But first, life with the lions
Auberon Waugh
The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz Russell Hoban (Cape £2.25) The Girl Who Passed for Norma/ Hugh Fleetwood (Hamish Hamilton £2.10) I had intended to review Muriel Spark's excellent new novel The Hothouse on the East River this week, like everyone else. But by chance the week also produces an extremely good first novel. First novels themselves are rare enough nowadays, but first novels of outstanding quality are so rare that they call for a certain amount of celebration, and it would scarcely be fair to put Mr Hoban in second place behind Mrs Spark where, I am afraid, he would inevitably belong unless one was planning an elaborate insult to one of the most gifted and admirable among our established novelists. Moreover, by delaying any treatment of Mrs Spark until next week I will give myself the opportunity for one of those sideward glances at my fellow reviewers which I am allowed from time to time, by courtesy of The Spectator's indulgent, taciturn editor. It will help me test the validity of a theory, that the reception accorded to novels by established authors is governed by second thoughts on the previous book. To be more explicit, I thought that Mrs Spark's last book, Not to Disturb Was distressingly bad and received unjustifiably favourable reviews. I will be interested to see the extent to which her new one, which is infinitely better and comes very close to the standard of her best, suffers from unjustifiably hostile reviews as a result.
Russell Hoban has already written a successful chilren's book called The Mouse and His Child, about two clockwork mice. His first novel for grown-ups is about a phantom lion. Lions, we are given to understand, are extinct. A master mapmaker, whose quasi-magical maps show people where they can find whatever they want, has a son who becomes drawn to the effigy of a lion in a ruined temple, presumably somewhere in North Africa, although the exact location of the novel is left intentionally vague. The father, Jachin, has drawn up a master-map intending eventually to give it to the boy, called Boaz, in which everything is shown — except, of course, where lions are to be found, since these are extinct.
By the force of concentration, Boaz conjures up this long dead lion which goes to haunt the father, who by now has left his map shop and set up with a lovely lady called Gretel in a foreign country. Jachin feeds the lion and is savaged by it on one occasion. Sometimes other people can see it, sometimes not, depending upon standards of imagination and sanity which are never adequately specified; but often, having seen the lion, they deny having seen it, knowing that lions are extinct. Eventually, Jachin sees a psychiatrist who informs him that whether the lion is real or not is unimportant; it has been sent as punishment for his guilt.
The guilt is probably that he does not give his son, Boaz, the master-map. Boaz, meanwhile, has left home too and wanders round the world having various sexual adventures which are never less than adequately described. The narrative jumps between him and his father Jachin, which can sometimes be irritating as their adventures have nothing to do with each other except that Boaz has apparently sent the lion to torment his father. Jachin and Gretel are eventually sent to a lunatic asylum, where all the loonies see the lion quite clearly and take it for granted, but none of the staff sees it. I don't think it is destroying any great suspense to reveal that the book ends with a reconciliation between father and son.
Perhaps it is all highly allegorical, but I was unable to discern any coherent strain of allegory. There is much excellent philosophising of a zany kind which only occasionally degenerates into bogus mysticism with the frequently repeated sentence: "There is only one place — the place is time." Perhaps I am being obstinate or obtuse in thinking this sentence meaningless, but insofar as the novel has a message, that would appear to be it. Certainly the absence of any alternative message or allegorical significance takes nothing from one's enjoyment of the novel, which derives from Mr Hoban's unusually vivid imagination; his immensely striking use of words to describe the being-with-the-lion feeling in a world where there are no lions; and finally, most welcome of all, his use of these powerful images in conjunction with a sense of the ridiculous which verges on the total. His novel has only one serious fault, but it is one which I never stop mentioning, and I wish publishers would draw their authors' attention to it — if only to prevent these reviews degenerating into a repetitive whine. Long descriptions of dreams practically never work in a novel — except, perhaps, in short stories where they may form an integral part of the narrative. They screw up a reader's concentration, his suspension of disbelief and everything else. Nobody is interested in other people's dreams anyway, least of all the dreams of people who don't exist. Novelists think they are giving a little fireworks display of their imaginative powers, but in fact they are boring their readers' pants off. Dreams which don't miraculously come true are even more boring and irrelevant than those which do, but there is scarcely a single dream in the whole of fiction which would not be better cut out.
Which leaves very little room for recommending Hugh Fleetwood's admirable horror-novel about a steady middleclass English girl who lives in Rome to be away from her neurotic, demanding mother. She takes a job looking after the grown-up daughter of a rich, voluptuous American lady. The daughter, called Catherine, is simple. To reveal more would certainly spoil the book, but those who like reading about murders and madness passing for normality will be delighted by The Girl Who Passed for Normal, which is better written and more intelligently constructed than most novels of twice its intellectual pretensions.
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