C. P. Snow:

shows promise

Auberon Waugh

The Malcontents C. P. Snow (Macmillan £2.25) About a Marriage Giles Gordon (Allison and Busby £2.10) Lord Snow reveals an entirely new talent in his latest novel, all the more welcome because never suspected, at any rate by this reviewer. There are those, of course, to whom news of any talent possessed by this particular author will come as an equally welcome surprise, but I thought I spotted a distinct spark of something in his study of nine great contemporaries, Variety of Men (Macmillan 1967). There he showed himself as a master of the potted biography and also, I thought, as an anecdotal gossip writer of great accomplishment. There are those who tend to despise the art of the gossip writer, but I would urge them to try it first. The gossip writer must be stimulating and credible at the same time, and these two requirements are as mutually opposed as they are mutually dependent.

The new talent which Lord Snow reveals is that of the mystery suspense writer. Having read his novel a second time in two months, I am prepared to bet that he could write a really first-class detective thriller if he set himself to it. On the first time through The Malcontents, it is true, I took it at its first face value, as a novel of contemporary manners, and was reduced to the usual spluttering indignation at the ineptitude of Lord Snow's social observation and the venality of his moral judgements. On second reading one spots a quite exceptional skill in the handling of narrative which one had missed earlier through irritation at the implausibility of his characters.

Seven politically aware students at a provincial university learn that slum property in their town, where coloured tenants are rackrented, is owned by a prominent Conservative politician and member of the then Shadow Cabinet (I wonder which member?). They plan to publish this information in such a way as they fondly believe will bring the capitalist system crashing down— a footnote paragraph in Private Eye, perhaps? The information has been secured by bribing a West Indian agent who runs the property, and Lord Snow believes that this makes them liable for criminal prosecution on a charge of conspiracy to commit defamation. He is wrong, of course, but one can easily accept that this is so as a temporary convention.

This group, which refers to itself as 'the Core ', is betrayed to MI5 by one of its members. Their parents are acquainted with the plan, and there is talk of a prosecution while the Core meets in an upper room to find out which is the Judas. It is in this situation that Snow's skill as a writer of mystery and suspense is revealed. First, he invites us to suspect the least sympathetic of their number, a sinister, vulpine drug fiend called Lance Forrester. Forrester is rich, cynical and promiscuous—everything beastly — but soon we realise that the cards are stacked too much against him, so he must be innocent unless Snow is engaged in double-bluff.

I was convinced that the guilty man was called Neil St John, a sort of John Osborne character who is for ever ranting about his proletarian origins. This was partly, I suppose, my Agatha Christie training whereby the murderer is so often the maidservant. Certainly the police seem to have absorbed this useful pointer in burglary investigations and generally assume that the guilty party is the person of lowest social standing on the scene of the crime. But my real reason for suspecting St John was simple class antagonism, and it is a tribute to Snow that he can stir such atavistic emotions.

The other members of ' Core' are the whole ' daughter of a bishop and her lover, the wholesome son of a provincial solicitor, a Jewish intellectual, a degenerate, detribalised young woman of middleclass origins who is the mistress of Neil St John and Mark, friend of the wholesome element. Suddenly the Jewish intellectual jumps out of a window under the influence of LSD. Lord Snow's description of finding the corpse is quite excellent in its gruesome detail, with brains spilling out and "the sweet thick smell of blood ":

a flocculent mass had issued, and could, like ectoplasm, still be ballooning out: Stephen thought of it as white, for he knew that was the colour of brain tissue, but on a colour film, taken under the lamp, it would have been nearer green. There was a lake of blood percolating the flagstones . . .

Exactly the sort of thing the modern detective story needs. Well done, Charles. But if I say that The Malcontents is redolent of promise — I think that is definitely the constructive thing to say about it — for a really first-class detective novel, I must not give the impression that it has fulfilled the promise. Its faults as a novel are many and glaring. Not one of the younger characters carries any conviction, and the situations are hopelessly incredible. Snow's description of taking LSD misses the awful solemnity of this particular ritual, making it a sort of cocktail party occasion — "'Come on, girl. Take a trip '—' Oh, I don't mind if I do '—Lance picked up a bottle and poured a few drops in her gin!" His ignorance of the manners and morals of the young would be distinctly endearing if he had not set himself the task of teaching us about them.

