An Awful Lot of Books (8 page)

August 1961

Some novelists write about ordinary and general circumstances and rely upon their characters’ reactions to provide the extraordinary element; there are others who create extraordinary circumstances in order to expose general - or universal - reactions and emotions. This singular, brilliant, confounding little novel is of the second kind, and before I start upon its matter, I must say that it is written with astonishing simplicity and force, and the result is both direct and fastidiously discriminating.

An American boy, fifteen when the book opens, is ‘adopted’ by a very rich couple called Bill and Mary, and with them lives a life of dazzling sophistication and opulence. He is narcissistic, cynical, precocious, highly intelligent, with a cold heart and a restless mind, and he makes the most of the situation afforded him. Then Bill asks him to go to Europe - without Mary - whom they leave in New York. Bill is dying of cancer, and Hector finds himself inexorably drawn into responsibilities which cannot be handled at all without emotion, and where the emotion required is painfully mature. They spend a winter in Paris, and Hector arrives through love to some understanding of the man he is waiting to lose. When it is over, he returns to America and sends himself back to school. On the face of it, this is not a pretty story: the rich, heavy, hard-drinking, rather dull man who has made good and doesn’t know what to do with it, and the sharp little playboy, sexually and materially on the make, bound together by disease and death. The author has loaded all the dice against himself and then transformed these people by making them make a mutual and moving discovery of their essential natures. It is an inversion of the way Mr. Maugham goes about people, where underneath the conventionally ‘nice’ exterior often lies a seething mass of ulterior motive: here it is underneath the unattractive exterior of these two men that one is shown the reality which is the charming truth about them. This novel is certainly caviar to the general - many people may dislike it. But some, I think, will welcome a new and remarkable talent, and certainly if one gets the chance of a little caviar, it is madness not to try it.

September 1961

Heroes of thrillers have to be tough in order to survive being on the right side for more than fifty pages. John Talbot, the narrator of this fierce, tough and breathless story is pretty well indestructible. After a brief prologue, which sets the scene - Florida and the Gulf of Mexico - he is in a hot country courtroom, as the prisoner. He shoots himself out of this, taking as hostage a young, blonde girl named Mary Ruthven, who turns out to be the daughter of a millionaire. After some nerve-wracking hours on the road - police blocks, all radios calling out for him (he has shot a policeman) - he and Mary get picked up in a motel, and taken to her home; a simple colonial mansion studded with anti-burglar devices, which seem needless, as it was already packed to the roof with relentless ruthless and, to put it simply, nasty men. General Ruthven seems to have locked all doors on a stableful of thugs.

The General owns an oil rig called X13, twelve miles out in the Gulf, and it is there, and many fathoms below it that most of the story is fought out. The last scene is in a bathyscaphe (it is fascinating how more and more fashionable life is being conducted under water - viz. the last James Bond), and finally, the good end happily and the bad unhappily, which according to Miss Prism, is what fiction means. In this case, the bad come to various, violent, and definitive ends, and the good have that touch of romantic tragedy about them which is concerned with abstract satisfactions like revenge and justice. I enjoyed this book very much: I like suspense, and action, and wondering what will happen but not caring too much about it all. Mr. Maclean seems to me to be growing as a writer in this medium: he is acquiring greater economy and precision, and also walking that tightrope of not quite cheating the reader about fore- and after- knowledge of events.

September 1961

Mr. Wilson’s new novel is set in 1970 at the London Zoo. The narrator of the story is Simon Carter, ex-Treasury, and now the Zoo’s Secretary; married to a rich and charming young American and with two children. He is a naturalist with a great love for badgers (who as we know, take a deal of watching if one is to see anything of them), and has therefore some informed interest in the Society he serves. His life, like so many others when viewed in these general terms, seems to be both pleasant and stimulating. In fact, or life - and this novel is a most faithfully brilliant exposition of that transient quantity - Carter is beset by the warp and woof of loyalty and conscience: on the one hand, he has the Director, Leacock, over sixty, and relaxing into euphoric generalities the practice of which - at their best - involve everybody else in unnecessarily hard work; on the other, there is Sir Robert Falcon, Curator of Mammals, and number two in the Society, who has a belligerently nostalgic passion for maintaining and substantiating the old Zoo architecture and ways.

Carter, wedged between these two with the responsibility of reconciling and administrating their enthusiasms, has also to deal with them against a background of intermittent international crises. These bring about the realisation of Leacock’s dream - a vast National Park in which all fauna can be seen at ‘limited liberty’ - which is aided by the Zoo’s President, a powerful old cynic who owns a lot of newspapers and dabbles forcefully in politics. The National Park is established, and then, when it has served its purpose, abandoned. Leacock is out, and Falcon in. Further crises lead to war, and Carter witnesses Falcon’s collapse, and outside and beyond it, the collapse of the world round him. The book ends after the war and its immediate consequences are over, with Carter, who has in a sense lost everything through his painstaking loyalty to idea rather than people and through his adherence to the interest of the Society, applying for the Directorship of it.

