NEW NOVELS
Materialism
HENRY TUBE
A Dark Stranger Julien Gracq, translated by W. J. Strachan (Peter Owen 30s) The Ship Hans Henny Jahnn, translated by Catherine Hutter (Peter Owen 35s) Master and Commander Patrick O'Brian (Collins 30s) A Tale of Two Husbands Peter de Polnay (W. H. Allen 30s) Long Lankin John Banville (Seeker and War- burg 30s) A Dragon's Life Walker Hamilton (Gollancz 21s) Informed Sources Willard S. Bain (Faber cloth 30s, paper 18s) The golden rule for aspiring novelists is per- haps not quite Sir Joseph Porter's for aspir- ing seamen: 'Stick close to your desks and never go to sea, and you all may be Rulers of the Queen's Navee!' Or if it is for some, there are at least an equal number whose talent is better served by going to sea first and writing about it afterwards. But for both parties the golden rule is perhaps: stick close to your material, whether experienced or imagined or a combination of the two. And the corollary is: choose only that material which your experience or imagination allows you to stick close to.
Julien Gracq's A Dark Stranger, first pub- lished in this country in 1950, has been described by Andre Breton as 'a master-work of surrealism'. But although it has clear affinities with that fashionable, if rebarba- tive, movement, the book is much better judged in the tradition of Moby Dick, The Master of Ballantrae and perhaps Le Grand Meaulnes. M Gracq's material, that is to say, is romantic and metaphysical, and he approaches it from outside, not from inside the dream.
The powerfully egocentric and discon- tented hero — a modern version of Faust — sets himself a date for suicide in order to free himself of ordinary human rules of behaviour, then spends his freedom chivvying a group of young holidaymakers at a summer resort on the coast at Brittany. M Gracq keeps a masterly grip on his diffi- cult material in several ways: he uses a sensitive but thoroughly solid narrator, he creates a marvellously seen and felt land- scape through which cars can be driven and ghosts can walk without ridiculing one another, and he carries the gripping mystery of his story through and not round the meta- physical speculations of his hero and nar- rator. W. J. Strachan's translation does full credit to this outstanding novel.
The Ship, by Hans Henny Jahnn, music Publisher and restorer of baroque organs, who died in 1959, is a less successful book. Its dreamlike elements, a voyage without known destination on an oddly constructed sailing ship—Jahnn's father was a ship's carpenter, his grandfather a shipbuilder— with an unrevealed cargo, a palely loitering crew and a decidedly clammy bunch of passengers, are too clumsily worked. Jahnn seems to hover between the outside and inside of the dream, his story comes away at the edges, so that the reader never feels that sense of inevitability which is indispensable when h writer attempts to carry him from a normal world to an abnormal without loss of recognition. In a Kafka novel every part of the surrounding fog is as clear as daylight, whereas Jahnn's fog is continually pierced by a daylight he wants nothing to do with and tries to shut out. It may be that the somewhat stilted translation compounds the novelist's vagueness.
Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander, though a less ambitious novel than either of the above, is a good read and an honest. Mr O'Brian's ostensible hero is a contem- porary of my Lords Hornblower and Nelson, the commander of a British brig in the Mediterranean in the year 1800. He is a broadly drawn extrovert, with long yellow hair, a sanguine temperament and a love of music which is shared by his saturnine and intellectual companion, the brig's surgeon. If I do not call it a 'ship', this is because Mr O'Brian has taught me not to, for his true hero is the British Navy of the time, its vessels, its hierarchy, its dockyards, and every last tackle, spar and customary disci- pline that appertains to it. Here we see the golden rule most wisely applied, for out of mere well-visited romance Mr O'Brian has by rigorous attention to detail fetched excite- ment. Not simply the febrile excitement of sea-fights and boarding-parties, though that is there too, but the more satisfying excite- ment of understanding how fights are won. Mr O'Brian tells us in a deprecating note that he has stuck close to the documentary material since `so very often improbable reality outruns fiction'. He hardly does him- self justice, having written a piece of fiction which makes historical reality so probable.
In Peter de Polnay's A Tale of Two Hus- bands we have another example of the golden rule admirably served. Mr de Polnay's familiar characters, faded, insecure heirs of the world of Conrad and Maugham, whose lives are indelibly stamped with the experi- ence of 'Hitler's War', for whom France and England still constitute the whole of civiliza- tion, here usher us into the quiet but insistept account of a trial for murder and subsequent execution under the guillotine in Marseilles. In choosing to accompany his story with a thin thread of Roman Catholic revivalism, Mr de Polnay seems sometimes to threaten his structure, since it is the one part he declines to come close to, but at every other point he works with the formidable craft of a man who has measured his material inch by inch.
Were one tempted to take the apparent ease of a writer of Mr de Polnay's quality for granted, three novels turn up to make one think again. John Banville is young and Long Lankin is his first published work of fiction, so that allowances may be made. Nevertheless, although the idea has promise —nine short and disparate pieces, some of whose characters reappear in the final longer piece—the writing is fatally bogus. Mr Ban- ville can write, but not yet as himself. All his efforts go to holding the material at long arm's length while he wrestles with the prob- lem of sounding like a novelist. Walker Hamilton, whose first novel All the Little Animals was much praised, died a year ago at the early age of thirty-five. His second and last novel, A Dragon's Life, recounts the episodic adventures of an old out-of- work actor who wanders about dressed as a dragon. The narrative is in the first person and plays upon the irony inherent in a simple-minded, generally optimistic view of life's little cruelties. Walker Hamilton steers just clear of being whimsical or sentimental, but he is pallid; such material requires a real understanding of cruelty as well as com- passion. if the blows of fate are not to seem like so many sixpences fed into a machine for jerking tears.
Willard S. Bain, in Informed Sources, avoids material altogether. His book, which pokes fun at press agencies and appears entirely in the form of telex messages, is not as pretentious as it looks although-the author appears sometimes, in weaker moments, to think that he is on to something more im- portant. But to hope to comment on society by merely satirising the press is like reading oracles into tinkling cymbals or flogging the Hellespont.
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