With a Vengeance
A Waste of Public Money. By Robin Chapman. (Hodder and Stoughton, 16s.) One Single Minute. By Oreste del Buono. Trans- lated by Helen R. Lane. (Faber, 18s.) THE bare outline of Fowler's Snare sounds banal enough. Joanna Hillery, a young middle-class woman studying at London University, is dog- gedly wooed by David, a fellow-student and a Socialist. Threatened by David's lumbering framework Joanna leaves him, to be seduced by Bric, an. American graduate. She leaves Bric to teach in a convent school and leaves that when it threatens to trap her. Her father dies and David is back, faithful as a hound. She accepts him and enters the snare with her eyes wide open.
What makes this an exceptional novel is the bleak originality and honesty of Joanna's feel- ings. She registers the claustrophobic world about her with a terrifying accuracy. She listens to David kill Camus: 'That chap had plenty to say and knew how to say it.' She watches her parents' marriage wither into nothing and feels the con- tamination of her mother's emotion: 'An "1," "1" went on purring and persisting in her mind, even when she saw the tears on her mother's face, and her peculiar squatting position as she pulled at her cigarette.' At all costs she will keep her- self clean. She retreats into whimsy, but behind the whimsy there is the reality of her feelings and this she keeps inviolate. It is her fate, there- fore, to attract masochists. David and Bric spend much of the novel apologising or writhing in impotent agony. 'Why are you always in spiritual purdah?' Bric shouts at her. But Joanna never answers questions like that. 'I want to be alone,' she keeps saying, and the more she says this, the more the men grovel. Bric supplies his own answer : 'I am always confronted with my empti- ness.' If Joanna is, in the abstract, regrettable, the men are utterly damned. The book is a crucifixion and cremation of the male animal, and at the end, fittingly enough, Joanna's father is sent through the mail as a little box of feathery ash which blows over her blouse at the supper table.
But Joanna is a stubborn fact and there is nothing borrowed about her apprehension. Her sharpness makes her little world of bedsitters and the Home Counties not only credible, but irrefutable. If there is a world elsewhere, she cannot reach it. She will go abroad, get away. Then her father dies and the threads of guilt hold her back. She accepts David because he assuages her guilt of isolation—finally she chooses with a vengeance.
Miss Dawson is not primarily a satirist and Joanna is far from being an object-lesson in mal- adjustment. She has created a character of com- plexity and set her in a society that she knows. There are no men, no visions except for vague remnants of nature. There is simply a girl with will and feeling in the mess we ironically call society. That is the reality and she looks at it steadily for as long as she can endure. It is the clarity that makes this an exhilarating novel. The truth has set her free, but it is not freedom that she wants and the stale orgasms of Church, State and man dribble pathetically into the vacuum.
A Waste of Public Money is a more conven- tional novel with Charlie Williams as a rebel somewhere between the working class and the middle. 'I've got two languages to choose from,' Charlie says at the beginning. There is the formal `essay' language of his grammar school, and there is the diluted Cockney he speaks at his home in Croydon. 'But the problem is, see, that this way is just as much an act as the Grammar School manner of speaking.' This is true, more so for Mr. Robin Chapman who is saddled with Cambridge English, than for Charlie. But Mr. Chapman tackles the problem head-on, and manages to fire the dull, suburban accent with some vitality.
Language is but one symptom of dislocation. Charlie is born between two worlds, a product of the semi-detached boxes that cover London fifty miles in every direction. He has no instinc- tive pattern of life, no tatters of regional tradi- tion to cling to. He is expelled from the grammar school and, after a trial in the City, changes direction and works on a building site. Then comes the call-up; he meets the public school boys who christen him Carolus; he fights his in- stinctive urge to social-climb and finally ends up as a clerk in Kenya. Africa means guarding an ammunition dump in the Rift Valley. There is no revelation, only details: a monk waving on a hill, an African tribesman on a path at night. These seep through :the Croydon exterior and the shell begins to crack.
He returns hoilne' to find his girl has gone to Australia, and his ex-girl Prue to Girton, where she has wrapped herself in a new set of conventions as meaningless as the last. Charlie takes up the building work again, meets his old friends, now selling stolen cars, and with them beats up a man. But he is not one of the boys; he goes to the hospital and gives the police all the evidence they need. The novel closes with the threat of vengeance hanging over Charlie.
Mr. Chapman records things as they are, sometimes with a literalness that is documentary.
But this is the beginning of an attack that is important. Where other writers retreat into a cosy regionalism or a cosy political idealism, Mr. Chapman confronts the bleak death of the suburban soul. He demonstrates that there is nothing to build on, that the official rewards (grammar school, university, etc.) are medals pinned on an empty breast. There is no going forward in the official sense, and no going back to the caffs and the juke boxes. This grey no- man's-land is Charlie's garden and his failure to cultivate it is finally the only integrity he has. The pitiable vestige of life that Charlie extracts from Croydon is insufficient to carry him for- ward. The ending is a little contrived in its doom, but Mr. Chapman has some fine, harsh words about suburbia and in the main he says them.
The Italian novel is also in the first-person singular. Dino, a journalist, has secured the woman of his dreams and has rushed to Ischia, leaving his wife in Milan. The time-span of the novel is a few hours. Dino wakes up, meets two friends in the hotel lobby, and returns to the room of dubious love. Middle-aged, self-con- scious to the extreme point of decadence, ob- sessed with his inferiority, he conducts a convoluted monologue in an attempt to trap reality. 'Your existence is a parody of what you say' might be taken as his motto. There is no end to it—ea va sans dire. But Oreste del Buono pursues each wraith of identity with surgical care. The final discovery-1'm making love with myself'—is the journalist's instant of light, of glory. I found some of the middle chapters flat, but the work fights through to a strong ending and, to generalise wildly, it had a greater impact on me than those French novels which attempt to cover the same ground. It deals a death-blow to the fantasy world in which we all at times live, and if it fails to indicate any possible alter- native, it is in good company with the other two.
JOHN DANIEL
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