NEW NOVELS
Unreal city
HENRY TUBE
Girltrap Charlotte Crozet translated by Brian and Sylvette Scragg (Hodder and Stoughton 30s) A Literary Lion Anthony Masters (Secker and Warburg 30s) 'London's a small place,' opines a character in John Braine's new novel The,Crying Game, 'One only has chums of one's own kind, and sooner or later one runs across those chums.' Even more so with one's fictional chums; there must be scarcely a street in central London which isn't thick with presences. Think of Hyde Park, for instance, with -lames's Kate Croy and Merton Densher pacing out their pas- sionate subtleties in the north-west corner, while at the south-west corner Powell's narra- tor and Mark Members observe Sillery and St John Clarke making an -exhibition of them- selves in a protest march; and, roughly half- way between, lies Beckett's' Murphy !supine on the grass in the Cockpit in Hyde Park, alone and plunged in a torpor from which all efforts to rouse him had proved unsuccessful.'
This use of 'real' places as a setting for fic- tional events is . one of the measures of a novelist's achievement, is indeed almost it
of the art of fiction; for while most people agree that fiction should 'ring true,' the interpretation of this ambiguous phrase con- stitutes one of the differences between a first- and a second-rate novel. The line falls roughly between those novels which 'ring true' to what we already know and those which 'ring true' to what we have learnt to recognise 'only in the course of reading those particular noveli. Thus, when James, Powell, Beckett borrow the 'reality' of Hyde Park, which for the reader is most probably already highly charged with associations, personal, historical and fictional, they return it still further fictionalised, yet ringing truer than ever. And the magnificent . reality of London lies less in its being a large, _. busy or even handsome city than in its being an infinitely complex agglomeration Of ; fictions. .
Of this week's three 'London' novels,. on'ly' the French one, Charlotte Crozet's wincingly titled Girltrap, comes, in a rather stiff trans- lation, near to 'ringing true' in our admired
sense. The heroine, a French girl working for the BBC, and the hero, an English civil servant with a 'long, equine face' and blue eyes, con- duct a long and intricate love-affair, whose emotional marches and counter-marches form as it were a transparent overlay to the map of London. The lavish use of dialogue, the untiring analysis of states of mind and feeling, the shifts of initiative as pursuer and pursued change roles, recall at times Nathalie Sarraute. But, alas, the one essential ingredient is lack- ing: imaginative power. Mme Sarraute's chief glory is to be able to seize and express the precise atmosphere of a relationship; Mme Crozet argues 'about it and about' and ever- more comes out by the same door as in she went.
It is noticeable that, like Simone de Beau- voir, she lacks any command of metaphor, which, of course, is Mme Sarraute's, as also Proust's, master-key to that inner chamber. Her hero is a good example of how she knocks but fails to enter : he is observed minutely from many angles and yet never 'seen.' It is the more ironic in that the English reader can so clearly make out his original, the model from which he must have been drawn, a most fascinating type, quintessentially English and yet never before perhaps examined quite so painstakingly as here. He is what is loosely known as a 'cad,' but Mme Crozet's particular specimen belongs to a more defined sub- species of the type, which I will call, in expec- tation of a storm of protest, 'Homo Balliolen- sis.' It is sad that Mme Croiet has missed trapping him.
The hero of John Braine's The Crying Game, a young Yorkshire-born journalist, is more in love with London than with any of the dolly- girls he rather absentmindedly beds. Perhaps because be contemplates writing a book about London he is given to detailed itineraries and even Good Food Guide-style entries on various named restaurants. There is, that is to say, Much surface truth to the swinging London scene, its PR men, its women of easy virtue, its Minor personalities. There is also a pleasant sense of humour which from the first page engages one's sympathy : 'The television personality, Harry. Morgate, lived on admiration. . . . "Refresh my memory," he would say. "When exactly did I become a prisoner of the Japs? God, it's ridiculous, I want to forget . ." '
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Even Mr Braine's rather crudely introduced propaganda for his latest set of social and political. allegiances ii--more endearing than irritating. Bnt the 'novel's failure is precisely that I referred to above, of 'ringing true' only to what we already know, or think we knoW; So that the banality of the view produces a curious sense of unreality, similar to that con- veyed by 'human' articles in newspapers. Not that the very inability of his hero to escape a pre-packaged vision of the city and its denizens might- not have been the ground for a fine novel, if Mr- Braine had taken 'a sufficiently objective line with the fellow, had had him ramble on in his blinkered fashion, while touching in with delicate irony the details that would have revealed his inadequate under- Standing, -As, for instance, in -The Diary of a -Nobody.
There are signs that Mr Braine at least con- templated such an approach; his hero is in the first person and it is intermittently sug- gested that he is looking back on the experi-
ences of his youth. Unfortunately he- proves too beloved of his author, and the more he and the other characters stand in front of the backdrop of London the more they look like cardboard cutouts. Holland Park which, as chance would have it, is visited by both Mme Crozet's talkative pair and Mr Braine's hero, remains, I can report, unhaunted by their ghosts.
This intertwining of place and person pro- vides the central idea of Anthony Masters's A Literary Lion. An ageing novelist, his name for ever linked with a bleak island, the setting for his best-selling war-book, has an affair with a young pop-star—swinging London again—who is the best-selling author of her own time. The idea is commonplace enough, goodness knows, but that may be sometimes an advantage, in that it forces an author to dig deeper, to mine for gold, where others have been content to pan. Not so Mr Masters. So predictable are his movements in search of the metal, so inevitable his failure to find it in the shallows he has chosen, that he creates for his reader a kind of oriental suspense: 'Surely he's not going to find anything new there? No, he hasn't. I thought he wouldn't.' Mr Masters uses place not so much as a backcloth, more as a front curtain: 'Matthew was driving . . . up the motorway ribbon that tore like a raw wound through the gently rolling countryside.' That raw wound drops between you and Matthew like a very thick bit of stuff.
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