Other-worldly

Francis King

Light on a Honeycomb David Pownall (Faber £4.95)

In the past I have never had any difficulty in understanding David Pownall's novels. But Light on a Honeycomb had me carrying on with myself the kind of conversation that Hamlet had With Polonius. `Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in the shape of a camel?' By th'mass, and 'tis like a camel,

indeed."Methinks, like a weasel.' It is backt like a weasel.' Or like a whale?' Very like a whale.' In short, Mr Pownall has produced a protean novel, made up of events easy enough to describe one by one but virtually impossible to interpret in sum.

There is, first and foremost, the northwesterly town of Rougerossbergh, with the seaside resort of Broadlands near at hand.

The major industry of Rougerossbergh is, we are at first led to think, the manufacture of floor-coverings at a factory ruled over by a pompous patriarch, Sir Alphonse Bourge. But soon a sociologist at the local university is putting another point of view. 'What do

most people work in, either on the giving or receiving end?' he asks rhetorically and

then comes up with the answer: 'Madness in all its subtle forms, and crime. Rougerossbergh's major industry is mental instability.' He then goes on to describe the town as one in which the majority of the people are either mad or the descendants of the mad, and demands: `Who is curing • whom?'

One of those who appear to be curing rather than being cured is Dr Zander, a psychiatrist at one of the town's three mental hospitals. Dr Zander has a favourite patient, a boy called Kevin, whom he encourages to 'create' as a form of therapy; but Kevin, assisted by a mad baker ally, `creates' a world so threatening and so real, summoning it up out of the darkness of racial memory, that the world of Dr Zander, Sir Alphonse Bourge and all the other ordinary, unimaginative citizens of the town is reduced to a smoking ruin.

Bourge has two sons. The older, an estate-agent, is so much attached to the land that he literally has sexual intercourse with it. The younger secretly belongs to a revolutionary band of down-and-outs called the Class War Syndicate and the Backlash (author's capital letter) that its activities provoke plunge the town into a state of anarchy, which the chief of police, Mutter— who claims to be Hitler's illegitimate son — can and will do nothing to check. There are a number of mysterious deaths in consequence.

Another source of unrest and chaos is the voluptuous Mrs Patel, whose husband, afflicted by inconsolable despair, throws himself into a vat of oil at the floor-coverbiS factory and so drowns himself. ApparenslY untouched by this tragedy, Mrs Patel, who has vowed revenge for the iniquities of the

Raj, opens a Yoga and Meditation Centre, to which not merely civic leaders but local, schoolboys are attracted. On the pretext al extending their sexual performance, she

persuades her pupils to allow themselves io be strung up by the ankles and then looks a°

while they begin to suffer a lingering death; The book concludes (I have enumerate° only a tithe of its freakish and bewildering happenings) with the lowest of the Down; stairs Folk coming up out of the bowels the earth, where they have lived for eons, to join those, previously living above thea who have emerged into the light of clal' (There is a hierarchy here not dissimilar S° that of Hudson, Mrs Bridges and the rest) A trumpet has sounded, the world has bee,P changed, and the dead have been raiseo incorruptible. But how precisely the train' pet has sounded, what is the precise nate, of the change and who precisely the deo' represent is, I must confess, not clear to ine; Presumably some key must be found in th` fact that, at the end, it is the psychiatrisid. Zander, who has become the patient a!, the patient (the baker) who has become S": psychiatrist; but this key opens no door int" which I have tried to fit it, though it turns more in some than in others. The dead ate never dead to us until we have forgone° them; the world of the imagination is more 'real' than reality itself; we must taell away from the complexity of innumerable dogmas to the simplicity of a few primin,vje myths; we must reach down into that raolv memory that stretches in all directions, all intricate honeycomb, below consciousness,' These are some of the doors; do what )ov can with them,, reader.

f The book is full, like its predecessors, e

bizarre and farcical happenings. Such, f°,1 example, is the search of Sir Alphonse! left-wing son for a real, live peasant and h1,5 belief that he has at last found one in ins father's head-gardener — a man who smokes Balkan Sobranie cigarettes and holidays,ill, the family villa in Corfu. Typical of Pownall's wit is his comparison of tool!' councillors to the pillars of the Acropolls' `There are many of them, they are all the, same, and they support only themselves' As this suggests, the style is always vigoroils and vivid. But for all its liveliness, I finished the book in the condition that the author self describes as 'tedium-stunned'. Sob!' 'other-world' books, like Gulliver 's Travel! and The Pilgrim's Progress, make ibe,lr, meaning perfectly clear and others, like rn; Castle and Alice in Wonderland, prese° multiple meanings incapable of exact degin: ition. The last two of these books are a; readable as the first two; and the fact tha Mr Pownall's novel presents multiple mall ings incapable of exact definition does n° necessarily mean that it will bore the reader' I can only put on record that it bored ine•

QettIng Through John McGahern (Faber £4.25)

earnlval Isak Dinesen (Heinemann £4.95) The Martini Henry Barrie Hughes (Weidenfeld £4.50) To say that John McGahern's eleven short stories are models, implies academic control and formula which they certainly possess, but which is not the important thing about them. Beautifully shaped, fastidious ,a,rid reticent, they embody the essence of we form: a poetic resonance which has a°thing to do with language — though the Prose weaves and sings as only Irish prose can — and everything to do with the encapsulation of single significant moments of e, xistence toughened and tautened by, and al.t°, symbol. It is moral and emotional precision engineering of a very high order. In almost every story there is a funeral, a reminder that friendship and comPainonship are only staving off the inevitable. After the death of his mother, a priest experiences heightened awareness of lost Aossibilities: other people are buffers. There was nothing left but his own life. There had been nothing but that all along, but it had been obscured, comfortably obscured.' McGahern writes of the tension !)eteeen comfortably obscuring and refusTg to compromise; easy ways out are pro'erred and refused, or avoided. , In 'Doorways' an affair is sadly let drop: at most it had been a seed, thrown on poor gkround, half wishing it might come to some.Ting, in the wrong time of the year.' There is a constant awareness of other times, ?ther possibilities, layer upon layer of perfection, and a loving, wry delineation of the °I3liquenesses of relationships. Carnival is a posthumous collection of tales and 'entertainments' which will interest admirers of Isak Dinesen (Baroness v "'aren Blixen). After McGahern, they read rather stiltedly and datedly, though the title story is adventurous in format and presents interesting, though for%ally scaffolded, moral conundrums. One (3.,' the best tales is, in fact, an entertainment, d terrifying psychological teaser about a Child murderer, The Fat Man'. But my appetite is spoiled by McGahern. One can admire the skill and formality, but gasp for enlivening metaphor.

As for Barrie Hughes: a brave attempt to Rive

weight and significance to what is bas!call)/ a piece of unrealised Gothic mawkishness involving a homosexual teacher's Passion for one of his pupils, and some eneralised satanism on a dreary South Australian island. Mr Hughes appears to be convalescing from a bad attack of the Patrick Whites which could have proved fatal. , When the recovery is complete, he can throw away his creative writing handbook and try again; there is still hope, because he writes well. One always welcomes first novels which show promise, but this writer needs tighter editing and new direction.

Mary Hope