Go, dear lady, please go
Tony Palmer
I want to Go to Moscow Maureen. Duffy (Hodder and Stoughton £2.40)
Holding On Mervyn Jones (Quartet £2.95) Shovelling Trouble Mordechai Richler (Quartet £2.50) Maureen Duffy wants to go to Moscow. Well, who am Ito stop her? If she goes she should take her novel with her. Not that I wish to imply the thing is fit only for Russian consumption. In fact, it is rather enjoyable, if a little long-winded. And apart from its pathetic lurches in poetry — after several pages of terse dialogue and observation, for example, we are suddenly given: "beyond was a park still in the undress of late February " (filth?) — the book is nonetheless gripping, although with what remains to be seen.
No, it's the message that the Russians would like. Briefly, Miss Duffy wants to persuade us that the harsh treatment we accord our four-legged friends, be they mink or cows, is symptomatic of our endemic inhumanity, both to each other and to ourselves. In a moving passage, Miss Duffy recounts the difficulties of communication even between those who speak the same language. If, therefore, we found an animal species that could talk, " would we stop feeling we were outside the animal kingdom, them and us, believe we were not alone with our terrible burden of intelligence that made us capable of monstrousness beyond the beasts and made us glory in our difference, would we learn in fact to love ourselves a bit?" The only jarring note in that sentence is the naive optimism with which it ends. Of course we won't learn to love ourselves. We are all hell-bent on a frenzied course of violent self-destruction, social and ethical. Surely Miss Duffy, a novelist, should know that?
Indeed she does. Not seven pages earlier she has noted with sardonic elegance: "we're prepared to have waste of all sorts, including lives, to keep the body of society going. It's a kind of anthropomorphism. We think of society as a real body. A healthy body has waste it gets rid of and society does the same. This makes us able to accept imprisonment and death as inevitable to society — for others, of course." That's more like it. She's a bit muddled but she gets there in the end. Now, I would not want you to think from these two quotations that the book is nothing but meaningful diatribe concerning the ecological malfunctioning of the lesser wombat. On the surface (although it could be that that is all there is) the book is an improbable tale of one Jarvis Chuff, an inmate of Wormwood Scrubs, who is sprung by helicopter on the order of Mr Big. Mr Big, a mad retired major (what else?) has plans for our Chuff, names to effect a series of" planned terrorist actions to force the Government and the United Nations to consider an internittional charter for animals."
The ramifications of this nationwide terrorism I must leave for you to discover. Suffice it to say that Miss Duffy imbues her novelette with a sprinkling of wit (not much), a handful of observations about 'our society' (what else?) and two teaspoons of sex (I told you it was filthy). But that's not the point. Here, manifestly, is a serious book struggling to breathe. You can tell that it was intended to be serious from the dour, humourless face of Miss Duffy which stares at you glumly from,
the jacket. At first I thought it might be the form she had chosen — that of a sub-thriller — which mitigates against her seriousness. But one only has to call to mind The Secret Agent to remember how well a thriller can embodythe bitterness implicit in a moral point of view. Then I thought it might be the sheer implausibility of the storyline which leads one to resist any deeper meanings. Yet plausibility has never been notably high on any artist's check list. Therefore I came to the con' clusion that either Miss Duffy had failed to be clear in her mind whether it was a moral tole she had meant to tell by means of writing a thriller, or whether a thriller with the occasional moral grip thrown in to lend a little intellectual respectability. Either way, this confusion illustrates yet, again the rather worrying preoccupation al have developed since taking over this job of what on earth the contemporary writer of fiction thinks he or she is up to. By chance, also published this week is an admirable collection of essays by one of the few novelists who does seem to me to have got his priorities sorted out and is at least travelling along the right road, even if the way seems strewn with quagmires and ruts. I speak of the Canadian. Mordechai Richler. One essay is conveniently entitled ' Why I Write' and is an account of his struggles during the creation of his last novel, St Urbain's Horseman. His uncle, he, recalls, had been deeply shocked when told how much the young Richler earned from his first published work.
"When he (the uncle) computed MY, earnings against the time I had invested.' writes Richler, "I would have earned more mowing his lawn, and, furthermore, it would have been healthier for me." Novel writing, he admits, always was a painfully absurd process, a " horrible, exhausting struggle" as George Orwell described it. One is driven, according to Orwell, by a demon "whom one can neither resist nor understand." Worse, maintains Richler, each novel is a failure or else there would be no compulsion to begill afresh. Then, with devastating, candour, he chastises (and quite reightly) people like me. "Critics don't help," he writes. "Speaking as, someone who fills that office on occasion. I must say that the critic's essential relationship is with the reader, not the writer. It is his, duty to celebrate good books, eviscerate bad ones, lying ones." 1 wish I had space to quote from the other essays in this fascinating book. Each is as absorbing as the next, and as pertinent. I can only urge you to rush and buy it. Above all' its lucidity and brilliant insights explain — t° me at least — why Mordechai Richler is (a, could be) a very important novelist indeed and why Maureen Duffy is not. Richler knows what he is up to and why, even if — he admits — he will never understand the half-crazed motivation that set him on hi,s course in the first place. On the other hallo, Miss Duffy (one imagines) has got up in the morning, stared hard at herself in the mirror, and said: "Today I write a serious novel.' Thus, she is exactly what the Soviets are looking for, which is why I suggested some way back that if she wants to go to MoscoW she should.
I hope she is joined there, although for chi'
ferent reasons, by Mervyn Jones, who has, written a real old middle-class moan call
Holding On. Alternating between a banal pot'
ted history of our times seen through the remembrances of one Charlie Wheelwright
born at the turn of the century in London's East End where "men and women were born' loved, got married, brought up children and struggled to keep going" (well! well!)'
and a curiously shrill plea for the dignity °,1 the working man in a society rotten with In' fluence, this saga meanders on after the man' ner of Mrs Dale. I'm sorry to sound so dis missive. but really, what was the point, iv", Jones?
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