An Awful Lot of Books (7 page)

Mr. Ansell knows his country and understands his people: he reiterates too much, which may truthfully be the Jewish form of protest, although it needs, in a novel, to be implied rather than actually experienced, but this is a book well worth reading for its intelligent treatments of a universal predicament.

April 1961

Alexander Denham is the successful head of a feature agency which Fleet Street takes seriously. He is married to a neurotic German refugee, and they live with her father in Finchley. There are no children; he does no journalism, let alone write the plays and novels he once envisaged, and his wife is intolerable. In his work he is surrounded either by people who all talk about their dreams and ambitions as he used to talk twenty years earlier, or by his contemporaries who seem to have slipped into a kind of mechanical sensuality which he finds infinitely depressing. He makes an attempt to work on an assignment - going to Germany, and taking his wife. His wife walks out on him, and on his way back to England, he meets a girl on a train. It is not until all the structure of his life has fallen to pieces that he can leave out his dreams or self-criticism and continue quietly with the next event in his life.

This is a psychological and introspective novel, set in a convincing professional scene - the author has both feet on the ground, even if his toes are turned in, but although some of the writing here is good, I still don’t feel sure what he was driving at. That the wife’s neurosis should rest on imagination is a cliché of neurosis: I was not convinced of the reasons for the marriage in the first place, and as shown, it had become such an unbearable business, that the spectacle of the husband’s endurance - minus much pity or any love - was not an inspiring one.

May 1961

Sammy is a boy of ten; South is some six thousand miles from Port Said, where he was living with his parents, to Durban, where his Aunt Jane keeps an hotel. When Sammy’s parents are killed in an air raid during the Suez crisis, he sets out alone on this enormous journey - with no idea of its distance and with no luggage but a Coca-Cola bottle and some chocolate. This book is simply his journey, which, aided and confused by all kinds of people and their different motives towards Sammy, is conducted throughout most faithfully and completely from his ten-year-old point of view. This is what lifts the tale out of the sentimental adventure class and makes it a novel with some epic quality besides its particular and original charm. Sammy is that composition of innocence, adaptability and determination - like a small animal thrown out of its element into water, he thrashes about and swims or drifts with currents because it never occurs to him that he might drown. He is only certain that he must reach land - in his case Durban - and the aunt who will give him love, protection and everything that he needs. This makes him able to survive even a most horrible early adventure, although it toughens and alerts his view of all the people who subsequently try - for good or bad reasons - to help him on his way.

By the time he has reached Khartoum, his disappearance has become news - and he is found and lost by an American tourist and an Italian journalist, neither of whom understands in the least what he is aiming at and what he has already become. It is not until - in Central Africa - he encounters an old man, a hunter, a renegade, an eccentric, and a man whose understanding matches his experience, that Sammy can actually accept help - to continue his journey on his own and finish it his own way. When he finally reaches Durban and the aunt who has been his goal of comfort and security, he has become somebody whose requirements are both more dignified and mature, and the aunt, who would never had provided for his infantile visions of her, discovers that she is able to meet him on these new terms which contain the reality of love.

Mr. Canway has not only written an excellent story - the adventures are exciting, extraordinary, and yet credible - he has also managed to show somebody growing steadily out of experience in the way that Sammy develops the resolution and courage to continue his journey in all circumstances and never retreats from any of them into becoming more of a child; they simply serve to sharpen his instincts, increase his discriminations and heighten his nature. The author has achieved this by a kind of gentle simplicity of treatment, the effects of which are unusual and moving.

May 1961

Mr. Shaw’s previous book
The Hiding Place
, was one of the best first novels that I have read. Is this as successful a piece of work? No. Is it a disappointment? Unless, like children, one wants Mr. Shaw to ‘do it again’ - meaning exactly the same thing in exactly the same way - no, it isn’t a disappointment either.
The Sun Doctor
, as second novels should be, is a much more ambitious novel, with a larger theme, more canvas, and consequently, more slack - so to speak - to take up on.

Dr. Benjamin Halliday comes back to England after twenty-five years in West Africa to receive a Knighthood. These years, which have all been spent in unremitting efforts to relieve human physical suffering, have left him exceedingly lonely, and indeed at almost every kind of loss.

In the second part of the book we go back a year or two, to tropical Africa (Angola or the Congo) where Halliday is searching for a particular herb known to grow in this sick, swampy region. He meets a native of the swamps who conducts him to an island in the interior which is inhabited by an extraordinary and pathetic community, where the sick rule the healthy by suggestion and are thereby preserved and served, although the village as a whole is slowly but perceptibly dying from under-nourishment as a result of this rule. Halliday stays with them, and becomes obsessed with the desire to prove to the healthy servants that they are not in fact subject to the miserable natural restrictions from which their poor sick chiefs are suffering, but in his anxiety to prevent further physical misery, he inflicts the utmost damage of another kind upon someone wholly vulnerable and innocent and his necessity to come to terms with this makes the rest of this book.

Mr. Shaw has managed to convey his Mandan community - their country, climate, behaviour and nature - with triumphant conviction: this kind of effect is only realized when intelligence and imagination are really combining to serve a natural novelist’s purpose. The trouble - or weakness - about the novel is in connection with Dr. Halliday. The danger signals are the need the author has to explain him - notably in terms of his childhood - which recurring parts of the book add nothing to the whole, and in fact often take the edge off it, and this need for explanation about a central character nearly always occurs when his creator is having to justify a partial understanding of what he is trying to make. Mr. Shaw is also unduly careless about detail and I point this out only because I think he has the capacity, and therefore no excuse for not taking infinite pains. But over and above this carping it is a novel entirely worth reading.

