Auberon Waugh on new fiction

Camp Commander Stuart Lauder (Longman £1.75) Stuart Lauder's new book arrived with strong recommendations from its publisher and an effusive message from Mr Angus Wilson: "I enjoyed Camp Commander enormously.... This new Stuart Lauder is one of my most looked forward to literary events. What a good book it is!" However, the first few pages, when I glanced at them a couple of weeks ago, struck me as extremely bad, and I concluded that the only critical usefulness of the book might be for the light it threw on Mr Angus Wilson's pleasures and pastimes. The first twenty pages seemed quite embarrassing in their inadequacy — a heavily facetious account of other-rank humour in the wartime Royal Air Force Regiment with all the dismally unfunny cockney jokes left in : "'When they open up,' Slasher advised, 'keep your Uncle Ned down and start to Botany Bay.'" Then, briefly, the book gets even worse, when a tentative homosexual note is introduced, among all the self-conscious other-rank jokes about saluting. Carry On Sergeant is bad enough, but a permissive Carry On Sergeant with its drawers, cellular, green, hanging around its ankles, jokes about buggery and masturbation for all the family, is mercifully still ahead of its time. I put the book aside, reckoning to use it later as material for an agonizing reappraisal of Angus Wilson of the sort which the brilliant Alan Brien writes for the Sunday Times in moments he can spare from his normal bodily functions.

But the slack summer months involve many lingering glances towards the shelf of unreviewed novels, and I found to my amazement that if you start Camp Commander on page 32 and read on you have a novel which justifies everything which Mr Angus Wilson and its publisher claim for it. The cockneys have suddenly become Clydeand Tynesiders — brutal, violent and impenetrably stupid men, who are seldom met in fiction for the very good reason that nobody with half a brain in his head would stay within a mile of them if he could help it — unless, of course, he was a saint: " ' They're a thick lot, and they hate your class, you know that. Their Dads was all on the Dole, in the Hunger Marches, hit by the Depression... . ".

No doubt this analysis is accurate enough as far as it goes, but, as the novel reveals, they also appear to hate their own class. Much of their spare time is spent knocking the daylights out of each other — a reaction with which many will be bound to sympathize and one which should surely be encouraged, if it prevents them turning their attentions elsewhere.

Mr Lauder's novel, then, is most instructive when it describes the strange rituals of aggression, defence and acceptance among these violent stunted men of the north, whom I neglect to call subhuman only through fear of the Lord. The hero, called Rog, is moved to a new posting:

" Hullo Rog," he grinned. "How are the mighty fallen."

"On their feet as usual," I told him . . • They raised their heads and gave a mocking cheer.

I stuck my fingers up in reply . . . "I heard you blokes were having a good time down here, so I decided to grab some for myself."

"Grab this," said one of them, clutching himself.

I seemed to be unpopular, and wondered why . . . " You sure you've got any to spare?" I mocked in reply.

Ritual barrackroom insult and response. There was a hairline level beyond which it hardened into positive provocation, and I thought he had exceeded this.

"Aye well," he said brightly, "enough for old Flossie, but."

I registered the point. " Blaws the wind frae that airt?" I muttered. There was a silence while they sleepily considered my response. Then one of them made a ritual peace-keeping gesture and began to toss a cigarette to his mates.

Flossie, I should observe, is the fat, common, homosexual commanding officer, under whom the squadron eventually becomes totally perverted. I am not quite sure what the airt is, or why the wind should blaw frae it, and this illustrates a major flaw in Mr Lauder's novel, if one is to see it purely as a manual of instruction: I can never understand a word these furious and usually drunken Clydesiders say, nor, I imagine, can most people from the South, even if Clydesiders can understand it themselves, which I doubt. So although Mr Lauder's book may give some idea of the correct response to certain opening gambits, I shall continue to run like a hare whenever I am addressed by one of these people. In my experience, they seldom bother to chase one for long.

It is particularly fortunate for Mr Lauder, of course, that his book should come out when Clydesiders are so much in the news. A television programme I saw the other day — I think it was 24 Hours — invited us to consider the human consequences of the UCS closure by interviews with selected workers in the shipbuilding industry. From their violent resentment at having been exploited (as they describe their last six years of spongeing off the taxpayer) it seems obvious that they will never be found gainful employment outside some Stalin style slave labour camp of the future which is exactly, of course, where their half-witted rhetoric will lead them.

There may well be those who do not wish to be instructed about such unpleasant people. They will be relieved to hear that Camp Commander is also most enjoyable, if puzzling, when treated as entertainment.

The squadron of the Royal Air Force Regiment is sent to guard an air base (during the last war) on a Portuguese island in the Atlantic somewhere near Tristan da Cunha (wherever that is). Through the interaction of the fat, homosexual commanding officer with a blond airman, the squadron becomes more and more homosexual until the command

ing officer is betrayed by his adjutant (in the RAF Regiment, an adjutant is apparently the second in command to a squadron) and saved by the hero, who disapproves of homosexuality but disapproves of sneaking and disloyalty even more.

Ideologically, the book is, a straight plug for the public-school ethos. Our hero's

feelings are slightly ambiguous towards Blondie ' Parrish, but so far as the narrative is concerned, he has no outlet whatever for his physical passions. The book gets better and better with every page — and I really almost think Mr Angus Wilson had a point when he said, in his homely, plainspoken way, that the book was one of his most looked forward to literary events.