NEW NOVELS
Action situations
WILLIAM BUCHAN
The Warm and Golden War Nicholas Luard (Seeker and Warburg 25s) The Gab Boys Cornered Doudu (Deutsch 25s) People of Providence Street John Gooding (Bodley Head 21s) The Boss Goffredo Parise (Cape 25s)
Where Eagles Dare, Alistair MacLean's latest, will not harm his reputation with his readers. From page one we are in an action situation, with trained, resolute men preparing, for a life-or-death struggle. An American general has been kidnapped and is being held by the Gestapo in Schloss Adler, an impregnable head- quarters in southern Germany. He has to be rescued. Mr MacLean knows his job: the odds against Smith, his hero, though pretty odd, are never quite impossible. But true suspense suffers from a multiplicity of distractions and, though there are exciting moments, and some good bits of deception by the author, the final effect is lurid, noisy, but not unforgettably clear.
War, undeclared, up-to-date, carefully con- trolled—a pocket of hot war in the larger, colder struggle is the theme of Nicholas Luard's first novel The Warm and Golden War. Its chief character—no point in calling him hero —is fashionably squalid, a photographer named, simply, Sear. He is called from London to a meeting in southern Spain with Mr Roan, rich and mysterious, who wants• to offer him
an assignment. Sear, a once-famous free-lance, slipping professionally through drink and the
growing preference of magazines for using staffers, needs the money, and so he goes to Spain. Mr Roan proposes, with the help of 'the finest group of mercenaries in Europe,' to open the Austro-Hungarian border for a brief while, for a particular purpose. Sear is to go along to get pictures for propaganda use in the western world. Sear, with his ulcer, his' ever- present hip-flask, his sad, warmed-over longing for a girl who once cheered his graceless exis- tence, accepts the assignment with sour reluc- tance. (Note to young writers: bloody-minded- ness is not a synonym for integrity.) He is introduced to the mercenary commander, and the game is on. This is an absorbing and original story. Mr Luard writes well, setting his scene with authority, making both tactics and strategy easy to grasp. With emotions his style, so crisp, clear, fast for action, tends to tur- bidity. He loads words and sentences until they stagger, and mixes metaphors with a generous hand. Nevertheless, if he can go on using mind and style in this way, his next book will be well worth waiting for.
First novels, this week, show up well. Mr Cameron Doudu, a Ghanaian, has produced, in The Gab Boys, a positive contribution to understanding those Africans who are re- learning self-government. His Gab Boys are the lively youths of the town of Pusupusu, who wear gaberdine trousers, talk an excited Ameri- can English, and sometimes break the place up.
They are poorly placed, lacking the education to get at the few plum jobs, lacking money to bribe their way to power in Nkrumah's graft- ridden new world. Yet this is not an em- bittered book, and what Mr Doudu has to say about the tribal structure of his country, its valid traditions, its poetic wisdom, its healthy laughter, makes far more sense than any idea of a nation shedding its past to gobble down technological systems which are possibly irrele- vant to its true needs. The story is simply told, and often very funny.
Another first, People of Providence Street by John Gooding, is an accomplished piece of work. Tue, the heroine, owes her odd name to her odder father--landowner, scholar, dis- dainer of most things—who, because her mother died at her birth, nicknames her `Tueuse: Tue, just grown up, leaves home to marry Adam, a Pole, who wants little from her but her small fortune and some children. When she cannot bear any, he leaves her. Dying, her father wills her money away. Tue, left on her own, takes a job in the library of a north-country town, and lodgings midway between Miss Burden and Mrs Groot. These two characters are really the meat of the book—Miss Burden, aesthetic, religious, with her cult of a half-imaginary Rus- sian priest, Father Vladimir; Mrs Groot, coarse, cheerful wife and mother, frustrated opera singer, spilling out physical energy in equivocal ways. Tue, perhaps seeking her dead mother, is a kind of clay in both their hands, and in the end, they are too much for her.
According to its jacket, The Boss by Goffredo Parise was, on its publication in 1965, . . an important event in Italy; few novels have evoked as much praise, vilification and excited discussion.' The Italians are known to be an excitable people, and perhaps it is a good thing that they should become worked up about The Boss. Some of them remember Fascism, and some at least of them must see where an un- critical devotion to slick artefacts and la Bella figura might be going to lead. To the English
reader; faced with a rather stiff translation, The-Boss, at first, seems fatally like a number of European works, post-Kafka, post-Frisch, which have tried out man's predicament in terms of allegory or fable. A young man comes to the city from a provincial town, mad to become part of a great industrial organisation, to serve and to be accepted. He meets people with names like Diabete, Balloon, Rebus, Hamlet, Pluto. He is taken in hand by the great Doctor Max, the Boss (son of the abso- lute Boss), who makes him speeches about morality. He is lodged in a lavatory, forced to take painful vitamin injections daily, made to marry the mongoloid ward of the Boss's family. In a long letter which is one of the best things in the book, Doctor Max shows him the uselessness of rebellion, the beauty of toeing the line prescribed by bosses, who alone have the power to experiment with, and alter, human lives. He is urged to accept that 'there is no reality without bosses' for people like himself. He accepts, and says that he is happy. Although this book may be of a familiar (and to some forbidding) genus, it is nevertheless a distinguished example of it.
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