Uncertain age
NEW NOVELS HENRY TUBE
A Spiral of Mist Michele Prisco translated by Isabel Quigly (Chatto and Windus 30s) Stepsons Robert Liddell (Longman 30s) A Thousand Illusions Valeriy Tarsis trans- lated by Michel le Masque (Collins 28s) Heir Roger Simon (Macdonald 21s) The Revolution Vincent Brome (Cassell 30s) There is a Chinese proverb, for the present I should imagine suppressed in its country of origin, which goes: To be uncertain is uncomfortable, to be certain is ridiculous.' It is a text peculiarly apt to contemporary fiction, which can be divided roughly into two opposing camps along the lines of the proverb. The older party, secure in an accepted mode of story-telling based on accepted notions of sociology and psycho- logy, proclaims with every line 'thus it hap- pened, for this and this reason, with this and this result'; the newer (not really very new, but one of the certainties held by the other party is its own legitimacy) makes uncer- tainty its only certainty, preferring even to risk causing its readers discomfort and in- comprehension than to court ridicule.
Michele Prisco's A Spiral of Mist runs no such risk. Mr Prisco—like Butor, Robbe- Grillet and others of his party before him— has chosen to exploit the form of the detec- tive story, which is of course admirably suited both to the exploration of uncertain- ties and to the retention of readers, for once you have set up a mystery and begun to supply evidence it is a hard man who will not stay with you. even if only from that very craving for certainty which it is your express purpose to correct. Fabrizio Sang- ermano, scion of a wealthy and influential family, appears to have killed his wife. The question that exercises the examining mag- istrate is whether he did it by accident or design, whereas the question that exercises the family • is whether they can get the examining magistrate called off or not.
Neither of these questions is of any importance in the novel, except structurally. The original death and its attendant dubi- ety set a whole chain of spider's webs trem- bling and enable Mr Prisco to examine with fine precision the reactions of the disturbed incumbents; and as the crime, if it was a crime, came out of a marriage, so novel's true mystery is the state of marriage itself. The magistrate's uncertainty is mag- nificently expanded into the novelist's: 'But these interrogations didn't produce the' truth, because reserve and uncertainty and resistance had slowly built up a kind of crystallisation around it, and he felt as if he were handling an object fished up from the bottom of the sea where it had been lying for years, and had become unrecognisable through all the sea plants that had grown up
around it, in a tangle of shells and seaweed that time had made into a shapeless super- structure of limestone. . .
It is perhaps unfair to place Robert Lid- dell's Stepsons beside A Spiral of Mist as an
example of the school of certainty, since it is a somewhat unsuccessful one, but I sus- pect that the school is now so ailing that only the most exceptional novelist could make a success within its limits. Mr Liddell undertakes the story of an upper-middle-class British family in the first half of the century, with an unpleasant stepmother as the central figure. Everything here is 'thus it happened'; Mr Liddell looks down upon his characters from above, directing and explaining from a prepared position.
This seems to me the chief objection to the school of certainty, that it closes down every avenue, takes the inference out of every episode, rather as a fussy guide with a small stock of knowledge got by rote reduces the contents of a country-house to rubble. But apart from this objection, Mr Liddell's book is very odd: there are a few passages in which he catches well the step- mother's domination of her family circle— here the novel expands to carry the nuances of a whole type and generation—but he makes no attempt to show any of the adverse effects of their upbringing in the stepsons. As the stepmother grows worse and worse, the rest of the characters seem to remain entirely colourless, mere 'nice people' against whom she vents her arbit- rary spleen. The novel seems almost to have been written as an act of revenge against the woman, but without a narrator to enjoy it such an act must bury itself in the sand.
Valeriy Tarsis's A Thousand Illusions is not an easy read, but it is an honest one. From the slender fictional basis of a Soviet film company on location in a Black Sea town, Mr Tarsis launches a bitter attack on the Soviet way of life: 'If only martyrs would scourge only their own hearts. But the trouble is that every martyr also martyrs other people. For us Russians this is a basic rule of life, stamped forever on our history and particularly on our art.' The presences of Dostoievsky and Chekhov hover intermit- tently, but one gains little acquaintance with Mr Tarsis's characters. Nevertheless it is re- freshing to stand beside him as he directs this furious fire-hose in the faces of his erst- while tormentors.
Roger Simon's Heir is a smaller but more sophisticated jab at the American way of life. In the form of a diary kept by one of those exceedingly rich young men who seem to be as common to New England as peas- ants to the Black Sea coast, it systematically ridicules the material certainties of Ameri- can society. Having given his girl-friend an overdose of drugs by mistake, our hero uses his air-conditioning to keep her body fresh, his priceless harpsichord to hide her body, and considers using his Canaletto to keep out the police: 'You can't come in here, fuzz shit. You'll destroy a great work of art.' In this murder, if it was murder, he finds a new meaning for his life: 'Somehow I felt that in my new status as killer I should remain aloof. People whose com- pany I solicited must now come to me.' Mr Simon's attempt to weave in references to The Merchant of Venice as a parallel story of false values is not entirely successful and the ending runs down, but for a first novel by a very young man this is a remarkable piece of work.
The Revolution by Vincent Brome con- tains many vivid descriptions of the Hun- garian Revolution of 1956, though its nar- rator, an American journalist, and his priv- ate concerns are trivial to a degree. They are school of certainty, of course, and per- haps no worse than others of their kind, but set among real events so strongly recaptured in print and so recently repeated in life, they appear particularly, insultingly ridiculous.
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