Dr Knox (setting off that famous ballad with its refrain "Knox! Knox! Who's there?"). I have already compared this duo to our modern band of social workers, and it would be labouring the parallel to notice that they murder for their victims' benefit. And for the benefit of Society: "What we are is a benefit to science and the human race and the great art of surgery. Four hundred students learning from what we bring them. Not worm-eaten from hours in the grave, but fresh as daisies." 'Fresher now, in fact, than they ever were in life — as Mrs Boyd goes to some pains to show in her life-histories. I was going to call them pre-mortems, if it weren't that pre is followed by the ablative case, and, in these: circumstances, the ablative absolute.
She has a brisk and clear style so that her narrative takes on all the strength and vividness of an engraving. Hers is a picture of human violence and misery littering the streets like garbage, and the details crowd in on one another to create the volume and the density of the past. There is one charming moment when Hare receives only half-price for a corpse whose face has been eaten away by rats: "Well," he says, "money isn't everything." If only the modern generation took so enlightened an attitude, the world would be a better place.
It says a great deal for the strength of Byrd's narrative that, at the close, straight fiction merges with garish and incredible fact without blushing. I did not know, for example, that in one day thirty thousand people filed past the hanged body of Burke as he lay in state at Edinburgh University. For those of us who missed the chance, his body is dead and well and hanging in the Anatomical Museum. Do as you would be done by is a powerful motto. As for Hare, it took one hundred policemen to guard him in his prison cell and, once outside the reach of the law, he spent the remaining forty two years of his life as a blind beggar down Oxford Street. Miss Byrd has told a powerful story, and she has told it well.
Follow Follow is also true to 'life', or what passes for it in New Zealand, by escaping from, it. Hers is a family portrait, of little Lydia amidst a prospect of cranks. Her husband is dead, and Lydia in mourning is the black sheep of th.e tamily. Her mother, father and sister spend their time either avoiding or consoling her. But the novel is not one consistent wail, and Lydia retains a strong if occasionally manic hold on the world. Alice Glenday's style is clear and, if it were not too pretentious to say so, unpretentious so the plot moves forward without undue discomfort. Miss Glenday has caught the banality of ordinary 'conversation,' which is just as well since her novel is consumed with it. We should all be grateful that the art is dead, if the modern novel is anything to go by. But as the plot thickens around the question of whose child is whose, a certain amount of antipodean symbolism enters by the backpages and there is too much of the sea and the sky. But Miss Glenday has constructed a novel with reversal, recognition and eventual catharsis, and we should all be duly grateful. As the man from the Manawatu Standard says of another book: "It is comical in parts but, true to life, it is sad in others." Good on you, sport.
Nicholas Moore's Spleen, published jointly by Menard Press and Black Suede Boot Press, is priced 60p and not 50p as stated in our review.
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