An Awful Lot of Books (4 page)

Miss Askwith has written a fascinating novel, the best feature of which is the way in which she has contrived to convey the Victorian life of this class at that time without ever seeming to strain after it. This book really does have the feeling of that overfed, padded and orderly boredom from which no doubt a number of people (women particularly) were driven to deceit and violence when physical and mental inactivity and emotional repression became too much for them. She bases her novel on the conclusion that Nia Crawford was not in fact seduced by Dilke, but describes how, at thirteen, she comes upon him making love to her mother. She also involves another lady in the plot - a Mrs. Rogerson, who was a friend of the Dilke family, a widow and who possibly had her own reasons for wanting Dilke ruined - or at least reduced. On this basis the plot is most ingeniously worked out to reach the public point of disaster which had such far-reaching effects. Miss Askwith - in her author’s note - is so honourable and exact about the distinctions between hard fact, strong likelihood and the point at which she has drawn her own conclusions and made the material to fit them, that while admiring the novel that she made, I found myself in the curious position of disagreeing with her conclusions solely on the facts of the matter which she has provided. But this only shows that she has succeeded in her intention of thoroughly engaging one’s interest in a situation which seems to have all the ingredients for a first-class contemporary opera.

July 1960

The blurb on the jacket of this novel likens it to
The Turn of the Screw
, and in terms of atmosphere this is a fair comparison, although Miss Paul’s excellent style is all her own. It is a work which takes thoroughly into account what is often loosely termed a ‘sixth sense’, which is perhaps only several senses combining to apprehend what one alone cannot.

A child mysteriously and utterly vanishes - is lost - and all those who had any connection with her are left with the almost tangible weight of her pathetic and not very appealing personality. After the immediate hue and cry for her has died down and no evidence has been found to account for her disappearance, the effect of it upon all those at all connected with her begins to gather force until it seems to be entirely surrounding them. Years pass but - particularly for the young woman who was the last to see the child - nothing has been forgotten or resolved, and her need to be comforted out of her aching ignorance of the child’s fate has assumed the proportions of anguish. For a brief, tantalising time the child - now a girl - seems to have returned, but before anything can be proved or discovered she has gone again … The elements of mystery seem here to divide into light and shade - to shine and shiver and blot from one to the other - all the people concerned less and less able to design or control their climate, until a sudden resolution breaks upon them like a storm which shatters or clears their different airs.

It would be unnecessary in this extraordinary and original book to describe the people: they are entirely convincing; but they too, have mysterious contrasting qualities. One sees them on different scales - blown up to enormous shadows - making the miniature, mechanical movements of marionettes - or prosaically and exactly like anybody one might meet. The writing is consistently interesting, and although possibly on one or two (most minor) occasions Miss Paul has conjured a little, she has a marvellously worked out and intricate structure to a novel which has that particularly good feeling about it that more of its aspects have fitted in with one another than were dreamed of in her original philosophy.

August 1960

Mr. Karp, who seems to me one of the best novelists writing today (and whose last novel I picked up just now and was again unable to stop reading) has achieved here a novel with a dream-like, but pungent quality; comedic fantasy masking acute observation and serious comment. It is continuously entertaining and funny; as the same time it is accurate, extremely skilful at sticking quietly to its point and altogether another triumph for Mr. Karp.

Julius Schapiro works for a play producer called Pollack who runs his small concern on his ex-wife’s cash (it never makes any money because no plays are actually produced but, as Mr. Pollack says, it is not a business but a vocation ‘like a church’). Julius’ spare time is spent fruitlessly writing pop songs, and more hopefully with an entrancing young woman called Daphne, whose innocence seems to him so reckless that he asks her about her early life. She tells him: a virgin until she was twelve...sold into slavery in Marrakesh when she was sixteen…rrested eight times, in jail six times ...smoked hashish for the first time at fifteen, took heroin at sixteen….has killed three men and two women, been shot twice stabbed four times and whipped three times - and, she finishes engagingly, is now in love with him. She is lying: but no, she, like her idealistic father, is a Truth Seeker, and they do not lie. But Julius also has a mother, whose simple questions (richly surrounded by a predatory, idolatrous monologue about him, which is her secret life) soon unearth the fact of Daphne, who is not a Jewess, and this inflammation - she stops at nothing - provokes a letter from her addressed to ‘dear J. Edgar Hoover’…

To Evelyn, the secretary in Pollack’s agency, plain, clear-sighted and awake, all these characters - and many more - are sleep-walkers, each of them drifting in their private unreality; smiling out of the little vacuum of their dream worlds - so foolish, so touching, that although she keeps resolving never to wake them, she knows that resolution is meaningless, as life would be intolerable if she did not try.

September 1960

These twelve stories make me think of a very well-designed
hors d’oeuvre
with deliberately predominating factors of colour and taste. They are written with the ease and economy which amounts to brilliance: in appearance they are all about marriage and children; in taste they are about several kinds of loneliness or isolation. Collections of short stories may have certain disadvantages, but they have one powerful start on the novel. If you want to make some statement and have the skill to make it from twelve different points, you have a greater chance of being understood without being accused of repetition. Mrs. Mortimer makes her points - about the difficulties or impossibility of communication, about people thrusting themselves or one another into little cages of habit, about the mechanical momentum that behaviour can acquire after the original instinct or desire has vanished. In spite of her capacity to entertain, one has the feeling that the particular view of human relations which she has fixed upon shocks her, and also that the shock must either diminish or considerably increase before she can have anything more to say about it.

