Murals and Miniatures
PHILLIP MADDISON gets a medal and goes to prison in the eighth and latest of Mr. William- son's herculean sequence of late-Victorian and Georgian novels. He also makes some notes in his diary. 'It is detail which makes books last, true detail. . . . Attitudes of mind pass away, while simple details, almost "small beer" details . . . give the true feeling of living.' Well, perhaps. At any rate, Mr. Williamson is fantastically faith- ful to his hero's prescription. He reconstructs as painstakingly as an old-style American million- aire transplanting a Scottish heritage to the soil of Texas. Battles, slang, songs, cliches are as
carefully re-created as any social historian could wish. It reads, at one level, like an experiment in total recall, a gigantic episodic gloss on Sassoon, Bairnsfather, and all the ex-officers who with cop and clapper went.
These panels in the growing mural are con- cerned with the last years of the 1914-18 war and their immediate peace-time aftermath. The focus is young Phillip, his fighting companions and family. Many of Mr. Williamson's amazing evo- cations of past detail seem to call for an audience of his own generation, eager for nostalgia. Names (Major Bernard Montgomery crops up briefly), dates and catch-phrases arc waved like so many processional flags. But, fortunately, there's more to it than that. There are places where the whole book seems to groan, turn, wake up for a second into brilliant life: the mad, brave bully drinking himself silly in a bunker and writing out comic orders while the Germans creep up on him; Phillip's old-maidish father playing a tiny auto- crat at the dinner table; an investiture at the Palace and a convalescence in a grand country house. But the terrible domestic pressures just beneath the surface of the book arc hardly explained in the book's terms. Phillip is dragged along, almost unresisting, by events, involving himself in his friends' criminalitics with a kind of indolent chivalry that is peculiarly tiresome. He is left, thinking of doing some writing. Oddly enough, one doesn't feel he could ever grow up to write a book as good as this: yet one does feel he would have been an avid, understanding reader of, say, the poetry of Wilfred Owen. I don't know the earlier volumes of this great labour of love and art; possibly they would re- lieve some of the more arid emotional patches of A Test to Destruction. From this alone one would hazard a guess that it isn't a work densely enough conceived to inspire constant revisiting, but its surface glows with a line, poetic intel- ligence.
Men of Destiny is prose to the core, unless you allow Sir Stephen King-Hall's final answer to world tension its own wild poetry. Trouble flares up in East Germany, a member of the Politburo intervenes, ultimatums are issued, and—through a chain of misunderstandings - global war is a second away. This is high-level drama, played out for the most part in the minds and chambers of our leaders—the Right Honourable Henry MacKall, Mr. Kcnnix, and Comrade Buglov- and their departmental minions. HE Etienne de Gallique is a grand, fleeting presence:
'And---er--what are your instructions to our General in Berlin?'
'None,' replied the General, 'let him ask him- self the simple question: "What in these circum- stances would de Gallique do?"—and then do it. Is that clear?'
Much of the satire is harsh and hostile in this way : but such is Sir Stephen's power to move confidently through men and diplomacy that the bitter fun frequently reads like the bitter truth. The turns of plot are quite crafty; there are neat paragraphs from the Times and some genial bit- players; there is some decisive reporting of panic- stricken crowds streaming out of London as the rumours thicken. But it is the scene where our I'M and the American President debate in agony as to whether to press the fatal button or not that stays in my mind. This is a grimly persuasive tract for the times. Mr. Williamson's war seems as far away and knightly as Flodden field.
It is the children's teeth that arc set on edge in Bernice Rubens's title. But 1 never found out what sour grapes the fathers had eaten. The Sperber family are guilty and doomed from the start--Miss Rubens portentously tells us so.
Stripped of the heavy riddles, which it 9 is, this turns out to be the story of a lov relationship between a Jewish mother daughter somewhere in the provinces and d the years. Long-suffering Gladys is finally I a husband, but he dies on their honeym Eccentric brothers and sisters-in-law nip in out of the central tangle. No one is endear' this packed, sharply written novel; in places. spleen almost bursts its deft stitching. It le,1 a bad taste in the head and the question : But several incidents of cruel, precise observe promise one that Miss Rubens will write a be possibly a very good, book now this one's.
Marguerite Duras has a mysteriously fash' able reputation. She's somehow got tacked all the nouvelle vague in both film and novel. Is latest, her gentle people never actually get to little (Etruscan) horses of Tarquinia any than those historic others got to the lightb They are on holiday on some drugged, svelte Mediterranean littoral, and the book is account of their campari-drinking and cone tions and of one infidelity. They're all ,,„ decent, aware, French, and they come up v:lw few quotable comments among the dot chatter should you feel inclined to beache It's tedious, pretentious, never moving, sorrie quite funny. If Noel Coward were to take Si de Beauvoir in literary wedlock, this might be their first offspring.
JOHN COL
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