Fiction
Old lines
Peter Ackroyd
Winter Kills Richard Condon (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £2.65) Ward 402 Ronald J. Glasser (Garnstone Press £2.95) Gone in the Head Ian Cochrane (Routledge and Regan Paul £2.95) Yes, "the author of The Manchurian Candidate, . . . it left me impatient for more from his pen
Vogue" takes us back to the vicarious world of high politics and low finance with Winter Kills,
a novel of drama and suspense which begins where fiction generally leaves off. Nick Thirkield manages some oil rigs for dirty old -pa," an American multi-millionaire who has obviouslY been reading novels about American multi-millionaires and has amended his diction accordingly: "You wanna win, you play to win", and other such phrases which bear the unmistakable mark of the wrong end of the cigar. Nick's brother happens to have been President of the United States and to have said incredible things like "I am a Berliner"; he has also been assassinated in Dallas, Texas, which in that literary and unpredictable way turns out to have been a conspiracy. Nick sets out to find his brother's murderer and a great deal of the narrative is managed through flash-back technique and, when that would be even too maladroit for Mr Condon, hy characters remembering quite casually key episodes of the past in minute detail. The book tends to flag at protracted moments like these, but Condon flogs the narrative on with chapter-headings like voice-overs: "11.10 pm.
Same Night — Brunei". The resemblance to fact, is so deliberate that it becomes incredible, and there is enough contrived conspiracising in Winter Kills to make the Warren Report seem Biblical.
The particular reality we call 'life' offers different kinds of probability and satisfaction from those of the novel, and it is unwise of Mr Condon to enter into competition with it for 'truth' or adventure. No one, for example, is going to take seriously Oriental manservants who say things like "Anything so long is chili and noodles, hey, Nick? I fix." Or a beautiful heiress whose face sets in a "mask of tragedy" The novel falls apart into scraps of received phraseology and it is so bound by the
conventional laws of fiction that the conven tionally surprising ending can be guessed a third of the way through — on the antique, statistical principle of bad crime fiction that the
guilty party is always the one who is least suspected. The really guilty party in this case, however, is Mr Condon himself. I am not left impatient for more from his computer.
It is not often that a novelist disarms the most vitriolic criticism in a personal foreword. Some of the conversations in Ward 402, Dr Glasser tells the general reader, "especially those of the nurses, I've heard so often before that by now they all seem to have come from the same person". The book is just a little like this, but it must be an occupational hazard: doctors and nurses being heavy with expertise,.
but notoriously short on character. The hero and narrator of the novel is an 'intern in a
pediatric ward, thus assuring us of that winning combination of grisliness and sentimentality. It also stars the shamans of our culture, those quiet and authoritative doctors of soap-opera fame. Ward 402 is also, and more significantly, the story of Mary Burquamp and her leukaemia, and of the reactions of her parents to her slow death among the instruments.
This theme is lent shadow, if not depth, by sentences which would do justice to the thin lips of Peter Cushing: "Some of our patients — the cardiacs and the birth defects — were so tiny we had no choice but to do jugular or femoral sticks to get the blood", and by some cleaner examples of our technological dream: An 8.1 instead of a 7.9 became more important than Yomiting, diarrhoea or even pain". Rectal Injections, spinal taps and the other paraphernalia of our magical mystery culture shine like f001'5 gold, but Ward 402 is written in an artless and unpretentious reportorial style which lends credibility to what would otherwise be a horror story of hardware freaking out on babies' flesh. Ian Cochrane has done something similar in one in the Head. The narrative is by Frank Broodie, fourteen years old, who writes very Well for his age. And it concerns the n trindbergian circumstances of his Da, who Itays out late, Ma, who calls on Jasus, and ft013hie, the sixteen year old simpleton who says _we right things at the wrong time. Life through 'Tank's eyes is that terrifying place where someone is always showing you something nasty, but it is also a pastoral spot where Youthful emotions can spring unimpeded. Despite the relentless present tense of the novel, it is obviously the inflection of memory w; nich keeps the narrative together and which `ITIParts to it a closeness of observation and a rwealth of detail which only this induced Innocence could muster. In the warm or cold 4,10w of memory, each event becomes as significant as any other and the ravings of mad Hessie, the next-door-neighbour with an iron !eg drawing down her soul, are only as 1MPortant as the interior details of the shop Where Frank works. This heterogeneous collection of moods and scenes gives the novel burled and it saves its `characters' from being uaried alive in a leaden descriptive prose. It is a simple book, in much the same way as children are simple, but it is also a very funny and attractive one.
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