An Awful Lot of Books (3 page)

September 1959

T
his is a Mexican novel set in the south of that country showing the disintegration of the landed families under the growing rebelliousness of the Indians inflamed by the ideals and agrarian reforms of President Lazaro Cardenas. It takes place in the thirties, and the story is largely told by the daughter of one of these families, a child of seven who makes the journey with her family from the provincial town where they live to the country where the Arguellos have their great sugar and cattle farm.

This is enough information: the book is not social history, but a novel - a poetic one - which is to say that by giving layers of rich and striking impressions the picture of a world is made - strange, universal and ageless. The result is a beautiful and satisfying book which one feels has lost nothing by its translation.

I was chiefly struck by the permeation of the idea of hierarchy: this is a feudal society, with the landowners at the top and the Indians at the bottom; the child’s father sees himself as a brutal realist who knows how to get what he wants, which is to preserve a status quo: but the gap between him and his Indian serfs is so great that there is plenty of room for the Government officials to act within it, so that by the end of the book he is a realist about a situation which no longer exists. Then there is the hierarchy of wisdom, faith and superstition: the Arguello family are, of course, Catholic, but the child’s mother is so ignorant of and indifferent to the Indians that it is only their superstition which strikes her and which she catches like a disease, while the child’s nurse, an old Indian woman, has collected wisdom to dignify her faith, and her superstition is relegated to wholly suitable objects - like motor cars. This idea seems to run right through the book - but there is not room here to expose more than two aspects of it; for the rest there is to me a peculiar joy in recognising these people, who usually remain a foreign blur in one’s imagination.

The author uses language without ever allowing it to use her, and that a young writer should avoid this elemental trap is surely a sign of promise and grace. I look forward to her next book.

October 1959

‘The hiding place of Mr. Shaw’s first novel is a cellar in Bonn. In this cellar two British airmen, Wilson and Connolly, have been incarcerated ever since their aircraft was bought down in a raid. Their gaoler, Hans Frick, originally hid them to save them from the Gestapo, but he has not yet released them. This is partly because he has come to depend upon them for companionship, and partly for another reason …’

This is a straight quote from the publishers’ admirable blurb of this book, which cannot be improved upon, as this is a novel made out of a really good idea - interesting, unusual and simple - containing elements of surprise and suspense which it would be a pity to explain here and thereby take the edge off a very good book. It is not only good because of its idea and situation, but also because Mr. Shaw, in addition in his natural ability for writing and his sharp eye and ear for character, has also an understanding far more active and informed than most novelists present in their first work. Wilson and Connolly, chained for years to the pillar in Frick’s cellar, have both had to come to some kind of terms with this existence - with themselves, each other, and their gaoler. Wilson has discovered the need to write - each day he is writing about his childhood: Connolly finds it much harder, and spends his time desperately recollecting the brief memories of his marriage, imagining his wife in London, and trying to think of ways to escape.

Their careful, obsessive, devoted little gaoler is also clinging to a past. The relationship of the two prisoners - their thorough, tireless knowledge of each other which makes their conversations able to run smoothly on a kind of dual track of subject matters - their affection, their dependence and their differences are all most beautiful conveyed, while beside this, the solitary, hard-working, anxious life of Hans Frick is proceeding methodically to its crisis, which changes the whole situation. The resolution of the story seems, when one has finished it, to be inevitable and implicit in the beginning of the book. As one has come to expect interesting matter or talented manner with first novels, it is a lovely shock to discover a new novelist with both.

December 1959

Nobody gets swiped with scimitars nowadays for failing to entertain, and if the penalties for dull story-telling are less than they used to be, it is likely that the valuation of success in that field is comparably diminished. Which is only to say that highbrow people sometimes pretend to despise stories which, mysteriously, is very discouraging for good story-writers. So before pretending to dislike anything, remember how writers of all kinds - like people - urgently need unlimited approval. When the approval is actually merited they need it less, but then it is somehow more fun to give …

How enjoyable it is, then, to know on the first page of a book which sets out to tell a good story, that its author knows his business - that he can present a curious or unlikely sequence of events so smoothly that one is delighted to accept them; that he can use coincidence - like pepper - simply to heighten the accidents of his tale, and most of all, that he is able to keep characters in their place as mere pawns in the game - they can be subjected to danger, fear, and death, and one is simply fascinated - one does not mind at all.

Mr. Eric Ambler fulfils all the exacting obligations of a good story: this one is about two American tourists who get dangerously involved in smuggling some ornaments from Malay into Indonesia via a number of gentlemen who regard this activity as a good financial risk. What is most charming about the shape of the book is that the originator of the plot - a little Indian called Girija Krishnan, who discovers the cache of arms and is determined to profit by them, is moved by a long-cherished dream to run a European bus service in the remote Malay district where he lives. To this end he employs his own patience, great ingenuity, a certain amount of courage, and other people’s cupidity, stupidity and false notions of themselves. Not the least of Mr. Ambler’s accomplishments is the ability to write, in English, dialogue which is being spoken in another tongue so well that one has the impression that one is reading Malay or Chinese. But this book, like so many Amblers, is stamped with the hallmark of apparent ease - there is nothing to it, really, you just have to be Mr. Ambler.

