NEW FICTION

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30739, 1 May 1965, Page 4

NEW FICTION

The Hollow Shell. By John Farrimond. Harrap. 189 pp. It is rare and agreeable to find a novel about a mining community that does not dedend for its action on a pit disaster. Mr Farrimond writes with vivid conviction about the lives of a community in the north-east Midlands whose village was slowly dying. Natural faults, aggravated by the system of total caving, which allows the empty caverls to collapse unchecked as the coal-cutting machine moves on, had caused subsidence which contorted the roads and houses, and sometimes made great pits open suddenly on the surface. The mining families wanted the city council to build a new estate on a large open area near by, but one young man, Bert Farrel, was sure that the Meadow was equally dangerous, and the move would not increase their safety. He was planning to build there himself, but it would be on a steel and concrete raft to protect the house from the uneasy shifting of the rocks below. Because he proclaimed his belief by letters to the local paper and in an interview with a national paper the villagers turned on him with all the short-sighted fury of Luddites, fearing to lose their new estate and be left to find homes as best they could. In this as in other things their leader was Jack Moss, a selfconfident, brave and brutal man who tried literally to knock sense into young Bert. None the less it was because of Jack Moss, by a gruesome irony, that the danger was at last taken seriously by everyone. Mr Farrimond is himself a miner, and the book shows his technical competence: far more, he has a thorough understanding of the men and women in such a group, and a talent for crisp, vigorous writing. Mallabec. By David Walker. Collins. 223 pp. The Mallabec is a salmon fishing river in Canada. A stretch of the river and a large wood through which the river flows belongs to John Hyde. The story opens in 1962 with the return of John Hyde, his wife Moira and their son Robin, to their fisning camp after an absence of twenty-three years. Acquaintance is made with Kate Talbot and her husband and between the young wife and the son, Robin, the acquaintance ripens to something deeper and cheaper that threatens the happiness of Kate and her husband. Kate is interested to find out that the Hydes had known her father before she was born, when twenty-three years previously her parents had come to the river to fish. The father, Gerald Poynder, was a poet and handsome. He had been found drowned in the river. His death was never satisfactorily accounted for, as he was an experienced fisherman. The author then uses the time-worn mechanism of the flash-back and the Hydes and the Poynders meet and become friendly. Hyde’s wife, Moira, and Gerald Poynder have an illicit relationship. Her husband found out and determined to kill Poynder. He loosened great logs that had been snagged at the river bank and arranged for them to flow down the river and hit Poynder near the lip of the rapids, but his conscience smote him and he determined not to carry out his plan: but he slipped on the logs and liberated them. Poynder was killed and his body found beyond the rapids. Now twenty-three years later Kate, who was not born at the time of her father's death, and Robin have an illicit relationship. Hyde is alarmed, his fears and remorse through the years are making his life intolerable. He destroys himself. The story is well told, for the author is a craftsman. There are many deft touches and clear pictures of the woods and the call of birds.

The Fourth Reich. By Martin i Hale. Jonathan Cape. 180 pp. and appendices. This is a cynical appraisal of the world political situation as it might develop i within the next ten years. Eugen Leutmann, Nazi fanatic whose gifts as a liar ! have caused him to be cleared by the post-war tribunal ' of Nazi sympathies, has be- ' come secretary-general of the : United Nations. He is deter- ' mined to rule the world, and , has appointed his own thugs to carry out U.N. “peacekeeping” assignments. With utter contempt for the black “developing nations,” he does however, pose as their champion, and by judicious use of ■ the word “peace” deliberately incites them to destroy the strongholds of any “neocolonialists” still existing in their continents. The British Government, now led by a Jew, is deeply distrustful of this newly constituted U.N., and despatches a young Secret Serviceman to the Congo—ostensibly to deliver secret papers to one of their agents but really to substitute him for a young Swiss, lying wounded in a hospital so that they can spirit the latter back to England with a deathdealing atomic formula he has invented. To this end they are perfectly prepared to sacrifice their secret serviceman, whom they suspect will meet with an unpleasant end once the hoax is discovered. The Englishman does, however, return whole after he has destroyed Leutmann’s power in Africa by blowing up a vital dam (for the loss of a few million lives), to be. feted as a hero and up-graded in salary. The plot is as farfetched as that of a boys’ adventure story, but as a grimly amusing satire on the morality of modern power-politics the book earns very high marks. No End To The Way. By Neville Jackson. Barrie and Rockliffe. 240 pp. “No End To The Way” is a frank story about two homosexuals. Ray Wharton, an advertising agent living in Western Australia, and Cor, a Dutch immigrant, meet one evening in a bar, and are immediately attracted to each other. They become lovers; but what at first promises to be just another casual affair soon develops into a serious attachment. As their love for each other deepens, however, complications arise, not only with Ray’s discovery that Cor is married and leading a double life, but by the appearance of Rob Hamilton, a mid-dle-aged business man and former lover of Cor’s. In a malicious attempt to undermine the new friendship, Hamilton drops a few hints among Ray’s clients, with the result that valuable contracts are suddenly and inexplicably cancelled. Ray’s business collapses and at the same time his love for Cor begins to cool. The two at length part violently, their love destroyed by the tensions arising from having to live in a society which does not recognise the validity of their relationship. The author describes well the loneliness and frustration which can be experienced by the homosexual seeking for a permanent relationship; on the other hand his description of the feelings of Ray and Cor for each other is sometimes excessively sentimental, leaving an impression of distaste, rather than of sympathy and understanding. The Nanny. By Evelyn Piper Seeker and Warburg. 247 PP“Horror” stories about children’s nurses in England were occasionally encountered up to the time of the First World War. Evelyn Piper has brought off a magnificent tour-de-force on these lines, but because her story had to be set in modern America the evil old woman she describes is almost an anachronism. Joey Fane accidentally killed his small brother during a game, and was so affected by the tragedy that he had to spend