June 1961

China Court is a house built in 1840 in Cornwall by a family called Quin who own the local china clay quarries, and the novel encompasses five generations of the Quins centred upon this place. At the opening old Mrs. Quin has just died, but as she was eighty-one and had lived all her life in the village before she married, she was in touch all the way through the house’s family, from her husband’s grandfather to her own granddaughter, Tracy, whose childhood is spent with her. Through Mrs. Quin, Tracy learns to inherit memory and experience of all the people who have made and used and accumulated the house that they both love: and as the mind may radiate with random ease from its present to any moment of its past, and one is so contained in the other, the novel is not told either chronologically or in ‘flash-backs’, but presented without time in its usual sense of straight lines and distance. The effect is something like the difference between hovering low over a forest, instead of walking through it; the impression of the whole serves to heighten experience of the parts. All very well - possibly all very confusing - but the secret of the surprising and delighting clarity here is that Miss Godden’s sequences - although easy, are not random - have been selected with all the imaginative and feeling skill which is instinct in her work.

In a short preface she begs one to remember that when one first meets a large family, it takes time to distinguish them, asks for our patience and assures us that we shall not need the family tree at the back of the book. She is quite right, of course; the minimum of patience is needed and the tree is unnecessary: her people, met at different and not always the earliest moments of their varying lives, from the opening pages are sharply distinct, warmly alive, having those layers of flavour about them of being a family and of their particular periods in its history underlying their separate natures. It is a romantic novel, which I am well aware has become a dangerous thing to say, but I do not mean the true-love-in-a-wig-winning-through-to-sex-in spite-of-the-French-Revolution formula which has sneaked this appellation: I mean that it is a very good novel of the kind where the relationships of people to one another are taken to be of paramount importance.

July 1961

This is a collection of four radio plays and six stories by a novelist whose style and attitude are so well known that any more general remarks about them run the risk of being repetitive. But these pieces are of interest to anyone who - as I do - reads Miss Spark with admiration and curiosity - particularly if - as I did not - one has not heard her radio pieces. She says in her Note at the beginning of this collection that the plays are for the outward, the stories for the inward ear. They are all certainly for the ear: there is no one, I think, writing today who makes such continuous claims upon that organ, or who understands better how to take subtle advantage of it. It is indeed very near to certain kinds of music - supposing that one can sit down and read a score; one is able to hear her dialogue and easily make the transpositions of key or character which together compose the chords, or discords of a scene. Which ear these pieces fall upon, it is hard to say, and her distinction about them does not seems to me accurate - it is something more like an outward ear and an inward eye - even a private eye, for what she sees about people is usually that which they do not intend to have seen.

She is at her best when she is at her most simple, eschewing the supernatural, although everything she writes is always a little yeasty with the macabre. Thus,
The Fathers’ Daughters
, about an ageing and forgotten novelist, his shrewdly devoted daughter and the young man who naturally suits their situations, is one of the most successful, with dimensions to the father-daughter relationship both original and true, and
The Party Through the Wall
, a play about a neurotic who is haunted by the Edwardian revelries of the next-door house, is too extremely particular to make its point. Several of the stories take place in Africa, and one of the best plays on a mountain in Wales. Whether you like this remarkable writer’s work or not, it is impossible to deny her creative skill, and the liking perhaps depends on whether, in relation to human nature, you feel that the remaining four-fifths of the iceberg is much the same old ice - just a lot more of it - or whether it is secretly frozen brimstone.

July 1961

Reading this book after
Lanterns and Lances
one cannot help noticing the change in generation - it is more than the outlook of personality: where Mr. Thurber uncovers people as absurd, but seems to regard the absurdity as a particle of man as a whole, Mr. de Vries is more active, and savage and personal. He too uncovers people as absurd, but there is the suggestion that they are particular people and nobody ought to be like that. He is far more divided in his feelings about his material - so much so, that this novel seemed to be in two halves. In the first half he is occupied with a comparatively detached account of the goings on (in connection with a wedding anniversary) of a collection of people who come out like caricatures - good ones, they bear a distinct resemblance to people - bold, angled line drawings of their most laughable facets; in the second half it is as though, whether he likes it or not, he has got to know them, and a certain amount of humanity - his own and theirs - creeps into the tale. This made the second half of the book much better than the first, as to me, while anything might be a laughing matter, nothing is only that, and if people are simply unadulteratedly silly, they end up by making me feel sad: in the same way that no painter has managed to draw any animal well if he has felt for it nothing but ridicule, I do not think that any writer of fiction can deal with people if he finds them entirely and simply preposterous because it just is not all that people ever are.

The jacket of this book (oh dear, these jackets!) insists so frantically on the funniness of Mr. de Vries that one gets a block about that word, but yes, it is funny, and sharp, and observant, and slick, and in the character of Prufrock - with whom he seems most to identify himself - he has made somebody of more than two dimensions: Prufock, half Red Indian, and a writer for a TV comedian, collects people like birds’ eggs, and is despairingly aware of his lack of real response, until eventually he collects a girl who, so to speak, looks like hatching. There are a quantity of more distant characters, including a marriage counsellor, who reminded me rather too much of Mr. Trexter’s doctor in
The Second Tree from the Corner
. There is no need to tell the story, because it isn’t the point of this kind of book, but it is a perfectly good line on which to hang this galaxy of unconscious eccentrics.