THREE FANTASIES

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28257, 20 April 1957, Page 3

THREE FANTASIES

Sometime Never. Three Tales of Imagination. By William Golding, John Wyndham, Mervyn Peake. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 224 pp.

Three striking fantasies by highly accomplished writers are here brought together within one cover. In “Envoy Extraordinary” William Golding imagines a barbarian genius arriving at the court of one of the Caesars, and inviting Caesar to try out three miraculous inventions. They prove to be the steamship, high explosives, and printing. After allowing him to demonstrate the first two, with results both farcical and appalling, and after considering for a while some of the possibilities of the invention of printing, including the least attractive, Ceasar decides the inventions are untimely and undesirable—and sends the anachronistic genius off to be Envoy Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to China. The story is told with a wit and high humour hitherto unsuspected in this brilliant author.

John Wyndham’s fantasy “Consider Her Ways” is a vision of the future in the manner of Wells or Orwell. Translated by an experimental drug into the future, his heroine, Jane Waterleigh, finds herself in a monstrous world from which men have been eliminated. A highly logical, scientific, and purely materialistic society has been organised by the women, divided into four classes —the Doctorate (the ruling-class), the Mothers, the Servitors, and the Workers—whose characteristics, suited to their role in Society, are induced in babyhood by glandular control. The horrified Jane manages to return to the world of the present and attempts to forestall this apparently predestined future; but a final twist to the story leaves her success in some doubt! It is an entertaining tale but without great originality, and certainly without the wit of Mr Golding’s story or the vivid imaginative effect of Mervyn Peake’s which far exceeds it in spine-chilling effects and in the depth of meaning suggested. “Boy in Darkness ’ is the title of Mervyn Peake’s fantasy. It is a loosely allegorical study of the unease, the torments, and the eventual triumphs of adolescence —that is, of the dependent child evolving into the independent human being. Outwardly it is the story of a young boy, a prince, who on his fourteenth birthday is oppressed by all the ritual and festivities that have marked the occasion and determines to escape from the familiar surroundings and inhabitants of the Castle. His desire is ... to be alone in the darkness of a district alien to his life, a place remote from the kernel of the Castle where, although he detested many of the inhabitants, he was at least among his own kind. For there can be a need for hateful things, and a hatred of what is, in a strange way, loved. And so a child flies to what it recognises for recognition’s sake. But to be alone in a land where nothing can be recognised, that is what he feared, and that is what he longed for.

This kind of land the boy finds, and in it he meets inhabitants equally unrecognisable, allegorical figures of vice and evil

that fill and haunt the reader’s mind. The Goat, the Hyena and, most horrible of all in his paradoxical softness and Nsweetness, the Lamb, contain the inward meaning of the story, and the tale of their defeat by the Boy is a Morality of remarkable imaginative power and subtlety, reminiscent at times of Kafka.