Floating on
Francis King
A Heavy Feather A. L. Barker (Hogarth £5.50) If it is true, as Thomas Browne said, that the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, then it is equally true that the Iniquity of fame blindly scattereth her laurel. The public embraces some writers and keeps other writers, of great distinction, at a distance. The case of A.L. Barker is an illustration of this kind of 'iniquity' or injustice. She has won prizes and she has been highly praised by a diver sity of writers. But she has remained essen tially a writer's-writer, not a public's writer. I think that there are two reasons for this comparative neglect. Firstly, she is a novel ist who has never seemed to be the voice of the Zeitgeist, like some of her female contemporaries. I doubt, for example, if, read ing about her heroine Almayer Jenkins in her latest book, A Heavy Feather , many women are going to say to themselves: Oh, but that's exactly how I feel!' The world. of this book is a private and a strange one.
Secondly, her novels tend to be curiously static. They are, like this one, full of moving things; but they do not themselves move in the way in which a novel by, say, Daphne du Maurier or Iris Murdoch moves with an irresistible, constantly maintained momentum. Most successful novels are like peep-shows that never cease to journey; the journey goes on, even as the peep-show goes on. Miss Barker, in contrast, sets up her peep-show and it stays stationary while something is acted out. Then the peepshow is set up somewhere else and something else is acted out.
In A Heavy Feather one often has the sense that what one is reading is not a novel, in which a central character lives out a life, but rather a collection of short stories, in which Almayer may sometimes be the narrator and sometimes not, sometimes at the centre of the narrative and sometimes on its periphery.
There is the short story about her childhood with her father, an odd-job man, to whom everything is hostile, precisely because of his extreme vulnerability to any show of hostility. As soon as he mends one pipe in a house to which he is 'summoned, another bursts unexpectedly. If he sees a woman whom he loves in a tea-shop, he not only knocks off a cream-cake from a table in his haste to get to her but actually manages to tread on it. When he dies, it is because he catches a chill after being marooned on a roof in a rainstorm, his ladder having been blown down.
There is the short story of Almayer's attempt to lure back her mother, whom she has never known, to her father, so that he will not marry a music-mistress, an eccentric woman, who lives with a shell-shocked former lover, now impotent, in a ghastly little house. There is the short 'story of Almayer's stay, after her father's death, with some 'people of wealth and influence' — mother, son, daughter-in-law. The last of these is a beautiful and languid girl, with a habit of disappearing from the house and wandering off over the downs and to the sea. Sixteen-year-old Almayer decides to follow the truant and to find out who the lover — or lovers — may be with whom she has her trysts. But on the first occasion it is only her own husband who meets her and on the second occasion an old woman from the village. But when Almayer tells her hostess that the daughter-in-law is a Sphinx without a secret, so far from being pleased, the old woman terminates the visit.
Later there are the short stories of Almayer coming between a young homosexual and the man whom he loves but who does not love him; of her marriage to the personnel officer of an airline and of the fate of their teenage daughter whose mental age is that of a child of four; of the macabre incident when a woman seated opposite to her in a train dies, by a strange stroke of fate, when a suitcase falls on her.
Miss Barker writes impeccably, each sentence and even each word carrying all the meaning that it can possibly bear. There is a passage in which one of the characters, the shell-shocked lover of the music-mistress, is describing how a feather floated past him in the trenches: 'The breeze carried it towards the wire. A Cameronian was spread out on the wire, dead as a doornail. The feather touched his shoulder, just touched him and floated on again. But that touch turned him right over.' Miss Barker's prose has the same lightness as that feather; but just as the feather, for all its lightness, nonetheless turns over the hanging corpse of the soldier, so her prose seems to turn the whole world over, making it look entirely different from the familiar world.
Her dialogue, quirky and oblique, has some of the pungency of Ivy ComptonBurnett's. As in the Compton-Burnett novels, characters tend to speak alike — all choosing their words with extreme nicety and all indulging freely in metaphor and simile. The wit is astringent, even sometimes bitter. Love is unpredictable in its awakening and incalculable in its course. Thus the impotent ex-soldier plans to be present while Almayer's father and the music-mistress go to bed together; Almayer's mentally retarded daughter becomes pregnant by a stranger, no one ever knows by whom; Almayer herself develops a mysterious attraction to the girl whom one of her sons marries.
Because of the static and elliptical nature of her longer fiction, I think that A.L. Barker is a better short story writer than novelist. But this is a book that amply repays the attention that it exacts. Undesirable Allen Regis Debray (Allen Lane £4.25) Superfolks Robert Mayer (Angus & Robertson £4.95) A Woman Like That Susan Richards Shreve (Hamish Hamilton £4.95)
Unconversant with revolutionary literature and fearing a lifeless tract, I was agreeahlY surprised by Regis Debray's novel. Frank, is a Swiss who has come to Latin America to join the revolution. The book is sketchily plot-thin — an urban skirmish, jungle marches, a love affair with the mistress of a Party leader, a botched arms deal, a final assassination and ambush. The interest lies in the accounts of conversations with other fighters in the cause: the hard-line, but disillusioned Armando; Celia, the mistress; the utterly dependable, doctrinally unblinkered Manuel, anarchist survivor from the Spanish Civil War for whom the workers' movement took the wrong direction a century ago, following Marx and not Bakunin and so 'he was waiting for better times and meanwhile he worked at day-to-day solidarity'. Revolutionary ideas are endlessly discussed but never boringly — indeed, Debray throws a few acid comments in the direction of the lethal semantic claptrap of the trendy Left. Frank's final decision to defy Lenin's edict and go for urban terrorism is seen as a personal resolution, born of jealousy and fury at being double-crossed rather than as a totally ideological outcome. It's a deeply pessimistic book with more humanity beneath the rhetoric than You might expect. Certainly more than in Robert Mayer 's slick and irreverent scamper through current American pastures and the sacred co,,vs which ruminate there. All the superheroes are dead except one, Indigo, who lurks beneath the unlikely disguise of one David Brinkley. Overweight, sweaty, bursting otit of his hero suit — he slips into the Heroes Entrance of his tailor to order a new one — he drags himself back into action, tempted by a fiendish world conspiracy to destroy him. The trouble with irreverence is that once the bit is between the teeth, everything is grist. Here, some of the best jokes are reserved for the (relatively) blameless: Bella Abzug drives a cab; Marilyn Monroe is a nurse, deliciously ministering more than medicine to a retired super-hero; Peter Pall is into fellatio; Cinderella, her fairy godmother asserts 'sleeps with anything ill t pants. She's rejected me. Too judgmental. It's an exuberant romp, with some splendid, outrageously scaffolded jokes.
Miss Shreve's account of a worn pathologically affected by her parent's relationship which ends in murder, seems to Me neither particularly good psychology n011. good fiction. Unrelievedly elliptic an"1 :s surprisingly emotionally barren, th gloomy case-study left me feeling as if 1.6 just eaten a Chinese meal: I finished it still feeling hungry for literature.
Mary Hope
Previous page
