New Novels
Flight. By Evelyn Eaton. (Gollancz. 10s. 6d.) A Kiss Before Dying. By Ira Levin. (Michael Joseph, 10s. 6d.) The Narrows. By Ann Petry. (Gollancz. 15s.) Mark Lambert's Supper. By J. I. M. Stewart. (Gollancz. 10s. 6d.)
Flight is sincerely and delicately contrived: that rare thing, an overtly religious and didactic novel—a complex version of Outward Bound as it might have been written by a collaboration of Virginia Woolf and Kafka—with breathless interpolations by Christina Rossetti. Miss Eaton is a Catholic intellectual; her book, although not long (just over two hundred pages), is very ambitious. And it is pride perhaps which is her downfall. For the at best tenuous and friable structure of Flight is made to shift and swivel from past to present, from reality to symbol, from chatter to exaltation—all at such a rate that at the end the reader is giddier than the writer.
Given this constructional weakness, the book contains much that is excellent. The central character, a woman, starts on an aeroplane journey in a dazed state of half-awareness the result of a bang on the head when boarding the aircraft. As the journey progresses it is the wrongnesses (which should be disappearing as her head clears), that become the realities. The captain, who seems to be alone in the cabin, and her fellow-passengers, begin to assume other than life- size stature. At the first stop the dream becomes concrete when in the ansignment. Shed her possessions and memories and acts are examined and disposed of; and with their disposal identity too has gone, the passengers' faces are wax masks. At the next stop, in a loathsomely pulsating desert of clay even the hand-baggage is dumped out and burnt. As they shelter under the wings of the (now almost wholly symbolical) aircraft, they are summoned one by one and carried off in a jeep to a horizon unseen in the haze of heat. The final stages of Miss Eaton's progress leave to you ; not so much
because of the denouement itself as because the thoughts and words get too rarefied for adequate summary.
As I say, Miss Eaton has been unable fully to control the extremely complex task she has set herielf. She has. made nevertheless a remarkably sensitive and civilised attempt to communicate a mystical experience in modern metaphor and simple language. Her courage in even attempting to handle so many different levels of feeling in so small a compass certainly makes the careful half-tones and flat washes of the Eliot-Greene approach look anaemically craven. Her experience is clearly still close to her; as it recedes more control will come; and then perhaps we can hope for a calmer, rounder view of the journey. Whatever happens, it will be worth reading.
Mr. Levin has written a first novel which is far more unpleasant and a bit more clever than most. A Kiss Before Dying is the story of an amiable enough young man who falls in love with a copper fortune. His secret engagement to the youngest heiress is termin- ated (when he finds that she is in no condition to make her father appreciate his true worth) by a deft push from a roof, and it seems he's lost his chance of marrying into his love. But there are, Bud comes to realise, two other daughters; and Bud's a determined boy. Mr. Levin develops this macabre theme with some skill and— considering its basic lack of taste—taste. He spares us at least too deep an analysis of his single-minded hero; having toyed a moment or two with the idea of bringing in some real Viennese mother-stuff he stiffens his jaw, whips the book back into line and halfway through he's well on the way to a Breen Code ending, film-rights and `a-remarkable-novel-of-suspense' notices. All this is very ably managed and highly readable; no doubt about it, Mr. Levin will go far.
Mrs. Petry. is American too, a negress. She writes about race relations and miscegenation in a small Connecticut town. Her book—if you can control your irritation at her dogged, wearying return to stream-of-consciousness flashbacks whenever the plot really starts moving—is warm and alive. She writes from inside the negro community and her plot grows through a negro's eyes, The picture that emerges is—even with the periodical misting of the flashbacks—clear and compelling. Her coloured characters: Miss Abbie, the respectable, childless widow; Link (short for Lincoln). her fine, fated adopted son; J. C. Powther, the near-delinquent. shrewd child of Mamie Powther, all curves and cookies; Bill Hod. the local liquor boss for whom Link works; Weak Knees, the sentimental cook in Bill's bar—all these are well-rounded, remember- able people. Her whites: the local newspaper editor and his spoilt wife, the millionaire Treadway family (it is Link's affair with the daughter which sets off the violence that no book by or about negroes seems able to exist without)—these are more loosely outlined, less easily remembered.
The book is perhaps a hundred and fifty pages too long. Mrs. Petry has found it difficult to let anything go. But the faults of The Narrows are also its strengths: a rich, muddled, restless vitality, an overflowing of feeling and action, which make Mrs. Petry's Mon- mouth, Connecticut, a real place in which real people are doing real things.
So, appositely enough, to Mark Lambert's Supper. I come late to table. Other, and more punctual, reviewers have been discussing it for weeks, some of them in terms which their elders reserve for the cuisine of Les Pyramides.
Well, so there's this book by this Mr. Stewart who writes detective stories under the name of Michael Innes and is Lecturer in English Literature at Oxford University. The plot of the book concerns the search by Anthea Lambert, a rather new M.A., and her respectful lover Garth Dauncey, an American literary researcher, for a lost novel of her great father Mark Lambert, whose centenary is currently being celebrated. The manuscript is found; but only after incest has been suspected (Mr. Dauncey's father was Mark Lambert's best friend), Italian culture skirmished with, female dons hated and hugged, The Critics knocked for six; and people have talked and talked and talked and talked.
Now Mr. Stewart is patently a gifted writer to whom words— particularly read words—mean a great deal. Mark Lambert's Supper is highly literate and vaultingly literary. And indeed, as a Jamesian crossword puzzle with clues full of donnish humour, the book is a successful romp of pastiche. But with all this talent, with all this gaiety-even, Mr. Stewart remains—for me—a bore. Jamesian crossword ptizzles simply aren't very funny over two hundred and twenty-odd pages. And the book is empty you find, empty.of what ? Yes, empty of people, real people like Mrs. Petry's, saying things people say, feeling, doing, fearing real things. Mr. Stewart presents some caricatures, some water-colours, some sententiae and a deal of urbane conversation. But people, no. JOHN METCALF
E.
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