NEW FICTION

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28974, 15 August 1959, Page 3

NEW FICTION

The Bridge on the Drina. By Ivo Andric. Translated from the Serbo-Croat by Lovett F. Edwards. Allen and Unwin 314 pp.

Jugoslavia’s highest ' literary award has been bestowed on this remarkable and unusual novel, whose author was a distinguished Jugoslav diplomat Conceived on the grand scale, it encompasses four centuries of the troubled history of Bosnia. It is a chronicle rather than a novel,.but it has the simplicity and unity that evade most works of the kind. This is because the events described in the novel are held together by the bridge at Visegrad on the River Drina: the bridge is the central “character.” The bridge has always been an indispensable link between Bosnia and Serbia; and the town, with its Christian settlement on the left bank and its Mahommedan on the right, owed its existence to the bridge “and grew out of it as if from an imperishable root.” Dr. Andric’s powerful writing evokes the whole character of the people and the region, gives a magnificent sense of the continuity of life and of the suffering of ordinary people in the face of great and violent events they are helpless to control, and shows how legend and tradition are related to a harsh reality. It is the novel of a patriot and scholar, with the imagination of a poet. The main incidents are the building of the bridge by the Grand Vezir, Mehmed Pasha, a work of beauty and great skill that was accomplished with the most barbaric cruelty; the suicide of a bride who threw herself from its parapet to escape a loveless marriage; the tale of a gambler who played for his life on the bridge with the devil himself; the story of a simple young Austrian guard who, beguiled by dreams of love and spring, momentarily forgot his duty on the bridge: and a final episode involving the death of Alihodja, the last descendant of the family to whom Mehmed Pasha originally confided the care of the bridge —and the destruction of the bridge itself. The bridge has since been rebuilt, to witness brutality at least as great as that of Turkish times during the second World War; and the inhabitant of Visegrad still endures the hazards of a Communist administration with the same “incomprehension and Imperturbability” with which he met the novelties of the AustroHungarian occupation described by Dr. Andric,

The Seed. By Pierre Gascar Translated from the French by Merloyd Lawrence. Andre Deutsch. 191 pp.'

This well-written study of boyhood is a successor to the author’s novel “Beasts and Men” which won him the Prix Goncourt and the Prix des Critiques. It is slight, but it has the quality of haunting nostalgia that pervades all such exact and sensuous accounts of youthful experience. The boy is a young Parisian who, after the mysterious and sudden death of his mother, is sent away to lead a loveless life in the care of an uncle and aunt in a small country town, baking under a southern sun. The people in the book, with the exception of the boy, are only lay figures, vague and shadowy But the boy’s experiences—poaching fish, raking among rubbish heaps for the peach-stones that will bring a little pocket-money, a first love, a first contact with death—are vivid enough. And there is sensitivity and insight, even if there is a touch of selfpity too, in the theme of the novel: “Child of poverty, loved badly or not at all, I had been released to discover reality for myself, like a dog.”

In Fear of Silence. By John Slimming. John Murray. 192 PP.

Tension is the keynote of this short but brilliantly poignant novel which describes the shadowy conflict that has bedevilled Malaya since the Communist infiltration into the country. A patrol is sent out on a routine survey of the jungle. It consists of 10 Malayan ex-Com-munists, now recruited into the forces of law and order, under a British officer, Peter Lance. It is not equipped with wireless apparatus, and shortly after its departure news from an informer reaches police headquarters that two Communist terrorist parties have planned a raid on a rubber plantation, and that they will converge at a point which will ,in all probability be the line of the patrol’s activities. Nothing can be done either to warn or reinforce the small patrolling party, and the book covers a period of five days, switching from the movements and meditations of Peter Lance and his companions to the agonising fears and forebodings of those who are plotting its progress from the base. The picture of life in this steamy-heated, embattled environment has the authoritative touch of personal experience, and the book is an epic, restrained and finely written.

The Men From The Bush. By Ronald Hardy. Muller. 191 PP.

As an exercise in suspense this book maintains a high standard, and takes for its theme one of the darker manifestations of life in a dark continent. Ukari is a small African town in a British Protectorate. There is an uneasy hush prevailing in the native quarters, the reason for which communicates itself to the white population. Four men from the distant bush are said to be in hiding, waiting to seize and carry off a victim for ritual sacrifice. Though nobody has seen them, the police, to allay local fears, send out a patrol as a result of which two acts of repressive brutality are committed without uncovering, the whereabouts of the shadowy visitors. A small native boy disappears, and a crippled white boy, Jeff Candler, who had loved the child, tries desperately to rouse his compatriots to action. None of them share his suspicions and forebodings, and eventually he enlists the aid of the District Officer's son, Michael, to undertake pursuit of the kidnappers. Drama persists until the last page. The atmosphere is very w’ell conveyed of a cruel sweltering halfdead land, its poverty-stricken and diseased native population, and the frustrated colony of unhappy whites which form its administration. The author obviously knows his subject at firsthand.

