NEW NOVELS
Victims
DAVID GALLOWAY
A Romantic Hero Olivia Manning (Heine- mann 30s) The Eighth Day Thornton Wilder (Longmans 30s) Pursuit Berry Morgan (Heinemann 30s) Omensetter's Luck William H. Gass (Collins 21s) Passport in Suspense James Leasor (Heine- mann 21s) The fourteen stories which comprise A Roman- tic Hero represent the work of more than a quarter-century, and the best offer a rich generously entertaining display of talent. Often subtle and elusive, but brilliantly constructed, they suggest that one of the few writers of short fiction with whom Olivia Manning bears com- parison is Katherine Mansfield; the ironic restraint, the rich but unaffected use of lan- guage, and the shrewd sense of manners (of what they express and what they mask) all make such a comparison relevant, even though Miss Manning is very much an original—especi- ally in her moments of comidie noire.
With one notable exception, the best of these stories seem to me to be those written in the 1930s, and reprinted here from the collection entitled Growing Up, published in 1948. Most of them concern the Clandavy family— neurotic mother, philandering father, and be- wildered children, who live in genteel poverty in Galway; nothing in A Romantic Hero fully measures up to the vividness with which their strained existence is communicated. The children, tortured by their parents' hostility and suspicions, are drawn with a fine compassion, but never sentimentalised; almost all of Olivia Manning's characters are victims—of their social background, their education, their pro- fession, or of those whom they love—but these are the most innocent victims of all, and their painful efforts to assert their individuality is the perfect prelude to the darker stories of dis- illusionment which follow Some of the later stories lapse into an anec- dotal tone in which Miss Manning does not seem at home, and the title story itself is wearily self-conscious, but the lapses are happily few in number. The most recent of the stories, 'Innocent Pleasures: returns to the eye of childhood through which the world was seen in Growing Up. I remember it vividly from its original magazine publication, but it seems to me, now, even better than it did then; in its uncanny blending of whimsy and grotesque it stands as the fitting conclusion to a volume of superb craftsmanship and absorbing vision. Thornton ,Wilder's -celebiated second novel, The Bridge of San Luii Rey,' was published in 1928, and Our Town was produced in 1938. In point of view and technique, Wilder would seem to belong to those decades between the wars—in short, to another generation, another time, entirely, even though much of his work belongs to the 1940s. A new novel by Thornton Wilder may therefore cause some surprise (it has been almost- twenty years since the last one), but the surprise 'could hardly be more pleasant: The Eighth Day is a robust, ambi- tious, and eminently readable novel, its narra- tive voice youthful and vigorous. The story begins, if it can be said to have a real beginning, in the early summer of 1902, when a young engineer is tried for the murder of his best friend.
Though he. is innocent, John Ashley is con- victed of the murder and sentenced to death; five days later a band of unarmed, masked men rescue him from the train taking him to his execution, and he flees to South America. The Eighth Day shuttles backwards and forwards in time, sketching in brief, vivid scenes the events that lead up to the murder and the con- sequences which follow. The novel's scope is immense, conveying the sense not only of the history of two families, but of a community and, more obliquely, of an age. It is a big novel, but there is none of the redundancy which characterises so much recent American fiction; younger writers might do well to take lessons from Wild'er, who not only accomp- lishes what he has to do with remarkable economy, but ranges over a vast and varied tableau with a self-conffdent ease that makes The Eighth Day a mirk of great distinction.
The Southern Gothic novel will no doubt be with us for a good long while—first, because it seems such a ready and translatable meta- phor for what Moses E. Herzog brands 'the cult of alienation' and spiritual dis-ease; secondly (and more practically), since so many of the best first novels to arrive from America in recent years have belonged to the tradition. Clearly one of the best of those is Berry Mor- gan's Pursuit, honoured by a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and generously lauded by the American reviewers. The novel traces the futile efforts of an effete Southern aristocrat to perpetuate his family's name and fortunes through his sickly, neurotic son, but the more elaborate his efforts to engage the boy to life, the more persistently Ned retreats into self- absorption, religious mania, and ill-health. The opening chapters rather clumsily set the stage for tragedy (or merely for catastrophe), but once the action begins, Miss Morgan carries it to its painful climax with increasing sensi- tivity and self-control. Her writing lacks the technical precision of Flannery O'Connor, but she is the only 'Southern Lady Novelist' (to quote Leslie Fiedler) to have promised any- thing like the same imaginative achievement.
Omensetter's Luck is an equally impressive first novel, though William Gass adopts a far more experimental tone. The language is rich and complex, turning back upon itself in a series of vivid images and counter-images that sometimes startle or baffle, but that inevitably draw the reader into the heart of this bizarre story. Omensetter is a slovenly, careless man with no regard for manners, weather, illness, or even time, but who is blessed with almost miraculous luck. He passes through a small Ohio town as an anomalous, amoral factor which. fits no preconceptions and yields to no conventional rules. In a world of petty quarrels, hard work and shabby gentilillus, he remains a mystery; through the minds of the townspeople whom he touches, we see him, ultimately, as a primitive force who can never be reduced to simple formulas because he embodies an instinctive sense of manliness and integrity which can never be fully compre- hended in a post-lapsarian world.
Dr Jason Love has been called 'heir apparent
to the golden throne of Bond. . . James Leasor's hero depends less than Bond on muscle and machine, but he shares his enthusi- asm for expensive cars and his talent for quick-witted improvisation. Love is a Somerset doctor who becomes involved in international espionage quite inadvertently, bin Passport in Suspense, the third instalment of his exploits, demonstrates that even if Love can't fill Bond's bed, Leasor may fill Fleming's shoes.
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