Who should be whom
Peter Ackroyd
The Is'apillan of Malta Nicholas Monsarrat (Cassell £2.50) All Under Heaven Pearl S. Buck (Eyre Methuen £1.75) I have not been reading that awful ' Who's Who In The Arts' in the Observer colour supplement, but I will bet my bottom dollar that Monsarrat Nicholas and Buck Pearl do not appear in its pantheon of the fashionable and the avant-garde. But talent is not, in fact, the price of fame and both of these authors have stood the test of both time and fashion in no uncertain way. After The Cruel Sea, it appeared to the critics that Mr Monsarrat no longer deserved his popularity. It turns out that he was fashioning it to his own ends, and with Kapillan Of Malta he has produced a first-rate entertainment.
The novel is set on that eccentric and hybrid iEland at the beginning of the second world war. The history of its devastation and final rescue has been adequately recorded elsewhere, but Mr Monsarrat consumes the history in the light of one man's stand — the Kapillan of the title, Father Salvatore. The novel opens with an account of his funeral, which is that of a saint or a hero, and Mr Monsarrat sets himself the task of making a man out of received myth. Now the interior life of any priest is inevitably going to run on certain rather well-worn tracks, and Mr Monsarrat has not entirely avoided the pathos and the portentousness which is the prerogative of any priest. A hero who relies upon humility and passive suffering is not generally one we take to our hearts, but the novel's narrative manages to avoid many of the pitfalls of pious entertainment.
The plot itself is an extraordinary one. Father Salvatore is the scion of a noble family. His mother is a 'Baroness,' and his brother-in-law a rich drunk who sympathises with the Italian cause in the war which is about to engulf Malta. Father Salvatore, however, cares more for his people than his pen sion and intensifies his ministry during the first terrible weeks of the bombing. His flock, to use the term loosely, take refuge from the air in the myriad catacombs that spread under the surface of Malta. Father Salvatore goes there in order to be with them, and it is here that he earns his title as 'the priest of the catacombs.' He is aided and comforted by two almost mythic figures, the giant sacristan Rafel and the dwarf Nero. The three of them lead what is, literally, an underground movement.
But this wartime plight of Malta is by no means the first, and in the course of Father Salvatore's sermons (conveniently prefaced "Let us now praise famous men "), the history of Malta is both illuminated and criti cised. This theme of past dwelling upon and being made relevant by the present is not a novel one. In my reading of recent fiction, I have come across many examples of the same fatalism and the same sense of historical order. Destiny is a conventional trick of fic tion, and I may not be the first to cavil at its presence in what seem to me unnecessary contexts. The life and works of Malta in the early 'forties can sustain both admiration and interest without relying upon historical parallels.
It does lend an edge of portentousness to what is otherwise a subtle and flexible prose, since Monsarrat can encompass both private and public events in a coherent and cohesive medium, and it is no accident that the historical portions of the narrative are the weakest written in the book, and they lack that imaginative life which is so strong an attribute of the more contemporary events. This life is nowhere more evident than in Monsarrat's description of the large ships that break the siege of Malta; he is, clearly, an expert in the matter, but there is a welcome simplicity about his evocation of their immense size and the immense destruction which they were forced to endure. It is beyond the reach of symbolism, which is Monsarrat's factotum in times of stress. I thought, for example, that Monsarrat's companions, the dwarf and the giant, had heavily symbolic undertones which could quite easily have been excised for the sake of the narrative. Of course the novel has a ' theme ' — the destruction of an ordinary or narrow morality, and the flourishing of one that is truly humane — but it is a theme which is best expressed in art rather than in sermon. A lesson that Father Salvatore, thankfully, learns for himself.
Pearl Buck is another considerable writer who has been slighted simply because of her enormous popularity. And she, like Monsarrat, has been clearly strengthened by her audience and the tone she is able to adopt. All Under Heavan is a mild morality play, concerning the fortunes of Malcolm and Nadya MacNeil. Malcolm is returning to America after a period of twenty-five years as a diplomat in Peking. His wife is a White Russian who fled to China after the Revolution. Both of them are now leaving Peking for a similar reason, after the Communist putsch in that ancient place. But their return is not an easy one, since the America of the late 'forties and early 'fifties is every bit as anxious and as confined as the now revolutionary China. This is Miss Buck's theme, and it is one which she handles extraordinarily well.
America is seen as an unhappy and sometimes alien place. Nadya, and her two children, are treated with a great deal of suspicion by the resident suburbanites. They travel down South, only to be shocked and frightened by the migrant black workers and by the curious unease which marks the 'all-American 'type. They finally settle in an old farmhouse in Vermont, but Nadya remains a stranger among a whole host of strange machines and even stranger customs. The boy, Paul, is entering adolescence and finds the pressures toward conformity even greater than his parents: he tries not to be clever (not difficult) and takes up football (not easy). But it can hardly be said that they make matters simple for themselves: Miss Buck's prose is of the elaborate and formal variety, in which the conversations between mother and father sound like something out of 'The King And I "Malcolm, you will not chew
the gum! Everything I can like but not this chewing . . .", which would put any fullblooded American right off. I was never sure whether these conversational bizarreities were intentional or not, but I cannot help but suspect that they are partly Miss Buck's own doing. As the young daughter, Lise, puts it "How smooth goes the road beneath our wheels, how green are the hills and how blue is the sky." Which, even in China, might be described as labouring the obvious. This may well be the point, since Miss Buck has created the hygienic but pathetic world of an old film. Within a comfortable and familiar style, she has evoked the restlessness and neurosis of America and, at the same time, elaborates upon the age and grace of another countrY. Who, in a reasonably short novel, could ask for more?
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