New Novels and Short Stories
THE exotic, in novels as in life, both scores and disappoints; it has its fictional hazards and its advantages. A man who knows some corner of life quite unfamiliar to the majority of his readers has both an asset and a liability when he sits down to write about it. Fascination or, equally, shrugs may greet him, for we most of us have our moods, our moments of curiosity or of indifference, the times when, even fictionally, we want to travel or to stop at home. The week's three novels have all, at least by my homely standards, rather exotic themes and settings, one being by a West Indian, one by a Brazilian, and one by an Algerian Arab. As mind-broadeners they are all very well, being informative, atmospheric, and (as far as content goes) unusual; but these are not the qualities by which a novel can be measured and, for all their unfamiliarity, the three make moderately stodgy going. Of the three, Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (Wingate, 12s. 6d.) is the liveliest. Mr. Selvon comes from Trinidad, of Indian parents; his last novel, An Island is a World, gave a picture of life in his island that was vivid but curiously conven- tional, its natural exuberance overlaid by a rather obtrusive literariness. This new book is more assured, much more swift and professional, and though the West Indian idiom in which it is written is (I feel) a literary trick rather than the author's authentic voice, and his talents are not strong enough to support unpunctuated Mrs. Bloom-like rigmaroles, it does succeed in giving a fuller and richer impression of London coloured life, through the eyes of the adaptable poor, than any of the books we have seen recently about coloured students (invariably sensitive and ill-adjusted). It is really a series of portraits, strung loosely together by the lilting, extravagant, slangy narrative voice, of people with names like Five Past Twelve and Sir Galahad, who arrive at Waterloo with a suit of summer clothes, five pounds (perhaps), a few hundred ship's cigarettes and a bottle or two of brandy : just that, and the promise of a golden future in jobs at five pounds a week. While London appears to them and to Mr. Selvon a city at once depraved and drab, it is also—and the mere fact of being there—a source of heady excitement, of magnificence, of glamour and power, riches and opportunity.
Brazil, by comparison, sounds tame. Erico Verissimo has been called, we are told (though not by whom), 'the Theodore Dreiser of Brazil.' Certainly he writes stout books full of characters in the kind of urban life that blurb-writers call 'teeming.' But that is about the whole resemblance. Prejudiced I may be by the rather dreadful English into which his original Portuguese has been turned, but he seems to me a particular type of 'best-seller' to the point of caricature: at once spicy and prosy, longwinded and high-coloured, using the weary patterns of social life and of fiction that a thousand novels have proved workable in the past. I have read one other novel of Mr. Verissimo's, another enormous epic written on exactly the same lines as The Rest is Silence (Arco, 15s.), his latest to reach us—that is, taking a cross-section of life in a big city by choosing people at carefully graded social levels, involving them in some rather arbitrary action together, shuffling them through a few days, and then reviewing the world from the standpoint of each: from which it appears (since the characters in both books are much of a muchness and so fairly interchangeable) that, having read Mr. Verissimo once, you know the sort of thing to expect. It is all very worldly and cosmopolitan, so that it might be happening anywhere; and the people might have come out of any novel anywhere, too. The situation, too, is fairly international in appeal—a girl's suicide linking the lives of the several people who happen to be passing when she jumps.
Algeria sounds lugubrious by comparison and Mouloud Mammeri's The Sleep of the Just (Cresset Press, 15s.) gives no clear picture of life there, being quite the most indistinct novel I have come across for a long time. The odd thing about it is, it has all the mannerisms of a perfectly conventional European novel (say a French one: in fact it was written in French, but this is quite incidental), with a completely alien outlook and (by European standards) unconventional philosophy; but without the ability to make either comprehensible or even (what is odder) interesting, Mr. Mammeri's fictional talent being, quite simply, rather small. The translation, though, is crisp and attractive, so that the style is the best thing about it.
Then short stories. J. B. Morton's Springtime (Constable, 15s.), subtitled 'Tales of the Café Rieu,' is a collection of highly banal and insipid stories about the arty and impoverished clientele of a Parisian café written with such a deal of sentimentality, such off-key satire, as make one wonder where in the world Mr. Mor- ton found his characters—not, surely, in Paris today. As a rule worse, but, being at least varied, on the whole more entertaining, are the forty-one stories contained in World Short Stories, Second Series (Odhams, 16s.), which, though they start off with an encouraging pat from Unesco and a lot of editorial excitement about the moral result (as if that came into it) of holding a short-story competition with 100,000 stories from seventeen countries to choose from, the result is, frankly, terrible. But then, if you look at the organiser's foreword, this is not so surprising, for there are sentences in it that, however often I read them, with however clear a head and determined a concentration, I still failed to understand, so complex and so illiterate were they.
Winter's Tales 2 (Macmillan, 16s.) is a very different kettle of fish from either of these, its dozen authors mostly established (William Plomer, J. D. Scott, John Wain, Rumer Godden, Olivia Manning, Rosamond Lehmann), its standard almost uniformlY high, but its range of stories—emotional, social, stylistic—fairly wide. Most of the stories—the most successful among them—are, written in the coolest, most conventional language : 'fine writing, the 'sensitive' approach, the idiosyncratic viewpoint, the odd angle on life and behaviour, being all of them clearly out. Several, too, are 'social' in tone, not aggressively so but simply in the sense that they discover a society rather than an individual, shay.' us social rather than emotional relationships, worlds more importantly than people. I must mention, with particular pleasure. 'Vladivostok,' by Maurice Kennedy. The illustrations (by a dozen artists, one per story) I found confusing, the mixture of styles, pictorial and linguistic, being rather too varied and inconsequen•
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