Half-known
Francis King
The Murderer Roy A. K. Heath (Allison & Busby £3.95) When I mentioned to a colleague that I was reading a book by a Guyanan novelist, he commented sagely `There's a lot of interesting work coming out of Africa these days.' Readers of the Spectator will not, of course, have to be told that Guyana, formerly British Guiana, is not in Africa but on the Caribbean. But produced by such novelists as Wilson Harris and Jan Carew and such poets as Milton Williams and A. J. Seymour, interesting work is coming out of Guyana as well as out of Africa.
In fact, for all the difference that it makes, the story told by Roy A. K. Heath in The Murderer might just as credibly have been set in Ghana or in Malaysia, Madagascar or any other tropical, multi-racial corner of the world. Any reader who hopes to get from the novel any idea of what Guyana looks like, smells like or feels like would be better advised to go to a travel book, published exactly twenty years ago, called The Marches o f El Dorado. Its brilliantly talented author, Michael Swan, made an abortive suicide attempt, cutting his throat and his wrists, soon after he had written it and, because of the loss of blood to his brain, remained, for the rest of his life, tragically incapable of speaking, let along writing, anything of interest. While reading The Murderer I kept supplementing the meagreness and poverty of its descriptions with the luxuriance and lavishness of Swan's. It is often a foreign visitor to a country, rather than one of its natives, who best catches and conveys its atmosphere. No English-born novelist of this century has, after all, written better descriptions of London than Henry James, Joseph Conrad and, in recent times, Paul Theroux. But the amount of information provided by a novel has, of course, no necessary relevance to its merit as literature. If Mr Heath had spent more time and energy on conveying to the reader the heat and humidity of Guyana, if he had described in far more painstaking detail the architecture of the houses in which his characters live, the food that they consume or the clothes that they wear, his grim, taut little story might have had, not more, but less force. It is precisely its universality the fact that the same events could have happened to people in a number of other settings that makes it impressive.
The hero of the book, Galton Flood, is so unlike able to the reader that it is sometimes difficult to conceive why one friend should be prepared to share his home with him, why another friend, a simple-minded and impoverished nightwatchman, should protect him rather than hand him over to the police when he admits to a murder, and why one attractive woman should be prepared to marry him and share with him a life in a slum tenement and another should be prepared to become his mistress. One feels that Galton must have that charm that makes essentially flawed and even evil people attractive to the world at large; but the author never really establishes the reality of that charm, whether it is one of looks or of manner or of speech.
Galton has been shaped, as the author reminds the reader at intervals throughout the narrative, by the devouring, semiincestuous love of his now dead mother. `Galton had, at the age of nine or ten, learned to adapt himself to the bit between his teeth' -the bit having replaced the nipple assoon as he is weaned. When a girl calls to see him, his mother sends her packing; even when he is already in his teens she forces him to go to church at least once on Sunday. But though Galton admires his father and elder brother, he accepts his sustained humiliation at the hands of his mother with an almost voluptuous self-abasement.
Galton's relationship with this tyrant explains all that happens to him after her death: his flight from the family home; his innate puritanism; his diffident wooing of Gemma and his killing of her when he discovers that she has not only been unfaithful but born a daughter to an older man who represents himself as her godfather. Yet, in a bizarre technical misjudgment, Mr Heath devotes a mere four-and-a-half pages to a summary of the whole of Galton's life with his mother, so that all the premises on which his subsequent behaviour rests must, inevitably, be taken on trust by the reader. Parallel with this clumsiness of construction is an occasional clumsiness of writing. There is something disconcerting about a modern novel in which a girl becomes 'a young lady' and a woman becomes `a good woman'. Other such oldfashioned usages keep recurring.
Yet, in victory of conviction over incapacity, the novel nonetheless manages to hold the attention and even create a deep impression. Mr Heath is one of those novelists who tacitly admit that they do not know
about their characters all that there is to he known. Thus Galton's behaviour in Ms!. rying Gemma and then murdering her, quarrelling with his best friend and with his brother and in finally succumbing to Mad; ness, is no less puzzling to the author than the reader. Yet, however puzzling, it never for one moment seems other than traei Paradoxically, were it less puzzling, truth might be diminished. Galton we8.7 ° unreliable, unloveable, introspective, PI' iable is a character who might have VI I created by Dostoievsky; and the fact tAlial that comparison comes to mind suggests strength and validity of Mr Heath's 01,5 ception of him. Each week brings nevC'a technically more adroit; but few weeks br.111! a novel in which not a single character is stereotype and the chief character is unique'
Ars°
The Watcher of Chimor David Cre3d (Secker £4.50) Casablack Christopher Leopold (Harilieli Hamilton £4.95) From the selective exactitude of the exile ' whose settings are felt along the blood, lel the encyclopaedic enthusiasm of that libersfi ex-pat school of novelists who roll actin the world leading every stone with inr)s,s. The Watcher of Chimor is set in Peru, wit, Francis Peters is on top secret and big unbelievable attachment to the ernment from the British secret service, wf smell out a local Indian uprising. it g5 without saying that he finds his loyeirf cruelly torn, and ends up a sadder and vase liberal expatriate. Along the way, there is much health): geographical descriptiveness and much Petri. fectly respectable assessment of the 10,. lems of Peru. But the plot is pure romain the leading Indian is a real White Mao, there's lots of (of course) superb sex wii"ns brown-skinned beauty who, luckily,rtieli'v out to be in favour of Revolution, there,ie" allowing Peters to return to his adoring.w:. t for good gradualist rather than bad raegill5r reasons. It's all good old district office stuff, with rather too much romantic cherg,,ee. I've never been much of a one for poi extended japes of buffs, whether of the fil or of any other variety. Perhaps either f should have been more, or ChristoPhes Leopold less, clued up on Forties nWvhicis and the North African cartripaign, forite. extravaganza to work. The basic idea is,e re-examine for the `reality' behind the Bergman and Bogart roles in Casabla fr.), fill in the historical background and P;ot around with varying levels of illusion. the author uses a battery of effects, a bevi.ig dering plethora of take-off styles, ranilil° from mock-Bogart to mock-M.A.S' without there being an ounce of is humour or real feeling. I can do without tPift laboured exegesis and especially Wee the deliberately anti-romantic porn displayed. OK so the film was rornall` that's the way we'd like it to stay.
Mary F.1°Pe
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