Near Amalfi
Set This HotAe On Fire. By William Styron. (HamiSif Hamilton, 21s.) The Undesired. By Kathleen Sully. (Peter Davies. 13s. 6d.) This Sweet Sickness. By Patricia Highsmit (Heinemann, 16s.)
The Absence of a Cello. By Ira Wallas (Gollancz, I5s.)
FOR a decade, William Styron has been the American literary enigma. In 1951, he puh- fished a .massive,. creepered, first novel,1. Down. in Darkness, which immediately mark( him the .member of his generation—Capole, Covenant with Death should be read in con- junction with the Field-Marshal's effort. It is novel--the characters are thin but it does contain some brilliant reporting of the ghastly, pointic" slaughter into which the military 'leaders' of th First World War led millions of young Englisl men. The story is that of a provincial city regiment from enlistment to annihilation on the first do of the Battle of the Somme. It is told in the. first person by a journalist and the conventional qual- ity which is wearying in the first half (life in England) somehow manages to give great vivid- ness to the horror of the trenches, This is plain man's experience of leadership fantasy o a scale only rivalled before or since by Hitt, The Battle of the Somme—'the greatest dis- aster to British' arms since Hastings' Mr. Harris, Calls it- had been planned by Haig and his staffs for months and `couldn't fail.' It foundered hope- lessly within the first few hours. Haig was to the same sort of thing the next year in Flander- where after-five months of fighting his Intel- ligence officer visited the front for the first tint,: and exclaimed aghast: 'Did we send men to fight in this?' Field-Marshal Montgomery serious considers Haig's claim to ' have been a ere:, ROBERT' K I
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