NEW FICTION

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29264, 23 July 1960, Page 3

NEW FICTION

The Negotiators. By Francis Walder. Heinemann. 151 pp. “The Negotiators” is a novel of an unusual kind, although it opens more or less as Stanley Weyman’s novels used to open 60 years ago. “And here I am, on this February morning of 1591, in the highest room of my house in Languedoc, dictating and recalling the pomp of that epoch.” But the speaker, Monsieur de Malassise, although a soldier, was also a man of affairs endowed with a reflective turn of mind. Together with the., dominating Monsieur de Biron, he was estimated by King Charles IX with the task of negotiating the St. Germain peace treaty of 1570 between the Huguenots and the King’s Party. “The Negotiators” is really a study of the factors ever-present in diplomatic affairs. The author’s insight is considerable. When de Malassise felt he was influencing Admiral Coligny, his attitude was that of one who" bore the combined weight of the two parties in France. “My mind was given up to that immense, solitary responsibility that is at once the glory and the peril of the negotiator.” The book takes the form of a series of dramatic interviews, during which there are curious fluctuations of feeling. There is even a woman at the conference, Mlle, de Mesmes, who is charming to look at, but formidable in debate. “In her hand you would have placed a handkerchief, a bouquet, and she was holding a whip.” Mr Walder’s novel is a work of distinction, which was awarded the Prix Goncourt, in 1958. Although it is comparatively short, it will hardly fail to impress all but the most superficial readers.. The Painted Leopard. By Peter Greave. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 255 pp. Mr Greave has written a powerful, moving, and intense novel, the story of a young man of English descent, bom in India', and, lor the duration of the novel, living in a Calcutta slum. He is a fugitive from his Own people, ashamed to show has face, since he has contracted leprosy. His loneliness and self-disgust are frighteningly real, and his picture of Calcutta in 1946 all to credibly sordid and horrible. It is amazing that within this frame Mr Greave has sketched a love that is both tender and tempestuous. It is a remarkable and terribly convincing novel.

Celia Garth. By Gwen Bristow Eyre and Spottiswoode. 407 pp. The heroine of this historical novel is a girl living in Charleston, South Carolina, during the American Revolution. She is described as “a girl who wanted things to happen to her.” And so they did. She is, of course, very pretty, in a sassy sort of way, and the hero is, of course, handsome, in a gay, daredevil sort of way. They have lots of fun and excitement, in an American. Revolutionary sort of way. Many people will enjoy the book immensely. The Sniper in the Heart. By Monica Stirling. Gollancz. 192 pp. Miss Stirling tells in the first person the story of an Italian woman who, in the course of her duties as a newspaper photographer, becomes involved in a revolution in a small South American Republic. Also deeply involved is the older man whom the narrator had known during the War, when, as an Italian Resistance fighter, he had sheltered with her family. Miss Stirling sketches with sympathy and pathos the development and tragic Elimination of the affair between the mature and worldly-wise woman and the hero of her childhood. She uses the excitement of the revolution economically, as a fitting background.

The Burning Eye. By Victor Caning. Hodder and Stoughton. 247 pp.

Though this is the twentyfourth novel Victor Canning has written, he does not seem to lose any of hrs originality or attractiveness as a story-teller. His latest story concerns a surgeon, not so very young, but handsome, clever and poor, and a widow, young, beautiful and rich. They and their fellow passengers, the survivors of a shipwreck, are projected into a world of monsoons and primitive violence, the domain of a Somali chief who stops at nothing to conceal the news of the ; discovery of'oil in his kingdom: from the outside world. It is a good, full-blooded story in Which the unexpected almost always happens—so frequently in fact, that the reader at times feels aS if he, too, needs an armed escort.

Pursuit Of The Prodigal. By Louis Aiichincloss. Gollancz. 292 pp.

Mr Auchincloss can never be accused of being a dull writer. This rather uneven tale Of an adult problem-child, product of America’s comfortably rich upper class, carries the reader effortlessly along. The Parmelee clan has its collective habitat at Parmelee Cove on Long Island, and th- great half-tumbledown mansion in which dwells their grande dame of a grandmother symbolises their social standing. Reese Parmelee alone rebels against the “niceness” of habit and thought which characterises them, and his first act of open defiance is to have a violent affaire with the wife of his best friend. His own wife, Esther, lays successful plans for breaking it up but she cannot hold Reese, who identifies her, perhaps' rightly, with the behaviourism which exasperates him. Having been trained for the law he goes to New York and throws in hills lot with a reputedly shyster lawyer, and in due course marries a second wife. Rosfna, an executive on a woman’s magazine. The chain reactions set up by family divorces and remarriages are cleverly portrayed, and the easy readjustment in the relations of the parties reveals the social rules governing the society to which they belong. But throughout Reese is not a figure to command sympathy.