Intuitions

Paul Ableman

Autumn Manoeuvres Melvyn Bragg (Secker £4.50) Melvyn Bragg's new novel opens with a distracted lady abroad on the fells. 'A great shower of yellow, golden-brown and russet leaves had newly fallen. They lay on her path through the garth.' The promise of this enchanting opening is not, alas, fulfilled. Still, there proves much to enjoy in what is soon revealed as not a monster nursery rhyme but a solid, old-fashioned novel about an election campaign.

Jimmie Johnston is the Labour MP for Cumbria. He is an incorrigibly decent middle-class socialist who never wavers in his adherence to civilized values no matter what the provocation and, from his stepson, Gareth, he receives such exorbitant provocation as to make his restraint seem well-nigh inhuman. Gareth is a glum womanizer, irreconcilably alienated from Jimmie because the truth about his bastardy has, from the kindest of motives, been with held from him. Gareth is alleged to be an ace disc-jockey but such is his remorseless, egotistic fury that one feels the mike, never mind the fans, would have been shrivelled by invective. It would, however, be too easy to write Gareth off as a melodramatic intru sion into an otherwise plausible group of characters. Embittered offspring of the wealthy classes are pulling triggers all over Europe.

Also occupying, or frequenting, the vicarage on the fells are Gareth's mother and Jimmie's wife, the distrait lady of the opening, who is emerging from a nervous breakdown, Marianne, the abandoned mother of Gareth's child, Helen, a blue-stocking, and others, including the indispensable old fam ily retainer, here discovered in the pic turesque guise of a superannuated miner. Also centre stage is Harold, a powerful, self-made magnate up from London to await the results of medical tests which will establish whether or not he is doomed and also to help Jimmie ward off allegations of

malpractice that involve them both and have been appearing in Private Eye. The

naming of the magazine suggests the (largely successful) striving after topical verismilitude of this novel. It is, in fact, a scenario for the next, rather than a report of the last, general election and enjoyment of it will be enhanced if the reader is au fait with contemporary political alignments as well as scandals such as the Poulson affair.

The Prime Minster, unnamed but Callaghanesque in his terse phraseology, comes to campaign for Jimmy and generates one of the most exciting passages in the book. During the veteran politician's long speech in the ballroom of the small industrial town, Bragg, doubtless drawing on expert know ledge, skilfully anatomizes media politics.

The PM, knowing he will be plugged into nationwide television in exactly fifteen sec onds, expertly times his build-up so that 'as the camera lights went red and the lenses swept across the enthusiastic audience' a 'spontaneous' roar of acclaim erupts. Jimmie is both impressed and embarrassed by his chief's 'wheeler-dealing'.

Mr Bragg, in fact, is more fluent and relaxed when evoking the strategies of power and publicity than when he is charting the interactions of mere mortals. He is clearly a deeply intuitive man, who can project himself into the mind and heart of a great variety of his fellows and recreate them convincingly. But there is a faint element of the `voulu' about his human characters and their problems. What really excites him are speeches and the instru ments by which they are projected, cameras, printing presses, microphones, the buzz of images and voices that blankets the planet. At one point two jet fighters thunder into the narrative and somehow achieve more grace than the human characters. At its best the prose rises well above its staple rugged efficiency. The following two extracts, taken from the same page, reveal its capacity for arresting and precise images: 'The affluence which had seeped over Britain in the fifties and sixties like a film of

alluvial silt . ' and 'Between the nineteenth-century furnace and the silent electronic humming of the twenty-first, the town stood abandoned . . . ' The writing does not, however, always sustain this level of excellence on its 'path through the garth'. It tolerates incorrect forms like 'circumloquitious' and ugly alternatives such as 'martyrised'. Occasionally, it lurches into fractured imagery worthy of the New Yorker's 'Block That Metaphor' slot: 'Yet if a diagram could have been drawn it would have shown that they were directly connected by a quiverfull of lines straight as arrows which went the shortest distance between them and carries jealousy, hatred, suspicion, curiosity, sympathy, identification, hope, worry, bitterness, relief, fear — all stretching by the hour with tension.' Curiously enough, because of its intrinsic vitality, the book sustains such blows with fortitude but they do reproach the editor who should have eliminated them.

The narrative effectively ends with the results of the election. It will be interesting to see, now that the Lib-Lab pact has been terminated, if the forthcoming autumn manoeuvres confirm Mr Bragg's prognosis, a narrow Labour victory. The human action, also, is not so susceptible to a neat climax and Mr Bragg lapses into a blend of melodrama and soap opera in trying to wind up his characters' affairs. Until the shor,t terminal section, however, which might profitably have been excised by that same nodding editor, the book is a convincing and enjoyable account of life at the hustings in the heart of England.

The apprehension of terror is one of the facts of the twentieth century. Which of us has not tried to imagine how we would react under suspicion, deprivation or torture, and how long we would hold out? What would it be like: how about having the next filling without an injection just as a test? Few, I think, extend the imagination to place themselves in the shoes of the oppressors, which is what Emanuel Litvinoff has done in this gripping epic drama of the Stalinist terror of the early 'thirties. His main characters are people who have embraced rep, • ression as a necessary weapon in the historical struggle, ordinary intelligent people who act under the brutal joke of disappointed idealism. Paths of casual cruelty and anguished compromise are trodden In the name of freedom and progress.

The third in a trilogy, the novel takes op the story of Piatkov, NKVD double-agent, and his once dashing aristocratically-born mistress, Lydia. The heady days are over, collectivisation has taken its appalling toll and it is the era of Kirov's assassination. Lydia, full of cynicism, is working in a state publishing house where Shakespeare Is ludicrously vetted for unreliable influences. Piatkov is subjected, on a secret mission to Berlin, to the same interrogation procedures which are meted out by his own section in Moscow. Terror mirrors terror. Pro

fessional je-..:lus nd envy finally entraP him. Totalliarian horror is, after all, big' league office politics. The only thing to survive is the dignity of love. This is a novel of great distinction, which wears historical detail gracefully and is not afraid to pose directly the basic questions of identity CM prison, a man nakedly confronts the problem of identity') and loyalty: 'Every man is, in some degree a double-agent. Loyalty to country co-exists and frequently conflicts with love, family responsibility, even crude self-interest.'

It is impossible to forget that Milan Kundera writes from behind the barriers erected by the characters in Litvinoffs world. Although his subject is sexual love, the reticence with which he describes his settings, the focussing on problems of truth, reality and dissimulation in personal relations hints at wider concerns. He is an expert on the games people play to probe the limits of love or sexual involvement and the fixes that fantasy can lead into. All the stories start with a deliberate step into untruth, and resolve with the dangers that lie outside prosaic paths. Toes are dipped into the whirlpools of deception and withdrawn frostbitten; or lost altogether. The sparseness of the setting emphasises the philosophical sophistication of the tales and points to sterner implications.

Mary Hope