Unfinished
Paul Ableman
A Twentieth-Century Man David Benedictus (Blond & Briggs £4.95) This book has one serious fault; it is far too short. It should be at least three, and preferably five, times as long as its 180 pages. Then David Benedictus would have had the scope to complete the pageant of post-war England that is here only adumbrated, although adumbrated with an intensity that suggests he could have done it.
Like most of my generation, I recall seeing newsreel shots of bulldozers urging ragged towers of corpses into huge burial pits. David Benedictus has doubtless also seen these almost unbelievable shots by now and probably also a large part of the remaining pictorial and verbal documentation of the charnel camps. But whereas I was a young adult when the horror was unveiled, Benedictus was just seven years old. For him, these vile events are history. And yet I have never read a more convincing account of life — which was really, of course, modalities of death —in Belsen.
. . . Redbone saw row upon row of low green huts. But it was not these which immediately claimed his attention. Along either side of the thoroughfare were what appeared to be small groups of picnickers. It took a moment or two before Redbone realised that they were corpses.
Alan Redbone, son of a Tory MP, is a very young, not specially sensitive, subaltern, vaguely serving as interpreter to the brigadier in command of the unit which first reaches Belsen. Through his eyes, nose, ears, and to the accompaniment of his heaving stomach, we explore those pavillions of nightmare. Benedictus employs less rhetoric than the theme is extorting from me and for that very reason the monstrous reality becomes credible. 'He was the particular target for a bald and naked woman — impossible to guess her age —who staggered up to him holding in front of her vanished breasts what appeared to be a bundle of rags. Redbone turned his head away, for the stink which wafted from the unfortunate woman, whose legs were coated with dried excrement, was overpowering.'
As decency slowly transforms Belsen, and, such is the legacy of typhus and malnutrition, that it is weeks before the death rate even begins to fall, Redbone befriends, and finally marries, Selma, a young Dutch girl whose whole family, now dead, were sent to the camps for sheltering Jews. Selma's home has been burned and, apart from her wasted body, her sole possession is one old army blanket. Even her womb has been stolen by the SS. Redbone takes her home to Margerison, the family seat in South Oxfordshire. But, 'what had she to do with these sheets? They were too soft, too smooth altogether. She who had clutched carcasses to her, who had lain in their clammy arms and been wrapped in their bony embraces Selma never truly escapes Belsen and, thirty years later, makes her way back there to keep faith with the dead. Her unappeasable survivor's guilt reminded me of Sassoon's poem about an infantry officer who, securely in bed on leave, is harrowed by phantoms of the slain who reproach him: 'Why are you here/With all your watches, ended?! From Ypres to Friese we sought you in the line.' It seems that those who have visited Hell can never again find solace on earth.
When his father dies, Redbone effectively inherits his parliamentary seat and embarks on a worthy but lacklustre political career. He and Selma adopt a son but, apparently bewildered by the varying orientations to life of his step-parents, Mark Redbone grows up to use and then push drugs. Redbone's own dismal inheritance from Belsen is a taste for sexual charades with his trendy mistress, Clare, games which involve Nazi insignia, black leather and whips. Redbone, finally convinced that he will never achieve office, resigns himself to a life peerage. Selma's disintegration, held at bay by whisky, approaches totality and Mark edges towards prison.
By now, you might be forgiven for supposing This work to be thin on laughs. You would be wrong. In fact, A TwentiethCentury Man is consistently witty and veined with ironic humour, much of it supplied by the gossip-columnist, Hallam, who emerges, in the closing pages, as the emissary of an underground, organisation in defence of enlightened Conservatism.
There are several powerful themes in this book. There is the dominant one of human infamy, exemplified not only by Belsen but by, for example, senior policemen listening, for recreational purposes, to tapes recorded by the moors murderers during their foul diversions. There is a penetrating survey of post-war English political history with some reference to world affairs. There is an exploration of middleand uppermiddle-class social and sexual mores. But the scale is maddeningly wrong. These themes should be merely elements of a major panoramic work but here seem more like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which fail to do more than hint at the grand design. This effect of incompletion is emphasised by Benedictus's chosen technique of narration. He alternates present tense sections dealing with present day events and past tense sections centered on Belsen. This method introduces an otiose artificiality into his otherwise highly-convincing and moving story. Nevertheless, the book is compulsively readable. If it sometimes suggests an unfinished mural by a master, who wouldn't rather contemplate such a work than the seamless tableau of a hack? Spectator 9 December 1978 Song of Solomon Toni Morrison (Cliall° 0.95) It's Cold Next Door Peter dePoinay Off H Allen £4.95) Last week, I saw Toni Morrison'sbIC buster on sale by the gross all over New VT' newstands, and was put on my guard. The sheer over-exhilaration of American inat.. keting has as many or more misses as bib' But it turns out that the spirit, sophi5licatif,11 and soul of this saga is very comPelsL': reading. It is a many-layered account a' self-realisation through the search for his roots — if that word hasn't now been down" graded into cliché—of Macon Dead Jr., vihti°' after long and perilous travails, more heroic and macho than traditional retinal allows, finds his origins, rediscovers en. restores the real non-slave name 0f hill! family. Toni Morrison combines all thetl tit, itional elements of myth and folklore: ; quest is pursued by the solving riddling, witches are confronted, ghe's.5 point devious routes. But the whole thing' rooted in strong, detailed reality: the ell; purpose, cross-grained, off-centre life °f.,,triv northern urban blacks, fighting for prof:nil without the soil-based grit and labour wi'v their forefathers exercised after Abe°, and before oppression set in. His heedn treatment of mother, sisters and mistress% strong indictment of the fecklessness anet of elaboratts spiritual poverty of the disorientedW . e male and a straight-down-the-in liberationist plea for real equality betweeio races and sexes. The strongest charade° is the book are the women: the witch thettle,c most subtly used to demonstrate male fea'r; his aunt, Pilate, who bales him out of dangeo and who has never lost sight of the real vaill lost in the tragic oppression of their race' 0, both witch and good fairy. FinallY, called Milkman disparagingly after mother's over-long suckling, dependentirte and careless of women's role in realises himself and his birthright in 3 00 liantly complex quest which uses the Met, ancient arts of storytelling to enliven Pe'ild ically the modern dilemmas of bladc a female oppression. Peter de Polnay's It's Cold Next 1),:f e comes garlanded with so much for previous work that I was disapPoin' r the clipped spareness of the style, the reli choligical didacticism and the limited In 0 in which he operates. Osbert HillleY;by dried-up, selfish bachelor, is taken ove'fate the wife of the farm manager of the es' ris which he inherits out of the blue. What site( as an intrigue to trap him into retainnil g husband in his job, ends as a sennaolic consuming passion. His protective Cath, of attitudes, used to circumscribe the feat a infatuation and involvement, are, blol, none-too-subtle twist of plot, dispose .dity and his prevarications are seen to be ar2..ec.. of soul rather than genuinely religious n'aiy,s tions. There is no denying Mr de 11°1111, of professionalism; but, like the noveLouis Auchincloss, it's thin gruel mary HOP°
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