September 1960

The girl is Jenny Bunn from the North of England coming south to a country town near London to teach in a school and board in a bleak house owned by an ineffectual bonhommous crook and his desperate and rather nasty wife. The moment she arrives she meets Patrick Standish who teaches in the college on the hill, and from then on the book is mostly about their relationship and whether she should go to bed with him or not. Upbringing, and even some (finer?) instincts are against this, but everybody gets what they think they want in the end.

Mr. Amis is at his best with inanimate objects; he can be very funny about boilers and food and cars and bars; but except when he finds his people absurd - when they are also funny - they are simply dull, and they are dull an awful lot of the time.

September 1960

Mr. Wyndham seems always able to get hold of a startling idea and then make it fearfully convincing and likely, and is consequently compulsive light reading. This time the head of a small research unit discovers some mysterious properties in a little known lichen. At first the discovery seems the answer to one of the oldest dreams known to man, but its discoverers soon run into difficulties. The lichen grows in one very small area in a province of Manchuria: there is not enough of it to treat more than a few thousand people, and the political, economic and social implications of this are soon alarming. The story is ingeniously worked to the restful conclusion of the two people most concerned with the lichen settling down to further research, and living happily for far longer than the fairy tales mean when they talk about ‘forever after’. This book is rather carelessly written, unlike
The Day of the Triffids
: for instance, people call each other by their names far too often, as they do in amateur plays, and there are other marks of haste or indifference.

September 1960

This elegant tale - inexorably French - written by a kind of Constance Spry of human relations and impeccably translated (by which I mean into beautiful English, but you know all the time that it is good French), is all about one thing leading so neatly to another that it accumulates a poetic bulk of fantastic probability. It is light hearted, trivial and charming and none of these words are derogatory, because those seem to me to be its deliberate intentions.

September 1960

The hero of this novel, Henry Lamb, has written a first novel,
Gentlemen Prefer Gentlemen
, which was intended as a quiet piece of mischief, but the intelligentsia hail it as a fearless work of social significance, and Mr Lamb becomes a celebrity to the utter dismay of his father and uncle - the latter at once leaving for the Himalayas. Mr. Lamb is offered the post of Special Caribbean Correspondent to
Torch
, a new progressive weekly subsidised by big business.

This is the opening of a novel which seems to me the funniest since
Scoop
, and indeed Henry Lamb and William Boot have much in common - including good manners and a kind heart. There is an awful voyage - exacerbated by Christmas - with the passengers divided into those who ‘feel that they have a contribution to make’, including the cultural Wendy Perowne, and those like Father Pink and our hero who simply make it…

In Port of Spain, Henry, who has been told by his editor - another intellectual humanitarian - to write exactly what he likes about what he sees, innocently sets about this, which lands him in deep disgrace with the Government,
Torch
, Miss Perowne and absolutely everybody who expected contributions in keeping with the fashionable views held about his novel. On the credit side are Father Pink and the magnificent Candida Firebrace - a child both of God and nature - and the fact that his family are unreservedly proud of his total failure.

Miss Honor takes the mickey out of a certain brand of crass poseurs who cannot ever see a tree for the wood: she is continuously amusing without ever being bitter, and she is positive in the sense that she does not confine herself to pulling everybody into their absurd component parts - Henry Lamb is a bewitching character.

September 1960

This author, who has proved herself - among other capabilities - to be a novelist of considerable range, has here attempted an idea the details of which all seem to be in place, but which as a whole strikes one more as an interesting experiment than a successful achievement. In a sense, it seems a little like an amateur’s brilliant idea for a novel, most professionally carried out.

A boy standing on a bridge in Limerick discovers that he does not know why he is there, where ‘there’ is, or even what he is called. A lift in a car takes him twelve miles to a village called Drumnair, which he not only knows - although he is sure that he has never been there - but where he also seems to be known, and where the effect that he has on a number of people is as violent as it is various. For two days he lives in a kind of enchanted dream of cognition without memory: he falls deeply in love and discovers easily something which had seemed irretrievably lost, but his identity is all the time catching up with him, and eventually invades his two days’ life.

There are curious layers in this book - a fairy tale element, but not quite the urbane simplicity required by that medium; a good deal of Catholic activity of the practised and practical kind; the outworn splendours and eccentricities of a large decaying country house - furnished and inhabited by Irish who seem to have direct literary affinity with their Russian nineteenth-century counterparts, and finally those acute, almost photographic, touches of contemporary English life at which so many good novelists, including Miss Frankau, excel. They all go to form a most readable novel which makes up in pattern what it seemed to me to lack in complete formal success.

October 1960

If one were to look for a thread running through her novels, I suppose it would be that Miss Spark takes account of the devil and is engaged upon denouncing at least some of his works. This time, the story is about the impending trial of a middle-aged spiritualist medium called Patrick Seton on charges of forgery and fraud and its influence upon a collection of people intimately or remotely connected with him. There is a spiritualist group divided by their opinions of his innocence or guilt; his girl, who pregnant and diabetic, could be said to feel that there is no fate like death; and, in and around these, the bachelors, of whom the chief is Ronald Bridges, graphologist, epileptic, and the most affectionately conceived character in this ruthless array.