New Novels
NEVER am I so thankful to be living in the twentieth century, even under an atomic cloud, than when I read the gorier sorts of historical fiction. Not that the gore in Maurice Druon's The Iron King (Hart-Davis, 15s.) is anything to complain of, for it seems to merit just about the amount of space it gets, considering the imminence of death by torture in the France of Philip the Fair. With intrigue, politics, religion and love, physical pain and degradation seem to have occupied a fair space in people's thoughts, and when the risks for, say, adultery with a royal lady were so terrible, one gasps at the courage that ever dared begin an intrigue at all. Maurice Druon's talent, as was clear from his strange and shimmering novel, The Film of Memory, that appeared in English last year, is for the evocation, at once ethereal and solid, of the past—in this case a past remoter yet far more tangible, thicker and robuster, than that of the dying courtesan's dreams in the earlier book : the end of the reign of Philip IV, the beautiful, cold and deadly king whose last months were spent, among other pursuits as cruel, in suppressing finally, after seven years of chained imprisonment and torture, the remnants of the Knights Templar. A book without heroes or even precise villains, the portrait at various levels of an age alinost unbelievably brutal, its main quality is urgency, immediacy : you feel the texture of the crowded days, the whole grain of thought and outlook, of how it felt to live each moment so close to danger, violence, unspeakable misery and, in a very few cases, as passionate hope.
The hound in the title of Vance Bourjaily's The Hound of Earth (Seeker and Warburg, 15s.) is a man's humanity, his Involvedness' with other people. America seems a difficult place for the man who, even innocently, wants to pack up and run : the policeman bays as loudly after him as any of these hounds of conscience.
SPECTATOR, MAY 4, 1956 When the atom bomb falls, and Al realises that this is where his secret research was taking him, he bolts into seven anonymous years of flight. We meet him in his last free month, before very personal and Dostoievskian policeman catches up with him —a humorous, gentle. even saintly figure to whom everyone, the dull, the depraved, the unhappy, the beautiful, in the Christmas toy department of the San Francisco shop where he works, turns for sympathy, help, and courage. Within the month Al, the suspected stranger, has won over all his enemies and taken on so many burdens of other people's guilt that, when his wife reads of his arrest in the newspaper, she can only gasp, 'What goes wrong with human beings? I used to think that Al was practically God himself.' A subtle, unrancorous, humorous and often terrible book, it sees hope, not so much in individual goodness, as in the eternal engagement of man to love, oppose, sympathise, pitr, in short to live as a man, closely involved with his fellows, ugly and purposeless though many of their actions may be—not t° escape into loneliness, or forgo the consequence of his own actions, or of theirs. Then two first novels: Elizabeth Hamilton's Simon (Andre Deutsch, 10s. 6d.) is what so many women attempt, the simP'.e love story—a thing that isn't as simple as it sounds and in till°, case is complicated by the fact that there isn't much `love story:, in the normal sense of the words, about it. Very minutely, vet', accurately, it examines one of those curious but perhaps 11°' unusual relationships in which a lonely woman falls passionately in love with a man who, though not indifferent, wants her neither as wife nor as mistress. The heroine is that classic figure since Jane Eyre, the guileless, sensitive, and ardent schoolmistress; the hero, if you can call him that, a singularly inhibited naval offie,ef . who wants nothing from her beyond the sisterly willingness ‘" be 'around' for years on end whenever he feels like it--thef recipient of birthday presents and postcards, the companion °f mild little jaunts, the lunch-on-Sundays 'chum.' Of this meagr,e, relationship Miss Hamilton has made something, if not quite solid, at least luminous and vivid. Her novel is not, as the first sentence says, 'about Simon.' Simon is merely the ratfie, exasperating peg on which is hung a wonderfully sensitive account of a woman's growth in love—love fed, not by encouragement and response, but by dreams; love in fact for a dream, a sYnlb°' a figure. All the feminine qualities you might expect are there'd delicacy, fastidiousness, a narrow world, a severely lilnites experience, an extreme tenderness in treating the small ills that mark the oblique, pathetic ecstasy of a love that never find fulfilment. If Simon floats a small way above the everyday world, Kure./1 Loewenthal's The World was Old (The BodleY Head, 12s. 6d.) is only too firmly anchored there by a horrifying documentary ra,"0 which, in a world of normal values, barely appears to sense. A schoolgirl of fifteen, adopted by a dentist and his wife, abruptly discovers her illegitimacy and bursts out of school and suburbia to become first a chorus girl and amateur prostitute. then the mother, and soon the murderess, of a coloured tart"' and finally the terror of a women's gaol in which face-slashilt boiling-fat-throwing and Lesbianism are all part of the day ,,c routine. If you compare her with the juvenile monster of Josephl",A Tey's The Franchise Affair—again an adopted fifteen-year-ou" reverting from suburban virtue to a background of urban vicrer Miss Loewenthal's Stella appears simply too monstrous, a actions seem simply too arbitrary, for one to accept her as a human being : she is, and even in her final reform remairlsiss 'case,' a kind of sporadic, mechanically faulty automaton. 1" Loewenthal deserves a pat on the back (which I give rather 1;.0 gingerly) for flinching at nothing, but her talents don't yet take
her Much beyond straight reporting. bjeet
Honor Tracy has already been incisively witty on the sus) of Ireland and is brilliantly funny again (less purely witty, perils of in The Straight and Narrow Path (Methuen, 12s. 6d.), the tale a Scottish anthropologist who, seeing a conventload of bled nuns leaping across bonfires on Midsummer Eve, cracks his 1,1e,,l) against the church militant (in the person of the convent chap lent by using them to illustrate an article on the persistence of ancic fertility rites. Though it may appeal mainly to those at least slightly acquainted with Ireland and/or Irish Catholicism, its jokes are beautifully timed to explode with serene good humour under the padded chairs of official religiosity, cant and crawthumping almost anywhere.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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