The last act
Francis King
Kalki Gore Vidal (Heinemann 24.50)
Few imaginative writers have been able to add a cubit to their stature by taking thought; Gore Vidal is one of them. It is difficult, after all these years, to believe that he once pupped one of those pioneering homosexual novels in which young men had each other in nothing but their shoes and socks beside mountain streams and then sobbed out on each other's shoulders 'Oh God, why does it all have to be so messy?' Evidently what seemed to be flab was really erectile tissue. Style, heart and head have hardened, even if a certain selfdefensiveness suggests that at any moment something tacky might ooze out.
The chief personage and narrator of Kalki, Theodora (Teddy) Hecht Ottinger, is, like Myra/Myron Breckinridge, a hybrid. Bisexuality ii evidently something with which Mr Vidal feels at ease when it comes to handling one of his characters intimately. 'In the land of the vibrator, the bisexual woman is queen,' he makes Teddy declare at one moment; to which the corollary suggests itself, 'In the land of the vibrator, the queen can appear as a bisexual man.' An intrepid aviatrix who has modelled herself on Amelia Erhardt, Teddy has, with the aid of a cliché-master ghost, managed to produce a best-seller entitled Beyond Motherhood. She has then passed literally beyond motherhood by undergoing an operation performed more usually by vets on bitches than by surgeons on women. Sterilised, she can appreciate the beauty of a female thigh lifted by plastic surgery; but, at the same time, her cells still vibrate (her phrase) to
the right pitch of a masculine voice. Kalki, formerly a GI called Kelly, who imagines himself to be the combined avatar of the Hindu Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, speaks at that pitch; and, in con sequence, when he selects her as one of the Perfect Masters, she accepts the destiny thrust on her.
It is Kalki's plan to destroy 'the whole human race with the exception of four peo ple: Teddy herself; another woman, a sci entist, also sterile; a doctor who has, so Kalki believes, undergone a vasectomy; and a beautiful girl, renamed Lakshmi, out of whose supposedly fecund womb he plans to create the next cycle of humanity. Teddy's task is to pilot a plane loaded with paper lotus-flowers, which she is to scatter about the world. Seemingly the flowers are to rep resent divine peace but in reality, impre
gnated with the bacilli of Yersinia intercolitica (on the synthesising of which Kal
ki/Kelly worked while a GI in Vietnam) they will bring with them the peace of death. Only the Perfect Masters have been inoculated against this plague.
What happens when the world is emptied of all its inhabitants except for the pentad is reminiscent of Neville Shute's On the Beach. Indeed, Mr Vidal refers to that novel, which he has evidently read with care, and —since he has a good memory for a bad joke as well as the ability to invent a good one — he even retells the story of Ava Gardner's inelegant retort to a pressman when she arrived in Sydney to star in the film. The macabre scenes of bodies putrefying in their millions, of wolves howling in Central Park, of streets choked with vehicles and of the five survivors looting museum cases for jewellery and clothes and museum walls for pictures (Teddy decides to put the Mona Lisa in the powder-room — she has never liked it but it will make a 'conversation piece') take up only a third of the book. Mr Vidal quotes from Pascal: `Le dernier acte est sanglant quelque belle que soit la comedie de tout le reste'; and certainly, before his last act is played out in all its bloodiness, the comedy of the two preceding ones is as beautiful in its shininess and sharpness as a well-honed sword. Unlike Teddy's ghost-writer, who zooms in on a cliché like a prize homing-pigeon, Mr Vidal examines everx,phrase with the canniness of an American tourist terrified that he is about to have a dud coin passed off on him. 'Still waters run deep. Except, of course, to be precise, still waters do not run at all."I had a good cry. What, I wonder, is a bad cry?' Human tabus and myths are treated to the same wary scrutiny, as Plough Mr Vidal feared that otherwise he might be gypped. 'For a lot of people cancer is a status symbol.' True? Hardly. 'Saint Exupdry was not a natural flyer.' False? Probably not. In a revealing passage, tears come into Teddy's eyes and then she sees them in the eyes of her husband. 'Love? Tenderness? Regret? No. It was the red-alert smog, creeping up the Santa Monica Canyone from the Pacific Highway.' When people cry in Mr Vidal's novels, the tears are no more than a mechanical reflex, like so many other of their demonstrations of emotion.
Before death rains down and before Kalki performs his Dance of Siva the Destroyer, Mr Vidal shows his thin-lipped distaste of the kind of human garbage that the deluge will sweep away. There is Teddy's ageless lover, Arlene, who declares that sex is one of the few things that she does really well now that her golf game has gone to pieces. There is the ineffable CIA, represented by a black treble-agent usually stoned out of his head. There is the wouldbe Presidential candidate, with a voice the patriotic hum of which is 'as measured and goose-flesh-making as the opening bars of the Battle Hymn of the Republic'. Like Kalki, Mr Vidal thinks little of the human race. and, if he had Kalki's power to administer to it a dose of Yersinia inter. colitica, who knows how he would react? The wit of this novel is a potent substitute for the all-destroying agent.
Dreaming of Babylon Richard Brautigan (Cape £3.95) Yesterday Sian James (Collins £4.25) The Stone Door Leonora Carrington (Routledge £3.75) As a newcomer to the Brautigan cult, I can only think that his latest novel must be a bit of a spare-time exercise: an after-dinner conversational joke which got out of hand. C. Card is an unsuccessful Chandleresque private-eye in 1940s San Francisco, so pen niless that he can't afford bullets for his gun, so dreamy that he spends his time fan tasising a life in 596 BC CI was the most famous private eye in Babylon. I had a fancy office just down from the Hanging Gar dens'). Hired to steal a corpse from the city morgue, he ends up with nothing except a supernumerary stiff in his fridge.
Much of the action takes place in the morgue, the cemetery, or the hero's head either way, the effect is fairly deadly. Brautigan's style depends on the premise that one bad joke deserves another: he sets up what starts off as a respectable one-liner and then kills it stone dead by trying to make it into two. If he'd honed down the cracks, the book would be even shorter than it is, but much funnier. There is not much point in -parodying a style unless there is a valid alternative statement to make: this is just a thin idea, made thinner by the disparity between the master's theme and the pupil's variations.
Sian James's second novel reads, I suspect deliberately, like the breathless letters schoolgirls write to each other. It treats the questions that many elderly breathless schoolgirls have had to face up to in the last decade: the conflicts of bourgeois respectability and marriage with the need for liberation and self-realisation. Those breathless girls who were daring enough to do it before they were married and then felt they had to marry him because they'd done it, often found out that they were just as trapped by their attitudes as ever they'd despised their mothers for being. This heroine speaks for those who took the next exam: Adultery, Divorce and What About the Children? She writes wittily and perceptively of life on a suburban estate, and the sheer slog of combining marriage, children, job, disappointment, sex and then re-tread marriage, children etc. . .Mss Karenina or Bovary she's not: but the gently reassuring accommodations arrived at in her Wates-style drama are nearer most people's experience in a world where half a moral loaf is better than no bed.
As for The Stone Door, this is for enthusiasts 'only: a surrealist novel whose images are fierce and compelling, but whose drift is obscure, though love and creation are around, as they always tend to be in this kind of thing. I don't understand a word of it, but, as the lady says on page 18, 'all stories are true.'
Mary Hope
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