Onward!
Duncan Fallowell Figures in Bright Air David Plante (Gollancz £3.75) None Shall Know Peter de Pol nay (W. H. Allen £3.50)
David Plante's new novel, Figures in Bright Air, complete with Hockney etching on the cover, is a finely tooled piece of whatnot which, fortunately for us, beggars description. You should buy it because (a) it is not something you are ever likely to have subscribed to before, and (b) it is not conventional 'value-for-money' either. There are not many whom one can visualise rushing to this sort of book in a positive way, even at the level of emotional self-torture on which it is often written. Its upholstery of images is very bleak: beach, ice, rock, waves. And such landscapes as there are have a tendency to resolve into geometric shapes. There are only characters: mother, father, their boy Ewen, the narrator who loves him. They do not make polite conversation. They screw, avoid each other, kill, and regret it. Although I picked up a sensation of hillbillies operating in a series Of elemental realities and knowing a great deal more about Nature than one expected, social attributions are not included, and the Appalachian overtone could well be mY own contribution to the reading experience.
These people wander about in bright air filled with longing, stumbling through rhomboids, cracking their shins against a quandary seen by the author as resembling a tetrahedron in design, a dilemma sharing the properties of a parallelepiped on heat, or simply stuck onto the points of a plain old-fashioned triangle. An extract will give you the idea of how these unfortunate conditions are presented: 'I knew the unfamiliarity beamed from its facets onto the surroundings, making what had been grey and green various shades of yellow, making the planes and angles shift, shortening and lengthening sight-lines and distances.'
Now David Plante is of French Canadian origins and this sort of thing is very French indeed. Despite what anyone thinks, Figures in Bright Air is a novel of passion and inlmense tension with the weird, self-generating power of a vortex. He is trying to bring the emotional territory of Jean Genet inside
the disciplines of Robbe-Grillet's technique and if he fails it is because the geometrY which governs the emotions is by and large a secret for us. The result abounds with celestial paradoxes and paralogisms. The most extraordinary paradox of all is that a book which should have come across as inhuman and abstract does, in fact, comet° resemble Henry Miller with the narrative bits subtracted.
If compared to the wisecracking polychromatics of very modern writing Plante's avant-gardisme seems passe, pre-Beckett even, a feeling of affectation because the unfamiliarity of the content is not confirmed bY an equivalently original attitude to language, it is because David Plante is not a major writer. But he is much more interesting than many of those claimed as major', since he brings the good news that the novel is still alive and edging forward here and there along a broad front to prove that 'entertainment', 'good yarn' and 'diversion' are ultimately get-out clauses from the energetic responsibilities of creating.
On the other hand it is recognised that most folk like nothing better than the oPportunity to get out, and for such people who cannot stand the sight of themselves Peter de Polnay's None Shall Know is among us to tell what happens to someone else who wins two million francs at the French Lottery, thereby extending your horizontal knowledge about life. He is everything a good writer is supposed to be: Witty, smooth and dry, 'realistic', penetrating, well-informed about hotels, hinting at the deeps, and totally unmemorable.
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