Fiction
The Burnaby Experiments. By Stephen Gilbert. (Faber. 15s.) PERHAPS the word " fiction " begs the most important question of all, because it has never been clear whether we want our stories to exist in their own independent right, like Robinson Crusoe on his island, or to give definition to our experience by the sort of investiga- tions carried out by Laurence Sterne or Virginia Woolf. " If you were to read Richardson for the story," said Dr. Johnson, " your im- patience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself " - and, without knowing the later course of suicide statistics from this cause, the reviewer has an obvious duty not to steepen any upward tendency among novel-readers by assuming that we all want the same thing.
A good many suicides might, for instance, occur among those who read The Seasons' Difference for the story. Mr. Buechner is even at pains to lure them on (rather as Sterne promises dramatic news for a forthcoming chapter which is always postponed), by indicating that one of his characters at a country-house party has seen a vision and promises to evoke something similar for the edification of every- one else. There are at once various questions which those who believe in stories want to see answered. Was it " really " a vision, as one may hope, and will the others share the experience, as they preferably should ? What was the nature of the vision (in as much circumstantial detail as possible), and does it not convincingly imply some system of relations as remote from our experience as the South Atlantic island on which Crusoe was washed up ? To all these questions the wary story-lover will foresee unsatisfactory answers when he notices that Mr. Buechner is paying more attention to character than to action. The vision, which is never shown to us in detail, turns out to be real in the sense that it is a response to the pent-up needs of the visionary, and the only other character who has a similar experience i&an adolescent boy, whose peculiar needs produce some considerable variation. The fascination of The Seasons' Difference depends therefore on the insight it gives us into quite ordinary human character, not only in the two visionaries but in the groups of precocious children and sophisticated adults who revolve around them. Brilliant and closely knit both in its rather overloaded descriptive power and its invention, The Seasons' Differ- ence may be recommended as one of the most distinguished novels that has recently come out of America.
For the reader who might regard Mr. Buechner as a fraudulent purveyor of visions, there is Mr. Stephen Gilbert with The Burnaby Experiments which are to be taken au plus grand seirieux. Young Marcus Brownlow began his career in childhood with dreams of his grandmother's unexpected return home, and developed it at school by accurately predicting the questions in a maths exam. This first part of the book has all the freshness and plausibility which one requires as an introduction to a career of prophecy on the grand scale, and when the adult Marcus goes into partnership with the mysterious Mr. Burnaby, who has made millions by foreseeing the movements of stock prices, we expect things to move at a Wellsian pace. In fact much time is spent on the theory and practice of Mr. Burnaby's methods (which we would rather have seen in action on the Stock Exchange), and, more surprisingly, we are sidetracked from the paranormal by a love-affair, in itself normal to subnormal, which the hero rashly engages in without regard to Mr. Burnaby's partnership. Whether from revenge or more academic motives, Mr. Burnaby dies and so effectively haunts Marcus Brownlow that he soon afterwards commits suicide. In all this, even allowing for some falling off in the develop.. ment of The Burnaby Experiments, there has been no possible reason for the story-lover to follow the hero's example. It is instead the reader who demands of the novel some revelation of character or of the ordinary human situation who needs the counterpart of Dr. Johnson's warning.
With The Burgomaster of Fumes M. Simenon takes another step away from the world of Maigret towards the serious novel in which he has already demonstrated expertise if not mastery. • As in The House by the Canal and The Ostenders, he is again dealing with Belgian characters, but at greater length and with a more considered and frontal attack which reminds one at times of Balzac's approach to Father Grandet. At the same time there is a certain loss of ease in the flow of M. Simenon's narrative, an apparent embarrassment in the use of detail, which now has to contribute to the development of character what it once, and more neatly, contributed to the plot. The story is a very simple one. A ruthless burgomaster exceeds the limit of his own almost unlimited callousness, and thereafter loses his grip on his town and his own affairs. A complex character, who is devoted to an insane daughter, he collapses in a no less untidy manner than he stands. The Burgomaster of-Furnes is in many ways memorable (it is also in parts squalid), but I missed in it that sense of powerful simplicity which would have been appropriate to the subject and is certainly within M. Simenon's range.
The Log of the Pelican suggests in its title, and the charts which Mr. Gibson Cowan appends, that it stands in close relationship to a real experience of the author. It is not without imagination, for the captain and the owner of this fantastic yacht, which makes a ' scarcely less fantastic tour of the east coast of Africa, have a more powerful hold on us than their photographs and identity-cards could exert. This ability to command our attention is indeed so marked in Mr. Cowan's lightest sentence that we are surprised at his occa- sional naiveté, for he can boast like a schoolboy, and at his failure to exclude the more obdurate and accidental parts of his experience which make this a cross between a log and a book.
For a volume of short stories to demonitrate in turn the author's great skill as a writer of thrillers, historical novels and tragi-comedies is to give almost too startling a proof of versatility. Mr. Gerald Kersh nevertheless demonstrates that he has sincerity as well, and it is the whole-heartedness of his conviction, in each of the three genres, which makes The Brazen Bull a collection of stories which is quite
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