NEW NOVELS

Thrills and spills

HENRY TUBE

Echoes of Celandine Derek Marlowe (Cape 25s) The Snow-White Soliloquies Sheila MacLeod (Seeker 30s) Philly Dan Greenburg (Seeker 30s)

The Killer Colin Wilson (NEL 25s)

Of Bombs and Mice Mina Tomkiewicz, trans- lated by Stefan F. Gaze! (Allen & Unwin 50s) The hero of Derek Marlowe's new novel is, I suppose, the educated man's James Bond. His job as a hired assassin is not decently draped in patriotism, but done nakedly for gain and on behalf of private clients; he is a ladies' man, but conveniently sterile; and for scenes of action and hairsbreadth escape he sub- stitutes an intimate and challenging relation- ship with his reader, something akin to that between the setter and the solver of a cross- word puzzle. His character is somewhere between a world-weary Greene hero and a brittle and hot-tempered Nabokov one. The novel is a thriller in so far as the movement of the story to its climax excludes any sense of outside reality in the reader, so that the acts of violence, both sexual and murderous, as well as the unsavoury profession of the hero, are elements in a game rather than sources of moral outrage; but it is a novel in so far as the hero's manner towards his reader dominates the action.

For this riddling, teasing, well-read, cleverer-than-thou, middle-aged, middle-class killer has been left by his wife, and the clever- ness of Mr Marlowe is to demonstrate the reality of this missing relationship in the manner of his book, and by implication the lack of reality in the ostensible matter. The ironic sense of the tedium between the lines which would kill James Bond stone dead if it were allowed to obtrude on his frenzied activities is actually voiced by Mr Marlowe's eraser: 'I recall a story for no apparent reason: a man murders his wife in Tunbridge Wells and in order to avoid recognition he escapes to Brighton. While there, out of boredom, he takes a mystery tour and finds himself back in Tunbridge Wells. He is arrested.'

I have lingered a little over Mr Marlowe's craftsmanship, his knowing exactly what he wants to do and being able to do it in a thoroughly dashing manner, so as to under- line the point that whatever virtues a reviewer may find in a novel—whether of intelligence, excitement, `promise,' truth to life' or what- ever—it is the way the thing is written that makes it enjoyable to read, the message with- out the medium being, at least in the realm of fiction, a somewhat unlovesome thing. Sheila MacLeod's second novel The Snow-White Soliloquies, for instance, starts well, immedi- ately catches the attention with its contrast between a level, matter-of-fact tone and a strange situation—a girl in a glass box, only her eyes alive, carried about the country On a large lorry and trailer, attended by assorted types under the direction of a showman known as Doc. But like so many paintings of the 'pop' school and their ancestors the sur- realists, the initial surprise is not enough.

The strange situation becomes less strange the more you look at it, while the matter-of- fact tone dulls apace. The opening contrast once lost, the fidgety reader begins to peer about for action, character, depth, hidden meaning. Miss MacLeod gives it to him, but too slowly, with too niggardly a hand, with the result that he has not only long foreseen her final revelation before he gets to it but has dismissed the whole fiction from all but the outworks of his busy mind. Where the writer's imagination fails to catch the right pace, the right focus, the right mixture of variety and repetition to suit the material, there the reader's imagination flags and dies.

It is sad to report that Dan Greenburg, the exuberant and highly polished author of Chewsday, has come the same sort of cropper as Miss MacLeod in his new novel Philly. Not, I think, for quite the same reason. Where Miss MacLeod failed to see her material in anything but a blur, Mr Greenburg has attacked his with apparent ease and clarity. Alas, he is too smooth and mature a writer to conceal from his reader the triviality of the undertaking. To treat this little adolescent horror story at all, he has had to tie one arm— his sense of humour—behind him, and even so he quite fails to suggest that anyone could be quite so dumb as the victim at the centre. The reader, like a knowing cat, watches the fingers instead of the string.

Colin Wilson, in The Killer, has attempted

to write a non-fictional novel about a sex- murderer. He explains in an introduction that

his attempt differs from Truman Capote's In Cold Blood which he says is 'fundamentally no different from novelised non-fiction—for example, Fitton-Miller's "biography" of Ras- putin'. Mr Wilson's character is a composite version of several case-histories, while his narrator is a psychiatrist—his idea being pre- sumably that though the facts are fiction, their interpretation should be strictly 'real' The result is certainly readable, unpleasantly so, but since Mr Wilson rigorously eschews any kind of style, even a style which would see the psychiatrist in relief, it is closer to porno- graphy than to a novel. Now it might be argued that the case-history of a sex-murderer would inevitably read like pornography, ex- cept that Mr Wilson has chosen to mix several case-histories in one, thus robbing his story of the very particularity with which fact obliterates pornography. Mr Wilson's sex- murderer, compounded of borrowed miser- ies, could only be made to exist in fictional terms, but this Mr Wilson will not allow, so

that what emerges is simply a peg on which are hung a selection of potnographic scenes. The question of style, of how the thing is written, might seem almost irrelevant to a

'documentary' novel such as Mina Tom- kiewicz's Of Bombs and Mice, an account closely based on the author's experience of

the Warsaw ghetto during the German occu-

pation. But although in this almost incredible story the facts speak more strongly for them- selves than fiction could, it is the author's arrangement of them, her quiet, butler's man- ner with them which give the shape and focus necessary to lodge mere statistical horrors in

the reader's imagination. We never stop see- ing the ordinary within the extraordinary and vice versa. How did recognisable human beings actually live through five years of the Final Solution? This novel will tell you. "'Does history repeat itself because our memory is so inadequate?" Nata asked her- self on such days, whilst before her eyes would pass a Technicolor film depicting the most extraordinary monstrous events—events which had happened to herself and to millions of other people.' If anything could make our memory more adequate it should be fiction as cunning with the facts as this.