An Awful Lot of Books (2 page)

April 1959

This story, by the author of
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, has a brilliant idea, its situations are treated with wit and it only stops short of being in the first class for an unusual and interesting reason: the author betrays one of his main characters.

The story is set in a big French rubber plantation north of Singapore, the estate being hedged about with jungle in which lurk Chinese Communist bands. Delavigne, the Frenchman who manages the estate, is married to an American, Pat, a ‘do-gooder’ who is convinced that charity and kindness will convert any Communist to democracy. After an entertaining parallel has been drawn of the identical behaviour of the French preparing for a visit from the Company director, and the Chinese in the jungle preparing for a visit from a Communist leader, the terrorists attack to seize the plantation’s monthly payroll, and Pat gets her chance. She finds a nineteen-year-old girl terrorist - Ling - badly wounded at the bottom of her garden, hides and nurses her, and eventually persuades her husband to consider her adoption.

Ling’s subsequent conflict and metamorphosis are very well done, but to describe the ending, the jacket tells me, would be unfair, so I won’t. I will, however, point out M. Boulle’s unfairness to his own idea. We are given explicitly to understand that Pat is a ‘good’ character, that her principles and behaviour are unexceptionable; even M. Boulle is too cowed, or too bored, by the sheer volume of her goodness to come out into the open about her; so he resorts to lip service while at the same time more ingeniously implying his dislike until, having put her in a position where it would really be interesting to know her reactions, he slides out of this responsibility. If a novelist cannot preserve the detachment necessary to present his characters in the round, then he must at least have the courage openly to convict them.

April 1959

This novel attempts less and succeeds more; it is far the most balanced piece of work of the four (reviewed this week). Christopher Marshall is the younger son of an American millionaire who founded a vast business organisation. He has no ambition to emulate his father, and when the story opens is prepared to stooge in the set-up, provided he is not asked to do anything which interrupts his integrity. Eventually, by a number of ingeniously contrived events, he gets pushed into a position where he has to fight to preserve his integrity, and the struggle involves the breakdown of the bosses who have climbed to power via his father and who have always regarded him with contempt. Finally, he discovers that having opposed and exposed the people and system governing a vast business, he has set in motion a train of events about which he cannot remain detached - the focus of his integrity has, so to speak, shifted and continued action is not required of him.

The book is set in New York, London and Paris, and moves easily between the three places at a good, even pace. The characters, with the possible exception of Jane Lancing - the girl with whom Marshall falls in love - are well made (Jane is a little too precisely like life, which isn’t quite large enough for a main character in a novel). This is a kind of backbone of novel writing - basically readable and right, and as much drama has been displayed as the treatment of this theme can legitimately carry.

April 1959

This is the kind of novel which could easily have been entitled ‘Bed and Bored’. It is extremely well done of its kind: neatly written, larded with snippets of pre-digested philosophy, sometimes funny, and always light in touch - about a young girl at college who goes home on vacation to find that her parents have separated, has an affair, goes back to college, her parents join up again and her young man abandons her. Crossed in love, she decides to go to Europe (this is the American contemporary equivalent to Edwardians shooting bears - one imagines that the expense is much the same, and the dangers as monotonous).

If the author (incidentally, a Mr. Warren Miller, masquerading all over the jacket as Miss Vail) is right about the very young and really he is so convincing that at any rate he’s taken me in - it isn’t just that they don’t have fun any more, they don’t have anything. They are so stuffed with information about experience that there seems no room or incentive for them to have anything direct, so that when it comes to their own lives - and they come to them reluctantly - they go sadly through the motions of whatever it is they think they know something about: their subsequent disappointment is attributed by them to their becoming adult, the moral is probably: ‘Do not take your vicarious experience so seriously my dear’, but they have no aunt to say it - ‘not even of any kind’.

May 1959

This is the kind of novel which one must begin by saying briefly what it is about. Krishnan, a Brahmin, education in Cambridge, returns to an India on the brink of independence, to his family and an arranged marriage and a career in the Civil Service. He marries and takes Kamala to Delhi: there he meets again an English girl, Cynthia, whom he used to know at Cambridge, and has an affair with her which results in his leaving his wife. Kamala goes to work in a hospital in Shantihpur, where Hindu-Moslem conflict is most rife, and Krishnan, left with Cynthia, recognises what is foreign in her to his life, leaves her, and joins Kamala in Shantihpur. This is not the end of the book - in some senses it almost starts at this point - but it is enough of the story for these purposes.

It is a brilliant but uneven novel; its best achievement is that - written in English - all the characters excepting Cynthia are Indian, but she emerges as the alien element. She has thrown away almost everything which is externally predictable in her life because she feels that in doing so her life will be changed; Krishnan, after a brief struggle, understands that as a Brahmin all the externals of his life are arranged from birth to death and that it is with this knowledge and from this point that any change in himself can be made. To the Western mind, the inversions of gentleness and violence are foreign; there are no women here like Kamala, whose strength is sheltered in gentleness; and there are few men whose faith would precipitate the kind of violence in this book.

Balachandra Rajan writes with extreme intelligence and a delightful sense of humour: he seems to me a little afraid of country, and he also shies a bit at the climax of his book - but this novel does give one some feeling of India and shows something of the people he writes about - one is moved past curiosity to interest and some measure of understanding.

