The Judge's Story
der and Stoughton, 25s.) Time Out of Mind and Other Stories. By Pierre Boulle. (Seeker and Warburg, 25s.) PSYCHOLOGICAL mystery stories are often twice- told tales, because, in the final dénouements, every- thing that has gone before which was shrouded in obscurity is disclosed and accounted for in the second telling. Mr Thomas, in his dis- tinguished new novel called The Judge, provides an interesting variation on this formula.
In the late autumn of 1947, Albert Jackson, a waiter employed at the 'King's Arms' in Pilt- chester, is brought to trial for the murder of Alice Rushden, an ex-girl-friend. But even though he is acquitted, there remain doubts about his innocence in the mind of Theo, the book's narrator. Did she really fall down the cliffs near Netherdean, or did Albert push her? Who was the father of her unborn child, and why did Albert take an eight-mile bus-ride home before informing the police of the accident that he had witnessed? At an earlier magistrates' bearing, there had been reported the damning remark which he had made to his new girl-friend, Betty Dove : `. . . Everything will be all right. I shan't be seeing Alice any more after today.'
After the first day of the trial, Mr. Justice Jevington, who has invited Theo to accompany him on this Assizes, suggests that he should take a stroll round the town rather than attend the completion of the case. Immediately both the reader's and the narrator's suspicions are aroused: moreover, this suggestion is made not only once tut twice. 'It was very strange,' comments Theo. Can there perhaps be some possible link between the judge and the accused, or one of the wit- nesses? The last 120 pages of the book are taken from the judge's diary (which starts at the time of Albert Jackson's trial and carries on for three years afterwards), and though none of these entries provides an open-and-shut explanation about Roy Jevington's subsequent attitude to Jackson and his family, they do offer a fascinating commentary on 'the unpredictable contingencies . . . of the human heart.'
Miss Smith's first novel is about the vagaries of the heart—its first stirrings of love and its first sorrows. Rosemary Willis is 'nearly seven- teen,' and she is at an age when that nearly is desperately important to her. Half schoolgirl and adult, her world is a mixture of pale-green folk- songs and homework; mascara and French grammar; Dylan Thomas and yeast tablets. Her parents belong to the well-off middle class, and the book opens with Rosemary and her elder sister preparing to go to a New's Year's dance in the same village. There she meets a boy slightly older than herself—and falls for him.
Jim's world is that of the drifter, the small- time coffee-bar drug-pusher. Yet he, too, at heart, is an innocent. 'Pebbles make bad sheets,' he says after another party as he steers her away frOin the pier towards the sandier part of the beach to spend the night. 'I've got you and whisky, and that's enough for anyone.' Yet his sophistication, like hers, is only skin-deep, and The Green Wind, despite a slightly melo- dramatic ending, offers a beautiful and tender study of the burgeonings of love : 'He . . . fell asleep with his head on my breast. . . . Not daring to move my position I ran my hand over his back and savoured the delight of watch- ing over someone one loves while they are asleep. . • •' The Return, which was awarded the Grand Prix de Roman of the Academie Francaise, is something of a political tract. Its author, M Droit, is the editor of the Figaro Litteraire, and the book, in its depiction of the French literary sect, has an authentic ring about it. His Ines Courcelles, who won the Prix Femina six years before, has since churned out a novel at yearly intervals. She is rather a stock character —though one of her aphorisms may bring con- solation to less prolific novelists than herself : To rewrite a page of manuscript half a dozen times isn't being unsure, it's being exacting.- . .
Philippe Thierry, a barrister born in Algeria, has an affair with her. Shortly before, he has had another with Beatrice Dumont—a girl who sells pictures in a Paris art gallery.
But somehow both women fade out and politics take over. Philippe is a liberal and, in spite of pressures brought to bear by other Algerian barristers, he persists in drawing a distinction between revolutionary activity which includes violence in pursuit of its aim and terrorist ac- tivity which employs violence for the sake of violence. He is a good advocate for his cause —though the book's rather violent final chapter is not at all convincing.
Moses Lockwood was born in 1811, and his son's ambition, born thirty-nine years later, is to establish The Lockwood Concern. But the word Concern could as well be exchanged for Plan, Obsession, Purpose or Mania, since what the am- bition really amounts to is the building-up of a Dynasty. Mr O'Hara, darting backwards and forwards over the history of four generations, shows the ruthless way such dynasties are made, and his Pennsylvanian chronicle is a long one, in which whoring, murder and suicide are all a vivid part. Some long books leave one refreshed at the end, but after 407 pages I found myself exhausted.
Time Out of Mind, the title story of a collec- tion, allows M Boulle to play some effective tricks with the centuries: 'I left the kingdom of Bardari about eight thousand years ago and at that time we had already reached the year ten thousand.' Some of the stories, however, might be better described as miscellaneous pieces. 'The Perfect Robot,' for instance, is really a discus- sion about cybernetics; 'The Diabolic Weapon,' an eloquent plea for nuclear disarmament; and 'The Man who Picked up Pins,' a satire about bestowing a cosmic importance to an utterly in- significant act. Library readers who take down this book because the author wrote The Bridge on the River Kwai may find themselves in for a shock.
NEVILLE BRAYBROOKE
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