New Novels
The Daughters of Mrs. Peacock. By Gerald Bullett. (Dent, 15s.) The Talented Mr. Ripley. By Patricia Highsmith. (Cresset Press, 15s.) ALL six of the novels listed above are for enter- tainment only. Their authors' aim is to thrill or amuse, not reform, us. That is to say, the authors know their place as novelists. Gerald Bullett knows his place best: he is an old hand. He is aware, of course, that his novel is an island full of echoes—distant voices of characters from Miss Austen and Miss Compton-Burnett that give delight and hurt not. Once at least a character from Dickens looks in. When Uncle Druid says: 'A boiled egg will restore the tissue, as the saying goes, so long as it's not too hard nor yet too soft,' we may be reminded of Mr. Woodhouse ('An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome'). When he continues: 'There's a time for every- thing, as the Good Book says,' it is Mr. Pecksniff who comes to mind ('And eggs, even they have their moral'). If Mr. and Mrs. Peacock are like Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, and if their three nubile daughters are similarly reminiscent, it is no handicap to a reader's enjoyment,, though, anxious as he is 'for the girls to find good hus- bands, he may wish that one of the suitors had turned out to be the base deceiver or heartless villain that his name (Robert Crabbe) and his habits (he rides a boneshaker and reads Brown- ing) seemed to foreshadow. We must be content with a housekeeper who is trying to frighten her aged master (the vicar) to death. It would be ungrateful of us to complain of anything in this charming period (1870?) piece, where the humour is never tiresome, the wisdom never warped, and all things work together for good. Its antiquated and tiresome form of humour and the metal polish left on its wit work against
the good in Heaven Knows Where. If the part-
worn narrator is, as he appears to be, a Mid- lander, his misfortune might account for, his otherwise inexplicable belief that what his defec- tive ear renders as phoneticised cockney is screamingly funny. But why should we be put to
the trouble of puzzling out, for example, that kermit means commit? And wan wanders, as
Midlanders say, where the fun is in such extrava- gances as 'a dart-board which had apparently been savaged by vultures' and 'his manner made me think of a cautious Mephistopheles who had made a nice pile, compounded with his competi- tors, and joined some small and not too exigent branch .of a Rotary Club.' Wan wanders, also, whether wan is expected to be amused by spoonerisms like 'threat me loo' and to laugh at very mention of the Welfare State or w.c.
Attempts are made to lift the fun from prep- school level to county sixth form by a burlesque lecture on T. S. Eliot and a spoof exhibition of modern art. They fail. Yet somehow the book as a whole succeeds as a divertissement. Its central idea—a small island in the South China Sea exposing itself to Western culture—was good. The working out of it in a mixture of juvenile comicality and senile donnish waggery was surely a mistake. The author should cut his ingrowing talents.
In Blind Tiger that very versatile author Robert Standish starts us off on the French Riviera. Delivering his story over to an advertis- ing executive, David Trollope, he seems to stand back and uncritically watch it run its course through nearly a quarter of a century, beginning in 1930. This lets in the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, in which the small American boy, Johnny, encountered on the first page, plays a Communist part; and it allows ample time for him to grow up, recant his Com- munism, and as the result of a reunion with Mary, also met on the first page, to produce a son for David Trollope to godfather on page 310. This neat arrangement is sure to please a reader who has come to like the children, though they sometimes strain his patience, in a story which shifts its scenes from France to America to England and introduces a nice variety of charac- ters, of whom Lady Venning, a hard-working adventuress, and Michel, a mystic shepherd in the Basses-Alpes, are the most striking and original.
Patricia Highsmith is an American writer of high-class thrillers. Her Mr. Ripley is perhaps over-talented : to undetectable forgery he adds perfect impersonation. But to cavil about any- thing in this story would be to miss a lot of un- healthy excitement. A thief, a murderer, a betrayer of friends, a man who at his most agree- able must, have been difficult to like (why people did like and trust him is a mystery still), Mr. Ripley made a trip to Italy and left desolation in his trail. Oh, an evil man, but so presented that we are induced almost to connive at' his crimes. Will he get away with it this time? He gets away with everything—not only murder. Will the truth about him ever be discovered? Will he suffer from remorse? Damn him, we hope not. To classify this as a thriller is not to under- rate it as a novel of character. Mr. Ripley is not the only source of interest in it. The parents of one of his victims, this victim's girl-friend, not to mention the victims themselves and all the supernumeraries, are much better realised than the requirements of an ordinary thriller demand.
Robin Hiscock gives us rather a bumpy passage in The Send-Off. Why it is not smoother is per- haps attributable to the fact the narrative lacks rhythm; it jerks along insufficiently lubricated by dialogue, and the people in it seem to belong to some other story. Sailors ashore, they are fish out of water, agreed; but they ought to be alive; we ought to be able to get hold of them; we ought to be made to care what happens to them. As it is. young Harry Matthews, cabin boy, who deserts with Steve Jackson, experienced seaman, after a drunken brawl in a café at a French port, fails to interest us in his fate, though he gets involved in what should be the most exciting adventures that take him and Steve (why isn't clear) across France to Madrid and farther. The fact of the matter is, the book is not well written; irrelevant things and people are described in un- necessary detail; excitement never mounts—it never gets off the ground. Why waste reviewing space on it then? Because the author has it in him to do better when he sees for himself how things are better done. And, anyhow, for the uncritical it is not all that of a bad yarn.
Francis Gaite is the name Manning Coles uses when he changes from Secret Service stories to bright tales with a supernatural element. This time, in The Far Traveller, a ghost turns up to play himself, so to speak, in a film which is being made at the Castle of Grauhugel in the Rhineland. Though not very plausibly told, the story just gets by.
DANIEL GEORGE
Previous page