His worst failure is in dialogue, but on a more elementary level he introduces far too many major characters in the first few pages. This has the effect on a reader of making him take a step back from the narrative, developing his critical faculties at the expense of his willingness to suspend disbelief. Never mind. The book is mercifully free from that death-defying ponderousness which characterised the Lewis Eliot series, and some of the older characters — particularly Thomas Freer, the wholesome provincial solicitor — are sympathetic and even mildly unusual. The book, as I have said, is redolent of promise, and I hope Lord Snow does not let me down by failing to live up to it.

In Giles Gordon's new novel he fully develops the talent which I perceived in, I think, The Umbrella Mari, for erotic de scription — more particularly for sensual descriptions of women dressing and un dressing — but there will be those who might feel by the end of this one that he has flogged that particular horse to death and it is time he tried his hand at some nature descriptions again.

Boy (detribalised Scot from Aberdeen) meets girl (rootless art teacher) at London party; they become lovers for a year in bed-sitter society; she has abortion; they marry; two miscarriages; two sons are born; he meets attractive divorcee motherof-two, but nothing comes of it; she has twice-off affair with husband's best friend; he laughs it off and has one-night stand with spare lady at a conference in Bradford. Moral: tolerance is all.

The book was rather spoiled for me by acute dislike of the hero and heroine, but there is no reason why others should share this reaction. Probably it is this reprehensible class antagonism again. One calls it reprehensible, but writers and critics of proletarian origin (and their middle-class groupies) are encouraged to abuse the middle classes at every opportunity. Never mind.

Mr Gordon's new book must stand or fall by its ability to maintain sexual tension. This might be thought so subjective as to defy analysis, but I think that sexual tension is only maintained in literature where there is promise of something more. Expectancy and promise are as important as fulfilment.

I still think that Mr Gordon has got it in him to write a first-class erotic novel. He should avoid dialogue on these occasions, and cultivate the serious, almost humourless side of his nature. Eroticism is the only branch of literature in which humourlessness and extreme attention to detail are advantages. In any case, Mr Gordon keeps trying and I wish him luck. A more serious fault is that he reveals all about the abortion, two miscarriages and two healthy sons on page eight and then expects us to thrill to the account of them in flashback. This is an elementary mistake and easily avoided. I

think the best novel for Mr Gordon to write next would be an erotic thriller about a bemused but lusty Scot in some Mediterranean location pursuing and winning many girls of different colour and class in chronological order, ending with the Scot's own death in tragic circumstances. English Civil Wars and Interregnum has been remarkable, and it has attracted some of the most distinguished scholars of their generation: Trevor-Roper, Stone, and Christopher Hill himself, as well as a host of men only slightly inferior. And within this field the favourite topic is always leftwing ideas, religious, political, or both. We are deluged with studies of Ranters, Seekers, Quakers, Muggletonians, Grindletonians and Fifth Monarchy Men, but for the efforts of saner Englishmen to establish a Presbyterian or an hidependant Church on oligarchic or pseudohierarchical lines there is no publicity, except for the work of George Abernethy at the very end of the period, 1659-62, and the continuing debate between various historians on the religious complexion of the Long Parliament after 1648 — a debate Which has more reference to politics than to religion. For the rest we are still dependant on W. A. Shaw's History of the English Church during the Civil Wars and Commonwealth; an excellent piece of work, very solid and worthy, but one Which was published in 1900.

As the prelude to a discussion of this latest book by Christopher Hill, this may seem a commission of the reviewer's prime sin — denouncing a book for not being What it never set out to be. But I think we are entitled to ask where all this discussion of obscure left-wing fanatics is getting us. That some of them were mad we have always impatiently suspected, but Dr Hill, in a chapter entitled 'The Island of Great Bedlam,' positively glories in it. What is not in serious dispute, though the mention of it occasions understandable asperity in the practitioners of this particular sub-genre of history, is that the ideas and efforts of these left-wing radicals had no discernible effect on the subsequent course of English development, except that it Perhaps made the ruling classes and the established Church a mite more reactionary than they otherwise would have been, and even this is difficult to establish With any certainty. For the rest, such radical ideas as were transmitted, tenuously and clandestinely, into the eighteenth century were divorced from any religious context, or set in one of pure atheism. Such few sects as survived the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 — notably the Quakers and the Baptists — remained. Politically quiescent thereafter. So, if we are to study this phenomenon at all (and I would not deny that we Should), it must be as an isolated episode in the history of religious thought and English social and political development.

