Impressionist
Francis King
The Skaters' Waltz Philip Norman (Hamish Hamilton £5.95) Carrying an epigraph from Baudelaire, 'PM plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mule ans', this book demonstrates both the advantages and disadvantages for a novelist— as distinct from a journalist or an autobiographer —of total recall.
Philip Norman writes of the childhood years, back in the late Forties and early Fifties, of the only son of a romantically handsome, moody and unreliable ex-R.A.F. officer and the wife whom he holds in semi-mutinous thrall. The exofficer drifts from managing a pub in the West End — where, somewhat surprisingly, he and his wife enjoy the friendship of Ivor Novell° — to managing an hotel in St Neots, and so to running a skating-rink, amusement arcade of his own on the Isle of Wight. ,With remarkable accuracy Mr Norman recreates a vanished world of trams plying between Clapham and Stockwell or Balham; of Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny and Sylvester the Cat on the screen of the Cameo in Great Windmill Street; of Turf cigarette cards with pictures of Old Mother Riley, Gene Autry and Frank Sinatra as the Kissing Bandit; of obsolete advertising slogans (Taw for Happy Meals', 'Drink and Enjoy Lipton's Tea'), outmoded fashions, and the whole topography of Ryde with its small shops, often seedy hotels and Victorian mansions, long since clumsily 'flatted'. The feat is comparable to Compton Mackenzie's autobiography.
The disadvantage of such total recall is that, whereas all the period details are infallibly right, they have not always under gone that process to which Henry James referred when somewhat portentously, he wrote: 'We can surely account for nothing in the novelist's work that hasn't passed through the crucible of his imagination, hasn't, in that perpetually simmering caul dron his intellectual pot-au-feu, been reduced to a savoury fusion.' A novelist's memory is usually,' in itself, a selector of what ingredients should go into that potau-feu; but Mr Norman's sometimes seems to have tipped in everything — peel, stalks, gristle and all.
This author is notably successful in producing the kind of ameos that disting uished the Ealing comedies of that same period. He brings to life character after character in merely three or four para graphs or even merely three or four lines. At times, these vignettes — as of a horrid little girl with whom the youthful hero, Louis, comes into all too close a contact ('In time he came to recognise two distinct kinds of wee wee smell that clung to her') — show little of the benevolence of those comedies; but in their vinegary way they are extremely skilful.
Paradoxically, however, the more Mr Norman relates about a character, the less sharp-cut that character tends to become. Louis himself is an exception. Physically unimpressive, not always wholly likeable, and pathetic in his inability to live up to his father's 'manly' expectations of him, he seems wholly true to life. His grandmother, Nanny Belmayne, earthy, kindly and wise, is also a first-class portrait. But about the characters of the father and mother — particularly the latter — there is a strange elusiveness, as though they, represented an area of scar-tissue still too painful to explore.
In general, Mr Norman writes with the same aplomb that his Olwen — a skatinginstructress, whom the father seduces — brings to her displays on the rink. But the kind of bright and breezy impressionism that is fine for the instant journalism for which Mr Norman has become noted in the Sunday Times, is not always suited to the less ephemeral medium of the novel. Twice, for example, he uses the image of 'the pale spats' of the father's feet inside their slippers; but the point about spats — as any novelist who worked carefully, would realise when revising — is that they go, not inside, but outside footwear. Similarly, to write of someone 'coffined in a blush' may, at first glance, appear to be a striking image; but since a coffin is never red or even pink, it is not really an exact one. It is not only in the image of the slippers and the spats that Mr Norman repeats himself. Twice Nanny Belmayne is compared to one of the Bisto kids; twice Louis corrects the English of the horrid little girl when she says 'Loose it' and 'Give it me' about the doll that he has seized. Of one character, Wilf, Mr Norman writes that 'when he spoke, a tight lump jerked up in his throat'. Later, of a totally different character, we read of 'the funny pointed thing in Lofty's neck that flew up when he swallowed.' These oddities suggest either that the book was originally conceived as a series of independent episodes or that it was taken up and put down over an extended period.
A further oddity is the way in which Mr Norman begins in the first person singular and then switches to the third near the bottom of the third page. I presume that this is a hint to the reader that what he is about to read is as much the author's story as Louis's. There is also a seemingly arbitrary jumping between past and present tenses and, in one line, a mixture of both, with a 'will' where one would expect a 'would'. Frieze, incidentally, is repeatedly misspelled freize ' Although its central theme, of an only child being regarded alternately as hostage and prize by his warring parents, is never adequately realised, this is so entertaining a book that I look forward to its promised sequel. But I hope that Mr Norman will either himself take more care or else have the assistance of a more vigilant editor.
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