NEW NOVELS
Lost causes
WILLIAM BUCHAN
The Dam Paul Ferris (Hutchinson 25s) Excelsior Alberto Ongaro (Bodley Head 21s) Edge of Glass Catherine Gaskin (Collins 25s) The Rendezvous Evelyn Anthony (Hutchin- son 25s) The espousal of causes—political, social, tech- nological—may be seen as typical of our fast- fragmenting societies. It is as though feeling no longer had reality for us except when evoked by abstractions. From the depths of our deprivation, by a notable psychological slip, we still sometimes describe our pet causes as 'crusades.' Innocence—eliciting a painful smile or a sharp reproof—speaks from the child's chalked-up sentence: 'Don't ban the Born!'
In The Dam by Paul Ferris, Owen Barbet, a Welsh engineer, cares, ambiguously, for Welsh nationalism. He was once imprisoned for flouting authority in its name. He despises the shabby heroics, ineffective violence, bone inefficiency of the Free Wales Army, but something impels him, nevertheless, to strike a blow. Since he is a skilled technician, and a man of some sophistication, we know that his blow, if struck, will be a telling one. Owen has an elder brother important in television. The brother's wife, Rosie, was once Owen's mistress. She keeps a corner of her heart for him but neither she nor her husband has any time for violence in the Nationalist cause. When Owen gets himself posted to work on his com- pany's big construction job, the dam in the Welsh mountains, and tries to borrow money from his brother to buy gelignite, we have brilliantly conveyed to us what this pursuit of a cause may mean: the extrapolation of a personal feeling, of a love denied or distorted, into some large, desperate action.
Such actions need admitted causes, if they are not to be dubbed plain mad. The dam will drown the valley where Owen and his brother played as children. The brother's success in a larger world is drawing him away from Wale.% and will drown his marriage. Money for gelig- nite is raised by selling a cottage to a wealthy supermarket operator who believes he craves country life. A girl reporter, fired from her paper for herself espousing a cause—that of a man dispossessed by Owen's own company, to facilitate construction work—is sent to make it ready for him. She is soon caught in the silky weeds of Welsh sentiment, bemused by the fitful passions, the breathtaking ability to hold two contrary propositions at once. She and Owen become lovers. The gelignite is first hi-jacked by the egregious Captain Goronwy of the Free Wales Army then recovered. After much coming and going, the by now no longer believed-in gesture is made. No heroics any- where; the book trickles away to its end— and this is its weakness as a novel As a con- demnation of a people's nostalgia, frittering action to nothing, it is devastating comment.
What makes a young Venetian tick? Mario, in Alberto Ongaro's Excelsior, does his best to find out. His passionate self-questioning, reminiscent at times of a small boy disem- bowelling a watch, accompanies the action throughout the book. Mario, of lower-middle- class parentage, but handsome, ambitious, articulate, comes, through the sudden good fortune of a friend's family, to know life in and around the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido and, in particular, the exquisite girl Gloria. She enters his life at a moment when, his dull fiancée Luisa infuriatingly pregnant, his own family and hers enraged, no money to be had save by giving language lessons to a minuscule customs official, Mario is writhing with desire to escape from the straitjacket of his class. He finds justification for his cruelty to Luisa, paradoxically, in his pursuit of Gloria, yet, after Gloria has yielded to him, she simply fades away, and Luisa and his world seem to have won the game. We leave Mario furiously determined not—never—to be drawn back : he already has his eyes on another girl; he haunts the Excelsior for her sake. This is a remarkable novel, remarkably well translated. As an analysis of a vitellino, a young Latin bursting with pride, fun, sex, greed, ambition, yet pathetic with it, Excelsior is surely authen- tic, and excellent to read.
A soundly constructed romance is, nowadays, a rarity. In Catherine Gaskin's Edge of Glass, Maura d'Arcy, who inherits her mother's antique business, is a model. Miss Gaskin sug- gests through her, most believably, a successful young beauty's world, bounded east and west by cool communicators, north and south by Madame Quant. What happens when a young Irishman walks into the shop and breaks, deliberately, a piece of Sheridan glass, is that the competent, glossy world of the dream- makers immediately loses Maura to Ireland and some older, more compelling, dreams. Maura is part-Sheridan: the dying glassworks at Cloncath has claims on her. So, too, because she is part-Tyrell, has her formidable grand- mother, till now unknown, unseen. Miss Gaskin, for all her dramatic sense, is a careful craftsman. Her descriptions of glassmaking are impeccable and, unlike so many who write of country houses and the great of now and then, she really knows the world of which she writes.
Evelyn Anthony's idea in The Rendezvous is a good one. Alfred Brunermann, of the ss, doing Gestapo work in Paris and respected for his success in interrogation—he prefers an 'intellectual' approach to torture—has to in- terrogate an eighteen year old girl, Terese Masson. Attraction is immediate, mutual; real feeling flares between them. Terese just fails to accept its influence and is removed to torture, ultimately to Buchenwald. Brunermann is sent to the Eastern Front. During the German retreat, obeying orders, he signs 4,000 Polish Jews to death, and so becomes an im- portant war criminal. Nearly twenty years later Brunermann, tracks safely covered, is doing well as an architect in New York. Meeting Terese again, married to a rich Bostonian, he thinks himself discovered, but finds that, thanks to 'therapeutic amnesia,' Terese remem- bers nothing, no one from her past. Karl Amstat (ex-Brunermann) and Terese fall in love, continuing what began in Paris long before.
The experience of lovemaking shatters the hitherto frigid Terese, bringing back her memory. She knows her lover for what he was; he tells her the more, and worse, she does not know. They decide on flight together, and it is the Jewish psychiatrist who first made Terese forget her past who sets Israeli intelli- gence on to them. A good idea all right, but one requiring a deeper feeling for the realities of hate and persecution than Evelyn Anthony can show. Although the story is well worked out, there is evidence of haste in the writing, of a failure to produce depth in the charac- terisation. The characters are all shiny, two- dimensional, as pictures in a magazine. In the end, sadly enough, one remains unmoved.
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