December 1959

Mr. Byrom is a comparative newcomer to the field. This is his second book - about a young doctor who, in telling a lie to safeguard an old childhood flame, involves himself in two murders, professional blackmail, and a marital crisis with his sensible and nice wife, and with these major incentives, does some private detection in the course of which he finds out rather more than he bargained for. This is racy, intelligent, essentially light-hearted writing, with a good variety of characters, and on the whole the author spins his web so intricately that there is no time to worry about one or two airy improbabilities.

December 1959

This is Agatha Christie’s sixty-first detective novel, and well up to her standard. This time she has set her scene inside an exclusive girls’ school run by the most enlightened head-mistress and her devoted assistant. The girls range from a Middle-Eastern princess to nice freckled English girls mad keen on tennis, but it is one of these who has the intelligence to understand why there are two murders in the sports pavilion and to go to Hercule Poirot with her discovery. It seems to me that Miss Christie gets steadily better, and when I consider the number of people she ‘has taken out of themselves’ - the people who have said ‘Don’t speak till I’ve finished this’ multiplied sixty-one times by heaven knows how many thousands, I am mathematically moved to admiration, although I suppose M. Poirot would claim most of the credit, as he would never stop to think where he might be without her.

December 1959

If one thought hard about who was most likely today to produce a satisfactory collection of short stories, considering the large range of place and subject-matter which is preferable, and the sharpness and lightness of touch which are essential, hoping for humour and longing for wit, one would arrive in the end at Pete Ustinov. One would be quite right.

March 1960

Reading Miss Spark is a little like travelling at a depth of water to which one is utterly unaccustomed: the depth is precise, and one meets species which one would miss in shallower or deeper water; they are, one feels, more adapted to the pressure than oneself. It is neither light nor dark, but translucent, and one observes these creatures observing one another without really knowing the significance of their behaviour. Sometimes, in one’s ignorance - like children watching monkeys - they seem very funny, absurd, and repetitive; their ultimate indifference to one another is rather alarming, but they also seem to get upset by absolute trivialities … About three-quarters of the way through one realises that one is, after all, able to see these creatures, has been travelling at their depth so to speak, and begins to wonder rather uneasily whether the difference between them and oneself is quite what one supposed …

This novel is another phrenetic fantasy, this time dominated by a diabolical clown called Dougal Douglas, who wreaks change - which equates with havoc - in two textile industries and a collection of their workers. It is, as always with Miss Spark, very well done, and rather as though she chooses to pretend that people are butterflies and paints their portraits with a pin - which is exact without being true. Her dialogue has a kind of surrealist accuracy which reminds me of Mr. N. F. Simpson’s plays and, if you are entertained by him, she will entertain you, as she exposes a certain layer - an aspect of personality - which lies in all of us with such remorseless and entertaining brilliance that one cannot believe that it is the only layer she sees.

July 1960

This is the fifth novel in the author’s series
The Music of Time
, and it is necessary to admit that I have not read any of its predecessors: an embarrassing admission, but possibly useful to you as, if you have read any of them, I feel that you will know whether you wish to read this one or not. Mr. Powell’s idiom and style, which are both personal and impeccable, have that air of establishment and mastery which imply that he has long found his language, and his method of aiming just off the bull’s-eye of his target in order to make sure that you’ve noticed exactly what it was, has been conducted to a fine art.

This novel takes place in the ‘thirties during the Spanish Civil War; the narrator, Jenkins, becomes friends with a composer called Moreland, who in turn has a morose friend - a music critic - called Maclintick, whose marriage is like a perpetual aftermath of an angry street accident. Moreland marries an actress and Jenkins has married Isobel Tolland, whose large, well-housed family also permeate this work. Events occur, but one has no feeling that the characters’ sense of reality hangs upon them - an interesting and unusual inversion of affairs and people in a novel. The latter are so absolutely and unobtrusively real that one has no sense of watching them, or even of meeting them on a series of occasions; one simply - after a few pages - is absorbed into their life - even the tempo does not seem to have the distinction between art and nature to which one has become accustomed. There is nothing boring in this apparently leisured disquisition, nor is one irritated by the way in which ‘dramatic moments’ are deliberately side-stepped, because the writing has a kind of gentle, sinuous power and a consistent degree of intelligence about it which simply commands acceptance, although, in retrospect, I was left with a hunger for some more passionate nature than I found in Mr. Powell’s ecology.

July 1960

For those who have not read Roy Jenkins’s recent biography of Dilke and are not otherwise informed, here is a brief account of the affair. Mrs. Crawford, whose mother had had an affair with Dilke, and whose older sister married his brother, was herself married off to a Scottish lawyer twenty years older than she, whom she did not in the least love. Some time after her marriage, she began an affair with a Captain Forster, and five years after it she confessed to her husband that Sir Charles Dilke had seduced her in the most shocking circumstances. On the strength of her confession alone he brought his action and obtained divorce. Dilke, at the time, stood a very good chance of becoming next Prime Minister, and which public opinion demanded why, if Mrs. Crawford’s story was false he did not deny it, and if true, why he should be considered a fit person to govern the country; there was a second trial, but the court upheld the original verdict and Dilke was ruined. Captain Forster married someone else and Mrs. Crawford became a Catholic and devoted herself to good works until she died in 1948.