New Novels
No Joy of Africa. By W. R. Loader. (Cape, 12s. 6d.) THE ichabod situation is both enticing and dangerous. Splendour and decay; the wreck of empire; nostalgia and queasiness : novelists plop into it like wasps through the holes of summer jam-pot lids.
The British Raj in remote places, though tottering, is still good for a whack; and the descendants of Ronny Moore and Miss Quested are still at it, just the same : fraternising with the natives and then imagining assault, the idealist growing vapid, the man of action brutalised, riots round every corner and a quiet knife in the ribs. Things have changed on the face of it. ('You didn't,' says Mr. Loader, 'talk of natives and white men these days. Africans and Europeans, that was what you had to call them. It took a bit of getting used to% 1)ower, as we all know, has shifted; but the passions of the colonists in their same small compound, drinking their same pink gins, pursuing their same sad heat- mocked pleasures, seem much the same.
No Joy of Africa is splendid on heat, and bugs, and snakes, and thunderstorms; on all the physical disadvantages of white living in West Africa. I cannot remember being made to feel the sticky noon siesta, the pall of the night air, the maggots growing under a child's skin, more plainly and unpleasantly before. We have been there already, of course. The small expatriate circle has been examined so often that there is a well-established form for this sort of colonist novel: no hero and no villain, but an equal partition of interest between a number of (mostly unattractive) types; a highly photographic technique; no moralising, no remedy and precious little hope; above all no, personal 'point of view,' no apparent axe to grind. Primroses are strictly yellow primroses and-that is that; the camera has taken control. Mr. Loader's book is as good of its kind as any I can remember, but it is a kind that, for all a fast plot, grows quickly boring. Tedium and monotony, oppression and frustration, sights and smells neither heightened nor diminished, neither loved nor hated,. all uninterpreted and insignificant, grow dry, flake off, the edge of our attention. But as straight reporting of a very small corner of hell, it gets close to the flames and a whiff of brimstone. And that is something, if you read novels for straight reporting, penny plain.
How Like a God is extraordinarily similar in build, only the weather is pleasant (this is the Near East, and oil provides the pink gins), and Mr. Thomson, whose first novel it is, is already more of a novelist and less of a penny-plain reporter than Mr. Loader. He even leaves a few loose ends (two unresolved romances, as if he had suddenly grown tired of having women about), a thing Mr. Loader would be. incapable of. Not that he comments, except through his characters, or grinds any more axes; but those characters are more sharply drawn, less flatly and photographically observed. Certainly they are much the same types as Mr. Loader's, the types that, if fiction is anything' to go by, are our principal export to this sort of outpost: the old-time tyrant, the police thug, the discontented wife flirting with the dangerous native politician,(Mr. Loader has just this situation, too), the ineffectual husband, and their background of seething nationalism. No more than Mr. Loader does ht understand, or even pretend to examine, that background. But he is excellent on hysteria, explosiveness, and intrigue, and on that half-lit edge of truth and falsehood where fear turns the non-existent, quite honestly, into fact. To the consul's wife whOse life in the native quarter is a nightmare because she cannot stand the proximity of an Arab—any Arab, friendly or unfriendly, just as some people cannot stand spiders or rubber—Arab faces peering through the car window mean an assault : the fear is the same, the reaction the same whether, in solid fact and in daylight, she is attacked or not. Mr. Thomson is, in the best sense of the word, suggestive; and if he would give more attention to this conjuring, elusive faculty of his, and less to the cataloguing of events and appearances, which any filing-clerk among novelists can carry on with, he would write, I believe, a much better novel. This one is highly accomplished, though not distinguished; 'polite,' for all its violent action, is perhaps the word.
In Another Country is also a first novel, again with the British camping out in foreign parts; occupying Germany this time. But Mr. Bayley takes it quite differently. He obtrudes. Yet his method is witty and oblique; and so exuberantly clever with such dumb, flat characters that it looks like expending the talents of a tight- rope walker on merely crawling along a wall. Quite what the whole book is about is hard to grasp; the plot is even hard to follow, if there is a plot at all. There is Oliver, the butt, the moral buffoon, all the world's cheerful idiot, as heroes have tended to be lately. There is Duncan, a dapper little sinister fellow, deft in villainy at an early age and cutting Oliver out for jobs or girls or anything else they meet. And there are a number more, girls who keep diaries, colonels and suburban mothers, all watched with one innocent and one ironic eye. I have very little idea what Mr. Bayley is up to, so far. But he ought to be up to something, next go or the one after, because, far more than his two safely adult and composed companions in this column today, he deserves the
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