Here is the kind of novel that is immensely enjoyable at the time of reading, and that strikes one afterwards with all kinds of excellent intricacies. Mr. Wilson has a genius for implication: he has also this time produced a structure that exactly contains another structure with no space wasted, this process continuing as far as the mind cares to pursue it. These qualities of internal balances and fittingness are a hallmark of the satisfying novel; a chief reason for making one want to re-read, because there is more to discover than one apprehends at first sight. Mr. Carter seems to me to suffer a little too much from chronic disgust at his own species to be a really happy administrator in any circumstances, and his relationship with his wife is not quite round enough to stand the passage of a book, but neither of these criticism spoil a work beautifully composed of interest and entertainment (the description of a television programme, for example is a superb instance of the latter without being simply a tangent to Mr. Wilson’s theme) and the whole work is written throughout in the author’s top gear.

October 1961

Here is a delectable collection of stories by the author who seems to me just about the best living exponent of this elusive art. The title story is the major work, showing, apparently casually, a wonderfully clear and particular picture of a family in London faced with the return of their Hilda after thirteen years in the Far East and two marriages. Hilda, who is an exotic enigma to all of them, arouses curiosity, envy, protection and excitement - all lubricated with their various family relations to her. They never discover her, they never see how much she has discovered them, and when she goes they are left with their distant speculations - she is again a chronic topic of family conversation. I think I liked
The Wheelbarrow
best, as it has a character fraught with layers of innocence and guilt at which Mr. Pritchett excels, but there are several fascinating portraits in other stories - an accountant suffering from a film star brother, a very old and redundant gentleman who has fallen back upon food; a woman living on the telephone and calamity who collects a pulverising bore with whom to bank her best memories, etc. There is a continuous sense of the ridiculous in this writing, but the author also keeps a kindly eye on the truth about his people, so that they are never simply comic inventions; while you are laughing at them, you also entirely see what they mean. The narratives are studded with exact observation, and the dialogue and constructions are so good that one cannot think why Mr. Pritchett does not write some one-act plays.

October 1961

This is also a collection of stories by an author, some of whose work, at least, almost everybody must have read.
The Day of The Triffids
is not easily forgotten - nor is
The Midwich Cuckoos
. Most of these stories deal with confusions about time - the confusion induced by drugs, electronic experiments, and so on. Unfortunately, they don’t seem up to Mr. Wyndham’s high and demanding form. I suppose when the fantastic fails it is demoted to being merely far-fetched - meaning that the reader has not been gripped and temporarily convinced by a possibility, however remote, in the way he wants if he reads this kind of work. The first story, about a young woman doctor who through taking an experimental drug discovers herself way in the future in a women’s world, seems more unpleasant than it is anything else. The last story, about a man who, playing a tape of his own voice backwards at slow speed, accidentally summons a devil, is easily the best: this seemed to me neat, funny and well-shaped throughout. Three of the others have a curiously old-fashioned taste to them: at one point I even thought that the author was parodying Conan Doyle: it is not simply that everyone drinks stiff brandies whenever their sense of time - or the lack of it - gets too much for them; there’s also a kind of dogged pace and structure which doesn’t go with the stream lined inventions employed. I suppose pawns don’t date, and this is partly what makes these characters able to hop or lurch from one stretch of time to the next, without in most cases, anyone being any the wiser. This sounds rather savage when one has had so much entertainment from Mr. Wyndham’s earlier books - the truth is that he has conditioned one to expect almost too much of him.

March 1959

It is hardly possible to read this delicious book without several pangs of envy. Mrs. Huxley seems to have been provided with all the equipment for a rich and satisfactory childhood: wild, beautiful country, real things to do in it, parents who never put stupid brakes upon her enjoyments, and a life charged with adventure and magic. It is what all children want, and it is delightful to read about one who never seemed to have to make do with substitutes for the real things.

Her parents went in 1931 to make a coffee farm at Thika (which was then a name on the map in Kikuyu country in Kenya). Gradually, in spite of innumerable difficulties, they attract Kikuyu labour, acquire a headman who is half Masai, half Kikuyu, build a house and plant their coffee. They have neighbours: a tough Boer farmer, an Edinburgh nurse married to an absent elephant hunter, an English couple straight out of a Pinero play - and the Kikuyu. The author naturally collects an assortment of interesting animals, but she does not seem to have had any companions of her own age, and it is possibly because of this that she observed so much of the life around her: the Kikuyu - thick with witchcraft, ruled by totally different, but rigid values of necessity, propriety and right; Sammy, with his Masai habits, behaviour and legends; and the white neighbours with their grown-up problems of love and happiness - all this she absorbs with the acute, impassive attention of a child, accepting the different phenomena with impartial interest, and adding it to the store of experience that she is accumulating on her own.

Mrs. Huxley not only writes about all this extremely well - she never makes the mistake of looking back on her childhood as a grown up, so that her memories here are pure, and not tainted by grown-up present reflections upon them. There is a wonderful description after the war had begun when the author is sent to stay on a farm up-country near Molo on the western wall of the Rift Valley. Here are forests of olives and cedars, threaded by paths made by game and the little Dorobo, hunters who are hardly ever seen. She goes for an early walk, and comes upon one of the mysterious and beautiful glades where are two small buck who watch her with blackberry eyes until she moves, when they spring away and vanish. Then she becomes aware that she is being watched, and a moment later a little Dorobo magically appears. There is a marvellous feeling in this story - the forest soaked in morning dew, the way in which she and the Dorobo accept each other with the few words they both have in common and simply go off to continue the adventure together - that displays the essence of the book.

This is understandably the Book Society Choice for March and we published an excerpt from it earlier this year. Mrs. Huxley is well known for her writing about Africa, but for those who have not previously read her, this work will be a most charming and worthwhile introduction.