June 1959

In almost any company, when the subject arises, somebody will say that they don’t really like short stories, and as they are nearly always certain of support, the rest of the conversation has a dull, destructive ring about it and nobody is much the wiser, but whatever you usually feel about them, I beg you to try these stories and give them the chance of being your exception. The author, Jean Boley, travelled a great deal, and these fifteen stories are set in South America, Java, London, France, the U.S.A. and the Canary Islands, and while this was doubtless useful, her remarkable gifts do not seem dependent upon her changes of scene.

Whoever she writes about is immediately so real and clear that their life each side of the story is unrolled - one knows all of it from the piece that she presents. All her writing is composed of a lovely natural ability tempered by discipline and care for what she did: she writes exactly about people with an eye and ear trained by acute interest, amusement and affection for her subjects, and when you read her, it seems that there is no choice about what happens in her stories here were these people, and this is what occurred - you accept it as she offers it to you - with no desire to interfere or to judge (the main temptations provoked by less good work of this kind): but because she whets and satisfies the desire to be told something more, one reaches a point of curiosity about her. In the last piece one learns a great deal about her. This is the most interesting and impressive work of all, and only she, one feels, could have written it. It is her account of her three years’ experience of cancer, beginning with backache when she was in Java with her husband in 1954. From there the local diagnosis, flying back to America, the first operation with the ninety per cent chance of a total cure and the first year of uncertain convalescence which culminates in a recurrence of cancer and the certainty of death to be accepted (there is a wonderful account of her reaching this point and what it brought her).

In 1956 she had a third operation but when she came out of it with a strange nurse she knew that it had been useless and, when she was strong enough, flew to England to join her admirable husband. The last year of her life was spent mostly in London, furnishing the flat for her husband, feeling iller and iller and waiting to die. She says: ‘Sometimes we laughed, but death isn’t funny. When you are fatally ill the unspoken atmosphere in your house is unmanageable love. You yourself feel it for people, but also for things …’

In December her husband took her back to American for a visit to her family, but before she left England she visited a specialist who told her that she must have developed antibodies to fight her tumours. At the end of her account she says that some of the peace that came with her acceptance has gone, because there seemed to be a slight chance that she might live after all. She says: ‘You want to die well, not from the instinct for self-destruction but from the instinct for life and immortality. So you flip from a calm acceptance of death to a fight for life in an instant … in a sense they are one and the same.’

There is so much honesty and discovery in this record that there is something to be learned from it: it is unvarnished - she does not conceal or distort anything relevant to its point and she knows exactly what she wants to communicate because, among other things, she is an artist, and she gives throughout the account an impression of awareness of what was happening to her which can only be admired and loved.

June 1959

Hollywood again - this time the setting for an expert novel dealing with the 2-D life of a young film star, Kit McClaren - the dimensions being his Career and his wife. Both the star and his wife feel that getting to the top is everything: they also feel that Kit has got what it takes to get there, and one feels from the start that they ought to know, as she is a successful studio publicity girl, and he thinks about himself with the single-minded devotion given to few men on any subject. He makes it, and almost at once his wife leaves him. She is a fiery, foul-mouthed little thing, but she is the only other person who takes him as seriously as he does himself, and he misses her as he proceeds to a life of gruelling, monotonous luxury enlivened by the most awful evenings with a classically neurotic film star who lives in a rented home with a female parasite to rub her back, and who is learning to focalise her depressions by being articulate about them. Television is looming over the film industry, and Kit’s career is slipping. After vicissitudes such as a miserable trip to London and Paris and a studio-contrived marriage, both frightful and funny, Kit ends up with what he wants.

This is all written by a very capable author who clearly knows his Hollywood, and one gets strong impressions of glaring concrete, dusty palms and shabby, sweaty little men with ulcers trying to grab power and avoid responsibility; a world of mechanised invention, where people are properties, life is a bad dream which one can act one’s way through or in some way drug one’s way out of, and the Public is a kind of composite and barbaric god - unpredictable, implacable and avid.

June 1959

In spite of all we hear of Hollywood, it hardly ever gets written about at this level of brilliance and detachment. The people in these seven stories read like the ingredients of a strong and extraordinary cocktail, so skilfully mixed up are they, so well iced by Mr. Lambert’s observation and wit, and presented in the tantalisingly small quantity of the short story. Illusion and confusion reign: thus the title story is about California’s slipping coast-line where old ladies picnicking suddenly find themselves half buried many feet below, whereas in
The End of the Line
a blind old countess is under the impression that she is touring Europe when in reality she is safe at home listening to appropriate sound effects played and made to her by her parsimonious nieces.

There is also a devastating portrait of an imperishable star (the only character, I feel, who got a little under Mr. Lambert’s skin) and another about the teenage girl who comes on a bus three days from Illinois, and proceeds to drift gently downstream of her illusions - here the irony is less biting, almost tender, and reminds one a little of Salinger. These and other people are linked together by the author, who as a script writer observes them all on their separate little stages built to look like homes which are designed to look like sets on a stage: this confusion of reality and dreams is the real thread of the collection for none of these people can distinguish one from the other, any more than the old ladies knew that they were sitting on an avalanche; and it is the extremes of their uncertainty that Mr. Lambert explores, introducing here a miniature spectacle which one can enormously enjoy at the civilised distance his detachment provides.