Red menace
A. N. Wilson
A Summer in the Twenties Peter Dickinson (Hodder & Stoughton pp. 254, £6.95).
Tis sixty years since was the sub-title of Waverley. It is the perfect distance from which to construct historical fiction. The 1920s are close enough for plenty of survivors to correct our false impressions, but far enough away to be viewed with complete detachment. So, now, or about now, is the time to be writing a novel about the General Strike.
Peter Dickinson has done so with wit, elegance, and sensitivity, as one would expect. The jacket of the book is plastered with references to the author as 'the best crime writer we have' so I opened A Summer in the Twenties expecting at least a robbery and perhaps a couple of murders. When I found myself 30 pages from the end, with still no sign of any conventional 'crime' having been committed, I began to think I must have nodded in some early chapter, while the butler decanted the arsenic or the suspect foreigner slipped Lady Belford's emeralds into the pocket of his Oxford bags. But I was not asleep. It is true that there is an attempted murder in the penultimate chapter, and the book as a whole owes something to Buchan and something to Michael Innes; but it is not a 'crime novel' at all.
It concerns the dilemma of a nice young man called Tom (the Honourable Thomas Paul Dettinger) Hankey who is caught up in the General Strike. He is abroad when the story opens; he has just met Judy Tarrant, the girl of his dreams and everything appears to be going swimmingly (she has slipped into his bedroom during the night) when he is summoned home by his father and told to learn to drive a train. Meanwhile, swigging fizz over their breakfast at the Mitre, Tom's Oxford chums think it might be jolly to put on masks and go round shooting up Bolshies. Make a change from beating up aesthetes. Tom shares their loathing of the Bolshevik threat; and, for a series of complicated reasons, relating to the girl he loves, he is enlisted on the side of Right, to find the Bolshie ring-leader in the dock-land of Hull. But he is not entirely on the side of the• masked men in plus fours. For one thing, he admires the intelligence and courage of a Communist agitator called Kate Barnes. For another, he genuinely comes to like and admire some of these working-class fellas: train-drivers, dockers and so on. He comes to see that they are not such bad blokes after all. But there is some evil blighter in their midst, stirring up trouble, whose nom-deguerre is Ricardo. It is Tom, and he alone who, after a series of hectic adventures and deductions, finds out that Ricardo is . . . Well no, I won't spoil it; but it is no surprise, because the educated ones are always the worst.
Going back in one's imagination to reconstruct the conflicts of the recent past is a bold thing to do. Does the novelist take with him the superior 'wisdom' of his own times —the late J.G. Farrell's technique —or does he try to write in the spirit of the times he is depicting? The latter is the much bolder choice. Peter Dickinson has made it, risking being thought derivative and blimpish. He is neither, His book is fresh, always observant, at times moving. But it is interesting to see how it has been done.
He has not been at all ashamed — given that he is writing an adventure story set in 1926 to use the conventions and attitudes of story-tellers of that date, or authors closer to that date than he is. He raises no complications in the reader's political response, for example; he is as unselfconsciously hostile to the Bolshie threat as Dornford Yates or John Buchan would have been. And he has seen that the only way to achieve this effect is to be hostile to it in their sort of way. His villain is partly drawn from these authors, partly perhaps a throw-back to Conrad; his nickname, Ricardo, somehow summoning up the atmosphere of The Secret Agent. In the 'social' scenes he draws on authors of a slightly younger vintage; but he is equally unashamed to tread paths well-beaten by the likes of E. Waugh and A. Powell. When the five Gorringe sisters retreat from the party at Rokesley Hall in order to do a jigsaw puzzle, there is an unmistakably Powellian use of inverted commas. 'From childhood, he had been aware that certain families were classed as "odd" '. On the other hand, the semi-sentimental gusto with which Tom treats his Oxford landlady recalls Dorothy L. Sayers: 'Tom had never seen Mrs Godber smile but he had learnt to know when she was pleased'. None of this diminishes Mr Dickinson's claim to be an 'original' writer. A Summer in the Twenties is a fragrant pot-pourri made from other men's flowers; but the mixture is pure Dickinson. The plot — how gallant Tom beat the Reds and got his girl —is really only incidental to the care and devotion with which Mr Dickinson has reconstructed his period: its costumes; its films (Valentino dies in the course of it); its social mores; its railways (there is much here for votaries of steam engines), its politics. It is not meant to be a serious book, but it is a highly intelligent one. 'It's a funny thing about the English. They acutally hate ideas', says Kate Barnes as she falls in love with Tom. Mr Dickinson has not tried to offer new thoughts on the General Strike. He does not condescend to his characters because they are alive in 1926. His vignette gives an oddly convincing picture of what it was like to be them. And the fact that the illusion is created by such literary means is entirely conscious and within the author's very deft control.
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