NEW FICTION

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30937, 18 December 1965, Page 4

NEW FICTION

' Strode Venturer. By - HaatmaoS laaes. ColUas. 32# pp.

The publication of a new Hammond Innes novel is an event hailed with delight by a large number of his devoted readers, and rightly so for there are few novelists writing today who can tell such a good story. "The Strode Venturer" will not disappoint admirers. It begins slowly, but soon picks up speed and races into an exciting and unusual story—unusual in that it combines two very different worlds, exploring both the financial difficulties of a failing family business in the City of London and the physical dangers of seafaring in an old tramp in a volcanically active area of the Indian Ocean. The effects of events' in one world upon the other are cleverly intertwined and each is made to carry its own excitment. Whether Mr Innes is describing an explosive situation at a shareholder’s meeting in the heart of the City or the terror of seamen confronted with phenomena they cannot understand he is a master at writing a tense and dramatic atmosphere. One wishes occasionally that he could spare a little time from the swift development of the plot and the building up of tension to round out his characters a little more fully and explore a little more deeply the relationships between them. Such characters as Deacon, the drunken captain of the Strode Venturer, and Peter Strode, the visionary and impulsive younger director, are sketched in all too briefly, while Bailey, the narrator remains throughout a rather shadowy figure. But "The Strode Venturer" is a first rate adventure story with a well constructed plot, adequate characterisation and a well sustained atmosphere of tension and danger.

The Young Visitors. By John Wain. MacMillan. 206 pp.

It is a truism of western fiction that a Communist can be converted by the love of a good democrat: Mr Wain, however, is a writer of great merit who eschews truisms and has thereby produced a convincing tragi-comedy that Is both acid and sym- ' pathetic. The visitors in question are a group of students from Moscow who go to London for a short time to study local government methods there. On their first evening they watch a television interview of a young man called Jack Spade,

who proclaims htansetf the leader of a new theatrical group, as yet lacking theotre or plays, who will spread the principles of communism through drama and art Won over by Spade’s working-man attire—leather jacket, jeans and buckled shoes—the comrades wax enthusiastic over his proclamation of the simple life he leads and the masterly scorn with winch be parries the interviewer. Naturally they set off to see this hero at the coffee house which he says is his only home. So far the story has been told by Elena, prettiest of the students, utterly sincere and somewhat naive, but now Spade also takes Ms turn, showing himself as a man for whom it can only be said that he does not attempt to deceive himself. Meetings lead to misunderstandings, some ludicrous and some serious. The conclusion may seem unexpected and yet on reflection it is the most likely, and both Spade and Elena will receive what they deserve from the particular societies of their choice. The Mandeibaum Gate. By Muriel Spark. Macmillan. 330 pp.

Muriel Spark's gifts as a writer are not deployed to their full advantage in this loosely constructed novel, though her dry wit redeems its faults. Her heroine, Barbara Vaughan, is an Englishwoman of half-Jewish extraction, and as a Catholic convert she comes to Palestine with the worthy purpose of visiting the Holy Shrines. Middle-aged and sprightly, Barbara has temporarily escaped from the loving vigilance of her friend Miss Rickward, at whose school she is an assistant mistress, and she intends to join her lover—an archaeologist working on the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumrum. In her ignorance of the explosive nature of Israeli-Arab relations her frank admission of her Jewish blood is a source of embarrassment to Freddy Hamilton of the British Consulate in the Israeli half of Jerusalem, to whom she confides her plans. Freddy knows that on the Jordanian side of the Mandeibaum Gate Barbara is going to face considerable danger as a spy, and, in the involved story which follows, their joint adventures under the guidance of the astute Arab family—Joseph Ramdez, his son Abdul and his daughter Suzi are fraught with peril and difficulty. Freddy’s spell

of amnesia in the period which follows his return to his job ravels the plot still further. Barbara’s attack of scarlet fever while disguised as Suzi’s Arab servant in Joe Ramdez’s house in Jericho, the unveiling of a British Consulate spy, and sundry amatory escapades at the same address give the book at times the character of a farce in which the most unlikely people spend the night together. The -author's practice of creating situations that can only be explained by flashbacks is bewildering to say the least of it. However as a picture of an irrational. suspicious. bloodthirsty, treacherous, money-loving. Middleeast society with it bitter racial antagonisms, the book can stand on its merits. But would the maidenly Miss Rickward have gone to Palestine, and there embraced both Islam and Joe Ramdez with such rapture? One must doubt it.

Diamond Jo. By Daphne Rooke. Gollancz. 234 pp..

This is a novel with a plot. At a time when most novelists toy with one situation, exploring it in meticulous detail, and probing through many layers of experience to bare every secret meaning, Daphne Rooke gallops through years of exciting events and crowds of vigorous characters in the space of one comparatively short book. She is overwhelm, ingiy generous with her cast of characters, and every page brings a new and interesting development in the plot. Yet although she is liberal to the point of extravagance with her narrative, she is parsimonious with words, which doubles the reader’s pleasure. She writes with deceptive ease, and the restrained prose sweeps us away with astonishing force into a violent new world. It is the world of the Transvaal in the 1860 s: a world in a fever of excitement about diamonds—brutal, greedy with its own code of workable ethics. The narrator is a man who grew rich in this era, in spite of hardships, adventures and compromises, both moral and actual. In spite of his occasional ignominious failures as a human being, Mannie Bernstein remains a warm and likeable person. Diamond Jo is both star and symbol of the epoch—genuine, friendly, generous, and greedy for diamonds, snatching them by whatever means she can. Both she, and the book which bears her name, are sure to prove very durable.