• NEW NOVELS
Short-handed
BARRY COLE
The Ink Truck William Kennedy (Mac- donald 30s) Prisoner Born Claude Aveline translated by Mervyn Savill (Dobson 30s) The Hopours Board Pamela Hansford Johnson (Macmillan 42s) Downfall Roger Scott (Macdonald 40s) In the days of the Westminster Review and the Edinburgh Review, new novels were
written about at considerable length—George
Eliot could be damned or praised in 5,000 seemingly reasonable words. Today such a
freedom exists only in esoteric backwaters where skiffs of phantom critics scull across the becalmed currents of academe. And so we invent an understandable but perhaps un- justified shorthand—X's new novel seems to me a rather poor cross between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare—in the hope that something of a novel's tone may be communicated in a mere sixteen words.
The good novel, of course, pre-empts such brachygraphics; but there aren't, in any one week, many good novels. William Kennedy's The Ink Truck is a possible exception. It begins with a buttonholing, lapel-grabbing prose which lies ill inside the head of a reviewer whose mind is still being jogged by the implications of the phrase 'George Eliot'. But perhaps Mr Kennedy knows this, for his hero, Bailey, a charismatic and seemingly in- destructible striking journalist soon assumes, despite the writer's rhetoric, genuinely heroic stature. The strike has been on for a long time, so long that only a triplet of militants remains. And if they give in, they will lose more than they possessed at the strike's outbreak. Only Bailey, a syndicated col- umnist, refuses to accept the inevitable.
Impressed by nothing, a printer's devil turned juggernaut, he rolls through violence and persuasion with an unshakeable belief in his own secular divinity. His progress, like the writing, is often clumsy : 'Lust crept up Bailey's pantleg and tickled him. He won- dered about its cause, conjectured on Irma's stockings and her possible garter belt as catalysts . . .' Amends are made by some better thought-out exchanges: Bailey, in- jured, remarks to his mistress: 'The trouble with richly endowed women like yourself
. . is that they lack a sense of humour and life.' She replies: 'Shut up and quit bleed- ing.' Crude, but effective.
Mr Kennedy has a useful line in in- cantatory curses and too frequently casts it, as it were, towards our muted skiffers; the paradigmatic introduction of a collection of gipsy scabs not helping. One of these, in- cidentally, is a would-be Jesus figure called Smith who gives the book the allegorical - undertone hinted at in the publisher's hysterical blurb. In the end, though, the author's own words are perhaps sufficient: 'It is my hope that The Ink Truck will stand as an analgesic inspiration to all weird men of good will and rotten luck everywhere.'
Prisoner Born is by a writer better known, if belatedly, for his 'Suite Policiere', than for his novels. It is here, unfortunately, that the shorthand has to be invoked. Still, it's an interesting shorthand. Imagine a cross between Little Dorrit's Miss Wade and one of the more sombre dupes in a non-Maigret novel by Simenon and you may have some idea of the first-person character Claude Aveline presents. Persecuted and misun- derstood as a child, disliked by his mother, he becomes a precocious financial en- trepreneur, a young man of ability and ap- parent integrity. When he falls in love for the litst time it is with the supposed daughter of a demi-monde financier who allows him, as Dickens might say, to 'make love to' her. After imprisonment for fraud (conned by his putative father-in-law) he swears vengeance in a way certain to bring the book to a conclusion. To tie up the Simenon allusion, the translation is as good as almost any by Geoffrey Saintsbury, Alan Hodge et al.
With The Honours Board we move from shorthand to the idiosyncrasy of the Shavian alphabet (perhaps). It is Pamela Hansford Johnson's originality that she can combine the vernacular of Angela Brazil with the misted professional gloss of the deliberately light Arnold Bennett. An anachronism tick- ing with periodic reference to omnisexuality, her modified Mr Chips centres on the ageing sentimentality of a prep school headmaster's desire to push one of his pupils into a famous public school. Time is against him (and his wife), but despite the machinations of his rich and athletic assistant, he achieves what we must assume to be his life's ambi- tion. In the background a 'class' war resolves itself when his daughter, after randy hesita- tion, Marries a stinks of Working Class Origin. The writing is frequently dismal: 'Though some might have called him an empty man, he was a cunning one.' Or: 'She had not as yet a married look.' Charitably, though, the story does succeed in conveying a sort of death; but whether of a loved one or of a particular kind of novel I feel reluc- tant to determine.
Downfall is a cracked pot of a book, an imitation K'ang Hsi jug. Aristocratic university dropout experiences homo/ hetero-
sexuality, becomes dissatisfied with the quality of privileged life and 'questions the mediocrity and limitations which inhibit him.' Tough. The faults of this way- ward but perhaps talented writer are un- fortunately clearer than the virtues. It is often overwritten : 'In the vault of high, hard-bitten sky above them a jet-plane . . . went streaking up the empyrean.' Or longwinded : 'They drank tea and presently smoked two cigarettes. (They were forever holding these cigarettes up in the air, with the result that they burnt away faster and more freely).'
Complementing these faults is a long list of ill-defined characters which clogs the mind with irrelevant names. But all this, as my skiffing friends might suggest, is mere carping. Roger Scott's ability as a novelist is seen in his obvious appreciation of the sound of words. All he requires is their meaning: 'each of her breasts had (to cap it) a small sweet palpable nipple,' In my experience, they usually do.
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