the next two years in a home for “disturbed” children. Having always detested the English nanny, lent to his mother at the time of his brother’s birth, his home-com-ing -was bound to be fraught with such difficulty that his father decided to dismiss the old woman. It was then that Nanny put into operation a diabolical plot which she proceeded to carry out with subtlety and fiendish skill. Joey is convinced, not without reason, that she intends to kill him, and resorts to desperate measures to defeat this devilish adversary. A doctor, with a problem child of his own, is too ready to believe Nanny’s revelations of Joey’s iniquities. An emphasis on Victorian practices and phraseology is the only weakness in an otherwise admirable novel of suspense. Smith, as Hero. By Jeremy Brooks. Eyre & Spottiswoode. 249 pp. The young hero of this novel is a midshipman named Bernard Smith. Towards the end of the Second World War, Smith goes to sea on a minesweeper with two objects in view: to become a hero, and to gain sexual experience. He is, however, an innocent young man, inexperienced in either war or sex. The world, for Smith, is neatly divided into compartments, conveniently labelled black or white. Thus, the Allies are good, whereas the only good German is a bad one; sex is a matter of losing one’s virginity as soon as possible: death is what happens to someone else, preferably one’s enemies. To his shipmates he presents a series of facades; at one moment he is the cool man of action, at another the rake leaning towards homosexuality. Legends grow up around him, fostered by Smith’s exploits in pursuit of his two ambitions. These experiences are the source of some amusing episodes, including a bewildered plunge into the night-life of Malta and a series of frustrating liaisons with women. At a deeper level, the book’s theme is the gradual and painful initiation of a total innocent into the complexities of the real world —an initiation which is finally effected during the Palestine crisis, as Smith watches a crowd of Jewish refugees being herded like animals into cages on the deck of a British ship bound for Cyprus. This is a readable and at times very amusing novel, though its underlying seriousness is to some extent dissipated by the comic tone of the book as a whole. Start Somewhere. By Michael Standen. Heinemann. 204 PPThis is a thoughtful first novel, describing the efforts of a group of highly intelligent adolescents to acquire an adult outlook, and sense of responsibility. Frank Griffin, Peter Mohan and Antony Popkin are all senior boys at a Northern Grammar School, while Anne Cooper, a clever and beautiful girl, whom all three find attractive, is finishing her education at a nearby high school. Popkin. Griffiths and Anne become involved, at Anne's instigation, in a very mild nocturnal trespassing escapade, but only Popkin is caught. He is questioned by the police, and released after his headmaster has asked them to drop what would be a relatively trivial charge for the good of the school. This should have been the end of the matter, but the headmaster decides to demote Popkin, who is a prefect and publicly disgrace the wretched boy. This foolish action demoralises the lad and sets up a chain-reaction in which, oddly enough, Frank and Anne maintain silence about their part in the affair, and, in their growing interest in each other, barely spare a thought for the unfortunate victim. Unlike most books about adolescence this one does not harp on sex. The chief characters have a good deal of curiosity on the subject, and Frank and Anne (who is really fonder of Mohan) make two brief and unsatisfactory experiments in love-making. What lies ahead of them in life is the main thought in the minds of these immature but intelligent youngsters, and if the dialogue seems a little too witty and pointed for 18-year-olds this is not a “school-story” in the ordinary sense but a study of their search for emotional security and viable standards of behaviour.