This said, it must be admitted that something exceeding strange went on in England during this period. Under haunting and evocative titles like Some Sweet Sips of Some Spiritual Wine, or The Light and You can bind your copies of The Spectator. week by week in a special binding case, with stiff dark blue covers and gilt-lettered spine, designed to hold twenty-six copies. Price El post free from:

Dark Sides of God, or The Vials of the Wrath of God upon the seat of the Man of Sin, men poured forth arguments and assumptions which overturned all existing social and political authority, and even sexual morality. Winstanley's Diggers proclaimed and tried to institute something very like a primitive communist community, with common ownership of land; the Ranters held orgies of drinking and smoking, and many of them accounted adultery a sanctified act in certain circumstances. Henry Neville, in a book with the startlingly modern title The Isle of Pines, looked forward to a polygamous utopia, while others solemnly discussed the pros and cons of Californian marriage,' with sexual combinations of one plus four, or even five plus one plus one. As for the sacred authorities of the state, the law and the church, they were denounced as 'Norman,' or if not Norman, then 'Jewish,' showing a fine impartiality of prejudice, if some confusion of mind.

Dr Hill paddles his way through these frothing, log-bestrewn waters with all his customary skill. He corrects the record of the early Quakers, and amiably footnotes A. L. Morton's The World of the Ranters. He is equally authoritative on Seekers and Diggers. He is at his most stimulating when he discusses the debt such people owed to the Bible; he establishes that it was in fact highly selective, and his essay on Samuel Fisher and biblical criticism is one of the best in the book. If from time to time one wonders if this is fit employment for one of the first historical minds of our generation one's speculations are hastily suppressed. Most of us will want to know why all this happens, and here Dr Hill, unlike most of his rivals and colleagues, offers some help. The breakdown of central government is, of course, obvious, though even here we do not always make sufficient allowance for the impact of this breakdown on localities, the way in which local authorities were willing to sell toleration in return for support, resulting in such village effusions as Records of the Churches of Christ gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys and Hexham. There was also the youth of many of the participants; the fact (already noticed) that the median age of parliamentarians in the Civil Wars was ten years above the royalists meant that there was a parliamentarian younger generation that might fairly be described as 'teenage,' or even 'hippy.'

Finally, there is, of course, the solvent effect of Calvinist doctrine without Calvinist discipline. The idea that the majority of mankind were doomed to hell fire without possibility of self-justification or amendment was saleable only within the framework of a very tightly-discipline, self-regarding church; outside this framework it put too great a strain on men's fortitude. The alternative was to seek one's own salvation, or posit the immediate return of Christ to Earth (chiliasm), permitting Person to Person negotiation. Moreover, the Reformers had put too great a premium on discipline. The Ranter Lawrence Clarkson seriously taught that: in the imagination. What act soever is done by thee in light and love, is light and lovely.

But Hill points out that this has its origins in the teaching of Luther and Calvin; the latter said, "All external things are subject to our liberty, provided the nature of that liberty approves itself to our minds as before God." The English Interregnum may be seen as the reductio ad absurdum of Calvinism.

In sociological or historical terms this was a very curious Revolution.' Clearly the writings of these people evinced a settled hatred of established authority in church and state. Yet this came to nothing; it attracted no widespread popular support. The Levellers were crushed by Crom*ell, and Leo Solt has shown that their numerical support in the Army has been exaggerated. Frenziedly as they inveighed against Cromwell, the sects never shook his power — only upper-class republicans and politiques like Vane and Ashley could do that. And after Cromwell the fences round the Establishment were even weaker. Venner's Rising was only put down with difficulty in 1661, and had it occurred outside London, or the other main garrison towns, the results could have been incalculable. Yet it did not. This was not really a proletarian movement at all, it was an unexpected opportunity for failed shopkeepers, lazy artisans and eccentric academics to find their voice.

The reaction to all this lunatic eccentricity is interesting, though Hill touches on it only in passing. It ought to have provoked a frenzy of persecution, but except perhaps for the case of the Quaker James Nayler it did not. Hill has produced much the best book on the pre-Revolution established Church, and the most sensitive and intelligent book we have on Cromwell. Is it too much to hope that he will eventually produce a book on right-wing forces during the Civil Wars and Interregnum?