NEW FICTION

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31077, 4 June 1966, Page 4

NEW FICTION

To See the White Cliffs. By Philip Celllier. Longmans. 151 pp.

This short novel is something between an allegory and a satire. Jean Baptiste Gohrt is the undisputed master of the family fortune, and owns about seven acres of land near Boulogne. These privileges enable him to indulge a childish megalomania, and dub all his financial dependents—whether family or not—with fancy names and titles. He himself is a “king”; his penniless brother, and the latter’s ex-barmaid wife a duke and duchess, and his estate agent and the village priest are endowed with equally high-sounding titles. Jean Baptiste is well aware that he is only playing a game, but his tyrannous instincts, reinforced by his command of a good income, make him provide simply for the bodily needs of his “subjects,” and he doles out money grudgingly for any urgent request unconnected with food or clothing. This would make for an explosive situation in any enclosed society, and when Jean Baptiste “arranges" for his own marriage to his brother’s wife, and his brother's nuptials with the virgin daughter of his agent and further decrees that the double ceremony be performed in his own drawing room by the priest, a menacing situation arises which cannot be solved in terms of makebelieve. The author’s solution of the problem is contained within the allegorical framework, and is amusingly contrived, but makes no allowance for the characters’ inevitable emergence from their cloud-cuckoo-land into the outside world. The book is well translated by Edward Hyams. Sleep No More. By George Sims. Gollancz. 158 pp.

This combination of thriller and straight novel is remarkable for an eerie sense of terror that mounts gradually from a series of apparently senseless events. A popular actor suffers hallucinations about the death of his wife, Mia, in a car accident. Mia swerved the car to avoid a dog and crashed into some trees. Her husband was thrown clear but she was trapped in the flames and burnt to death. The husband is haunted by the thought that somehow he could have saved his wife. His delusions are pricked by innuendo, hints and violence from an unknown source. The climax is worthy of an exciting, wellconstructed story in which the characterisation is of very high quality. The Naked Runner. By Francis Clifford. Hodder and Stoughton. 208 pp. In this excellent novel, one bearing comparison with the most successful spy story of recent years, a spy goes out

from the warm, so to speak. A British businessman who had wartime experience on the run in Europe is induced to deliver a message while on a visit to a trade fair in East Germany'. From this ostensibly simple exercise a fantastic series of adventures ensue. The man’s son (who has accompanied his father to Germany) is kidnapped, and a woman who had given the man shelter while he was a fugitive during the war reappears; both are used to put pressure to force the man to a drastic action. While an exciting and tense story of adventure is developing, the author is adroitly creating in the reader’s mind a web of doubt that things might not be quite as they seem. In the end, the ruthlessness becomes apparent with which a security organisation had manipulated and terrorised a victim into being an unwitting instrument of policy. This book will add to Mr Clifford's already substantial list of successful novels, and to his reputation as a writer possessing a distinguished style.

Death is a Silent Room. By Jay Bennett. AbelardSchuman. 180 pp.

New York, the last night of Coney Island mardi gras. A man is murdered in a prostitute’s bed. Fearing the police will accuse her of a crime she did not commit and what her ruthless gangster boss Cardwell will do to her, the prostitute seeks the help and advice of Conlon. Conlon is embittered since the injustice of his dismissal from the police force as a sequel to a fatal shooting accident. Told in 180 pages, this story about “tough” men cannot be said to be a long one, but it was too long for the comfort of this reviewer. He found it tedious, for, fiction though it is, it strays so far from reality as to be unconvincing. Granted that Conlon and his wife, after hair-raising adventures, eventually track down the murderer to the discomfit of the vicious detective, Scofield (as they should in a thriller); but they give the impression of being immature characters with a naive approach to life. Indeed, perhaps the only credible characters are the gangsters, who, being gangsters, can be as ruthlessly gangsterish as they choose. Scofield, for instance, is too crazed with unreasoning hatred of Conlon, too improvident in his language when conducting his inquiries, to be credible as a detective. Conlon is no less incredible as an ex-policeman, for he is not above deceits that he must have known were criminal offences—such as faking false clues around the body, impersonation, misrepresentations and theft This reviewer was not thrilled by this thriller.

Never Step On A Rainbow. By Winifred Wolfe. Gotland. 244 PP-

Theoretically tt should take less literary talent tn write a thriller or a detective story than to write a conventional novel. But Winifred Wolfe, who has chosen to write a thriller, shows her greatest gifts in this book when she writes about the growth of a friendship between a Negro artist and a lonely night-dub dancer. On the other hand, the means by which she attempts to turn an innocent relationship into a thing of horror are less than convincing. Thus, although much of the book is pleasant to reed, the climax is merely futile rather than exciting or even ironic. Jenny’s good-for-nothing husband has deserted her a year before the book opens. She lives alone in a boarding house, with a landlady who is infatuated with another tenant, Alice Molland. Alice is fat, dirty, and famous as a fortune teller. The two women poison her relationship with Mr Connor with their superstitions and prejudices. The leitmotiv of the book is superstition, in fact, and Jenny’s hard-boiled exterior conceals a highly impressionable subconscious as well as the conventional heart of gold. Mr Connor, too, is apparently sane and balanced, yet he is obsessed with an irrational guilt because of an unfortunate coincidence in his past. When he had completed his last portrait of a woman, a death's head was discernible in the picture. Within a few hours of leaving him after her last sitting, she had been brutally attacked and killed. Believing himself to have jinxed her, Connor in remorse abandons his art. His friendship with Jenny encourages him to cast aside his fears, but then she in turn becomes neurotic, Alice, with her vibrations, her cards and her celebrity, broods over the book as its evil spirit.

Horse Latitudes. By Keith Walker. Longmans. 218 pp. Novels which are largely devoted to recording knockabout sex antics do not usually leave the reader with a sense of involvement in the lives of the characters. Such, however, is Keith’s Walker's skill that we follow with amusement the amorous adventures of Andy Monk and his girl-friend, Cathie, and the tactful solicitousness of Andy’s two friends, Greatorex and Crashaw, to wean him from the Bohemian life he has chosen to live in order to foster what he believes to be his literary talent Andy’s friend, Enticknapp, is, like himself, a University graduate with the same sense of literary mission and hunger for women, and the two share a squalid lodging in the wilder part of Kensington. Enticknapp, in pursuit of his muse, is not above seeking financial help from the National Assistance Board, by representing himself as a starving-in-a-garret type of genius extracting some grudging response, and caustic comment from that eminently realistic body. A party at which some very low specimens of the grubby-sex-literature school are present spells subsequent disaster for poor Enticknapp; and Andy, facing a stark moment of truth, is rescued from the stupid and dangerous wastage of his life for which he had been heading. The author’s gift for dialogue, and sense of the ridiculous redeems his work from the bed-and-dog’s-breakfast squalor in which so many chroniclers of London’s artistic underworld too often indulge.