Past and present
Peter Ackroyd
That Wateiy Glass Moira Dearnley (Christopher Davies £2) Schoolboy Rising Nigel Foxell (Dennis Dobson £2.50) One of My Marionettes Tony Aspler (Secker. and Warburg £2.10) Most novels are flawed autobiographies. There, I've said it. And I've infringed the cardinal principal of what used to be new' criticism — never to question the motive of the author. I believe I am guilty of the synthetic or emetic fallacy or some su'ch, and there may really be things on heaven and earth beyond my typewriter, but this same splenetic fallacy is my only explanation for the current crop of novels. That Watery Glass is the slightly misty history of Gwendoline Vivyan, a research student who teaches Eng. Lit. in a provincial university, A fate even worse, in fact, than that of being a lady novelist and you would think that Ms Dearnley would take advantage of the situation. But no.
Miss Vivyan is treated sympathetically, as you would treat a stray dog. The novel is cast 'through her eyes,' and there is an awkwardness and formality about her prose which is, at first, almost appealing. Anyone who has a picture of the young Queen Victoria on her bedroom wall can't be all bad, and I rather took this stiff-corseted creature to my heart. But the first impressions don't last, and it becomes quite clear that Miss Vivyan is basically a rather vulgar person. She sports a perpetual bouffant, wears extremely high heels underneath her academic gown and at one point doffs "a Jackie Kennedy pillbox in pale lavender." I cannot believe that people of such bad taste teach our young in even the newest universities, but I could not make out whether she was as much an insufferable bore to Ms Dearnley as she was to me. Certainly she steals what thunder there is, and her sordid affair with an oafish student is the major theme of the book.
This is a pity, since Teacher Vivyan would have been a marvellous agent for social satire. She is both watchful and self-conscious, highly principled and highly neurotic. There is also an objectivity about Ms Dearnley's prose that suggests a talent for, exposing the ridiculous and ridiculing the absurd. I have never read a novel, for instance, which so well brings out the worst in student life. All those occasions which I managed to avoid came back to haunt me: bread-and-cheese (bring your own conscience) lunches for Oxfam, the , playing of Bach in lonely rooms, endless selfanalysis from the least interesting, and meaningful discussions about ' literature ' from the least talented. If only Ms Dearnley had written a satirical novel around these timeless themes, instead of relying upon ' character ' and romance and the other pink elephants of fiction. Schoolboy Rising is not as lascivious as its title suggests. It evokes the healthy world of House, wine-gums, little sneaks and Captain of School. I am practically uneducated, so public-school demotic was new to me. I did not know that things could be a " bind " or "pretty wet," that one had either to "brace up" or get "blown up," that one could "take a dekko".at something or "get baited," It is charming that Englishmen talked in this way in the distant past, and Mr Foxell will refresh a few ancient memories. If you are not a genius, the sole way of dealing with past experience is to make it amusing and it is this which Mr Foxell has done. His hero is young Robin, who stands firmly for what the school stands for: God and winning. He has an unfortunate interest in painting but, as one of his chums tells him, you can't win any Cups for painting and Robin wisely drops the subject. Eyeryone in the school is terribly upright; there is only the slightest hint of
pash " among the boys (I will leave that particular word to the graces of social historians) and absolutely no preppy " smuttalk." An innocent and sturdy world: that is. until certain grown-ups enter the picture.
Schoolmasters, as you know, don't count as grown-ups but schoolmasters' wives certainly do. In this case, it is Robin's mother who is the rotten apple in an otherwise sterling barrel and it is her grown-up friend who seduces Robin in a convenient field. It may not be cricket, but it certainly excites obin. He becomes disaffected with his old school-life and, in company with a wicked and progressive headmaster, sets out to tear a few holes in the old school tie. I won't be a sneak and reveal the end, you'll jolly well have to do the hard work yourself. And hard work it becomes when, in the final chapters. Mr Foxell ceases to be funny and becomes portentous. A medium-weight novelist cannot afford such luxuries.
It may of course be that the past is in another country. and besides the novel is dead, but most novelists seem determined to live off it like a Ricardian rent. Mr Aspler has solved, or rather postponed, the problems of character and experience by shuffling them inexpertly like a pack of grubby cards. One ot My Marionettes is ' a novel within a novel' or meta-novel: what is fact and what is fiction and, more important, who cares? AngloSaxons have never been particularly adept at literary experiment, having been forewarned and forearmed some time back by Mr Sterne, and Mr Aspler is no exception. He has adopted the rhetorical tricks of experimental fiction, in spite of the fact that there is a perfectly pleasant, conventional story somewhere underneath the montage and the histrionics. One of My Marionettes is not simply a conventional story, it has the added advantage of conventional characters: there is Lottie, the theatrical landlady, there is a stage Englishman who has buried himself in Ireland, and there is a self-effacing hero known occasionally as Mark (or is he, as one breathlessly watches the fiction dissolve before one's very eyes, Tony?). The novel opens with the funeral of a quondam Jenny (who is really Diana), and proceeds to analyse , the fact of her death. This involves an experimental study of her experimental boyfriend Keith (is-this his real name? perhaps we will never know) and of her experimental father. Mark or Tony, or both, travels to Ireland in order to discover the truth, which is even more melodramatic and unlikely than I expected. Unlikeliness, in art or life, whether true or false, is never convincing. This is a pity, since Mr Aspler can write carefully and well. He has an eye for detail and elegant introspection and his prose is, like its nominal hero, full of fine feeling and extremely well-made. If there had been no histrionics, this would have been a perfectly good love-story and I would have been contented with that.
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