Memento Mori. By Muriel Spark. Macmillan. 246 pp. Miss Spark is the possessor of a sense of humour of an unusual kind. In her latest novel her macabre fancy has prompted her to study, the behaviour of various types of people, all ol whom are more than 70 years of age. She views them with amused detachment, and shows that they all have eccentricities and that some have decidedly unpleasant habits. Deafness or tailing eyesight tends to turn their attention inward, and this is sometimes disastrous. Oddly enough the principal characters all find themselves receiving telephone calls from unknown persons. The gist of the message received is usually contained in four . words, “Remember You Must Die.” The effect of a message like that can be imagined Miss Spark moves easily from one class of aged person to another, from the geriatric ward of a great London hospital to drawing rooms in which the former elite of Bloomsbury exist in a state of advanced senility. There is even a murder described with appalling coolness. “Memento Mori” is a cruel and clever book. It will probably take its place as one of the best novels of the year.

Beds In The East. By Alan Burgess. Heinemann. 237 pp.

The abdication of British rule in favour of self-government in colonial administrations is more and more engaging the attentions of novelists. The background of this witty extravaganza is Malaya on the eve of liberation, with its uneasy co-mingling of races which had pursued their separate interests happily enough under a foreign power but which now find themselves jockeying for position in the new regime. Victor Crabbe, preparing to hand over the functions of Chief Education Officer to his Malay successor, surveys this Far Eastern melting-pot with detached affection. His help in all their problems is solicited by Malay, Chinese and Tamil factions in turn, who regard him as a source of wisdom and financial support These polyglot types include Rosemary Michael, the Britishtrained teacher, black, lovely and promiscuous with her touching love for British culture and Worcester sauce; Vythilingam, the Tamil vet, terrified of his matchmaking mother; Syed Omar, the Malay, and Manian the Tamil whose quarrel results in mayhem. Mr Burgess also draws some shrewd portraits of those of his own colour, Britons and various American specialists imbued with goodwill, and resolved to guide the stumbling feet of the new administration on to the safe paths of Democracy. Crabbe’s dramatic end has some association with an earlier book which is not made absolutely clear to the reader, but on the basis of this one, Mr Burgess’s works should well repay perusal.

The Travels Of Jamie McPheeters. By Robert Lewis -Taylor.

Macdonald. 472 pp.

Faced with a novel of this length the reader may well prepare to skip as nimbly as a mountain goat over some of the longer descriptive passages. It is a tribute to the author’s skill that such a temptation never arises, for long as it is, the book holds its interest from the first page to the last. The subject is the Californian gold-rush of 1849, and the adventures of a simple, great-hearted, Louisville doctor and his 14-year-old son, Jaimie, in crossing the vast lands which lay between their home and Eldorado. Their companions on the journey become very real to the reader who shares in spirit their trials and dangers from illness, hunger and thirst and the menace of marauding Indians. A vivid description is given of Salt Lake City in the days of Brigham Young, and of the sinister activities of the Danites, a splinter group from the main body of Latter Day Saints. Once having reached the goldfields the McPheeters might well have acquired the fortune they were seeking, but the good doctor’s childlike credulity made him a prey to swindlers, and father and son drifted to San Francisco to suffer further privations before the generosity of the English nobleman who had been one of their companions on their journey afforded them a happy solution of their difficulties. Some small lapses apart, the books is a painstaking. and always interesting record of the brutalities and heroisms, failures and triumphs of one of the most spectacular pages of American history.

A Call on Kuprin/ By Maurice Edelman. Longmans. 266 pp.

Maurice Edelman, a member of the House of Commons who speaks Russian and has several times travelled in the Soviet Union, makes use of his knowledge of the British Parliament and of Russia to attempt a “political thriller”—an account of the adventures of two patriotic Britons, an M.P. and a journalist, whd visit Russia in order to persuade a leading scientist whom they both knew at Cambridge to return to Britain. The M.P., LayeParker, is immediately suspected as a spy, and is arrested and held prisoner. On the other hand the journalist, the nondescript Smith, unsuspected by the Russian secret police does manage to meet Kuprin. The theme of this story is well conceived, and the author paints numerous realistic and authentic pictures of the Russian scene. Nevertheless those who enjoyed the author’s previous novel “Who Goes Home” will be a little disappointed. <

For Change of Scene. By Isobel Stracbey. Blond. 256 pp.

The setting of this interesting novel is contemporary Argentine. The heroine, Jean Gladstone, was brought up there and in due course married Duncan Wallace. Largely owing to family interference, the marriage was a failure. After the divorce she returned to England. There she married Brian Edge, reckless and extravagant, and soon to lose his life in a motor accident. For some years Jean drifted without much interest in life. Then she suddenly decided to return to the Argentine. In fact she was returning to her first husband. His family circumstances, she found out, had changed; she was sure he was still as interested in her as she was in him. The return, however, was not quite simple. Jean was a sophisticated lady and her journey back to Duncan was complicated by the brief infatuation she inspired in a young lawyer in Buenos Aires.