Last Words
THE most interesting new book of the week, The Centre of the Green, documents several forms of inadequacy. The four principals of this curious and intelligent novel are Charles. a failed suicide swallowed up in the anonymous city; his brother Julian, swallowed up in marriage and compulsively philandering; and their parents, the stoic, 'disappointed Colonel and his withdrawn wife. Charles begins group therapy; the Colonel manfully takes Julian, whose behaviour defeats him, on a healing holiday in Mallorca : but nobody's problems are solved. It is only with the Colonel's death at the end that there is a moment of dignity. 'Chaps ought to finish well,' he says. 'Only thing we ever have any choice about is how we do things. You know—doing it with style, and all that That's us—style. The rest is all outside, and we can't control it.' We have been led up to this resting place through a series of expertly managed shocks, and it is extraordinarily moving; but it is doubtful if it can carry the weight Mr. Bowen seems to hope for it. When Aziz hurls his accusations at the English of 'weighing out' their emotions like potatoes, his outburst rein- forces and comments on the central preoccupa- tions of A Passage to India; but the Colonel's 'statement' can't really be turned back on the experience presented in Mr. Bowen's novel. In- telligence here has been put at the service of a sort of tidying instinct, is doing a job of persuad- ing us that the book coheres rather than of making a coherence. But the incidental manifesta- tions of Mr. Bowen's intelligence are unusually fine; he may lean too heavily on 'furniture' (the make of cigarettes and mattresses) in bodying out his people, but he has a devastating gift for larger documentations : the therapy sessions, a meeting of admen, Charles's wet weekend are triumphs of cool, humorous reporting.
The Englishmen concerns the repercussions produced by two new masters from England on the people of a South African school and on Richard, a young liberal member of the staff, in particular. This sort of book is invaluable for the sidelights it can throw on an exotic com- munity—it was a surprise that Richard's extra- curricular night-school' for Africans should have been, however contemptuously, sanctioned by his colleagues—and Mr. Lerner writes extremely well in giving the 'feel' of the place: he knows, one is persuaded, how both whites and Africans talk. The dilemma of a rather anaemic intellectual faced with an impossible situation emerges from Richard's shifting reactions to the new masters, to the certainties of Franklin and the outrages of Tracy. But there is something excessive, in the last resort, about Tracy : he sleeps with the coloured maid Georgiana, reads the Communist
Manifesto to his boys and pinches Richard's girl. One is invited to expect great things from such a tornado, but his conversation with Richard, before he leaves again for England, doesn't meet one's expectations : 'You must accept people as they are,' he suggests. And Richard of the sig- nificant limp, who has succumbed to the man's. dubious charms himself, is left on the last page realising 'I don't know what I want.' Again, as in The Centre of the Green, we have been en- couraged to accept a late formulation as holding a larger meaning and again there is a sense of let- down.
• No hesitations about Mr. Naipaul's latest : Miguel Street is a splendidly skilled collection of character-sketches and talcs-with-a-twist retailed by a young man looking back on boy- hood, a kind of Cannery Row of Trinidad. Eccentrics can quickly become wearisome, but the inhabitants are so artfully varied, and the frac- tured accents of their talk so sparely caught, that you are galloped through from one delighting story to the next. The affection that Mr. Naipaul doesn't try to conceal for his creations seems entirely appropriate. For a different world-picture, turn to Ring Lardner, whose hatreds seem equally apt. There is a thesis to be, written, if it isn't already in the writing at Columbia, on the rich, harsh line of American humour that travels from Mark Twain down to today's sick joke. Lardner would appear prominently about half-way. The boastful baseball-players are here, of course; but so are the over-eager friends, the spoilt children and the heartless impresario, every one of their clichés rammed home with crippling, comic effect. This collection is unfortunately long enough for a certain brutal repetitiveness to appear : the scalpel swells to a sledgehammer.
JOHN COI I.N11N
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