'PEACOCKS as comets catapult across the tarmac road in a
tail- flurry of blue-green and gilded palm-frond feathers,' starts Han Suyin's . . . and the rain my drink (Cape, 16s.), 'to drop stag- gering, clutching, swinging their meek sharp heads upon the wire fences which ring the Sultan's Zoo. Tulips, poppy-red, grow in clusters forty feet up towards the sun-bleached sky, on the round- leaved glossy tulip-trees. In the Sultan's garden the verdigris statue of an arrow-spending cherub . . and so on, and so on: which is just the sort of meringue-like prose it is sad to find adhering glutinously to the severe and competent thoughts of a book of this kind. Mercifully, not much of the book is given over to straight description, so that most of the lush windy over- writing, the inversions and adjectives and affectations, are left by the way : yet the book does suffer, and badly, from its style. A pity : for Miss Han Suyin gives us a wonderfully comprehensive picture of today's Malayan life at an extraordinary number of levels and with an extraordinary understanding of each one of them—Malscyan, Chinese, British, bandit, administrative, prisoner. The trouble is that, having made it a novel, she seems compelled to stick into what is basically a tight documentary account some melodramatic excrescences to make a plot, and so, her line between fact' and fiction, the acceptable and the inadmissible, being a wavering and rather embarrassed one, this talented, energetic book suffers from its own indecision. I should, myself, prefer to have met it witho9t any fictional disguise at all, the material in it being plentiful, serious and (presumably) factual enough to stand on its own feet as fact, and Miss Han Suyin's fictional self (assumed rather arbitrarily here and there) being the least convinc- ing thing about her. Yet she compels a kind of whistling admira-
tion for the vigour, horror and scope of her treatment of an enormous subject, and for the sheer natural ebullience that sweePs you, reluctantly perhaps but impressedly, along.
A quiet domestic novel that is also good is such a rarity that when you- get three in a row it is odd enough to seem startling. Of the three that so strangely turn up together this week the most competent, the one with the most to say, too, is Anthony Rye's Giant's Arrow (Gollancz, 12s. 6d.), in which everything is worked. out within the strict framework of everyday, and of a firm ot instrument-makers called Kelly's. Between solid, successful office, conventional home, discreet pub, we are shown, so deftly that its enormity is barely obtrusive, the lurking lunacy under the staidest exteriors—in the pious Bridget who almost, but never quite, steals babies out of prams; in the slavishly devoted Carol whose secret life centres on the child she lost seventeen years ago; in the un- happy Naomi who, with a child of her own, for eight years refuses to go near it; in the upstart Devere who, disliking everything about her, seduces his scornful secretary on the ironically appropriate occasion of a business trip to Paris; in the girl her- self who, against every instinct, yields to him not just for the moment but for life. The meclianics of this improbable-sounding story do little to convey how peculiarly true to life the whole thing appears : how inevitable seem the idiosyncracies, hoe) real the heroism, the unpleasantness, the narrow circular affections and hostilities. The only thing I found distasteful about it were the cosy confessional chats, in a kind of neo-Greene murk that struck me as rather false and imitative, between the Catholic Kelly and his confessor; but the convent scenes between Kelly, the nun, and the ghastly idiot child were masterly. Mr. Rye has an almost grotesque talent for the ordinary, and his gentle, sinister, highly moral tale has the disturbing impact of an actual, almost tangible, situation.
The next—even quieter, and, in both the American and the English sense, more homely—is James Courage's The Call Horne (Cape, 13s. 6d.), in which the domestic hearth shifts to New Zealand, where family behaviour seems like a caricatured version of our own—everything, that is, just a bit heartier, tougher, and less demonstrative than ours. A doctor whose wife has been killed in a car crash goes home from England to have a nervous collapse mended by the cheerful but hardly subtle ministrations of his sheep-farming family; and meets a (similarly collapsed) English widow, who speeds up the process of recovery. The writing is taut, precise and occasionally vivid; and Mr. Courage has a knack of showing the middling but not necessarily mediocre situation, person, action, or thought with an exactitude, a robustness that is yet not insensitive, a kind of everydayness that, in a rarefied world of fiction, is rather refreshing. For unobtrusive verisimill. tude I have read few colonial novels to beat this one.
The third, Mary K. Harris's My Darling from the Lion's Mouth (Chatto and.Windus, 12s. 6d.), is a first novel with a quiet domestic setting undermined by the unquiet rumblings of adolescence. It starts brilliantly, finishes well, and sags in the middle, and is mainly remarkable for the study, not so much of the too-precious little heroine, as of the dogged housekeeper Flora who, four- square and fearsome, sees to it that Julia escapes contamination with what she sees as the devil, the world of the flesh. These all appear, the hot summer that Julia leaves school under one of those not infrequent schoolgirl clouds of discreet kleptomania, in the rather raffish person of a Mrs. Randolf, brought in as Julia's companion and general educator by her (Mrs. Randolf's) lover, the local doctor, and of a French Catholic family she introduces Julia to, which includes a sulky charmer called Thomas and a perfectly splendid jeune flue Nen élevee who is called Lucie. Nothing—beyond some family cricket, an abrupt kiss or two, and a storm of domestic jealousy—much happens: the atmosphere is heavy and still as the weather, as Flora's lowering moods, as Mrs. Rndolf's uncertain temper; but within what is almost a vacuum of inactivity the air of abnormality—Julia's innocence beside her grandfather's indifference and Flora's ignorant, muddleheaded devotion—is beautifully conveyed. Between the lyrical and the horrific, Miss Harris treads delicately; he has an exact ear for conversational distinc- Lnns. an exact nose for social—or environ- mental—smells, an eye for both landscape and Portraiture. Small-scale at present, she Promises a good deal. , Iwo satirical novels, both competent enough, "4.4, I think, for lack, not of conviction but u( indignation. John Bowen's The Truth Will ;„(4 Help Us (Chatto and Windt's, 12s. 6d.) true eighteenth-century story of a trumped- PP charge of piracy for political motives, put 1,P,t0 modern dress to suit the climate of ocCarthyism; and Robert Waller's Shadow rAuthority (Cape, 13s. 6d.), a tale in the 41re-1980—in which literature is taken over and taste controlled by a body called the National Publishing Authority. Both these in- ktniensive books go to show that satire is per- Pans the hardest sort of fiction to make com- Pelling, or, for that matter, to spin out to ',111Y length. As short stories, either might have °elm carried along on its basically promising ,Plea: but the idea is in each case too thin. '1)(1 meagrely spread to make a novel of it; 'tnd the final impression is of two intelligent writers talking contentedly but rather point- let
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