NEW FICTION

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31089, 18 June 1966, Page 4

NEW FICTION

Mr* Bratbe’* August Picnic. By Jacqueline Wheldon. Goilancz, 480 pp.

This is a remarkable book; If the author can produce any others of similar quality she will certainly achieve the rank of Significant Writer of the 20th century. The core or heart of it is a group of three people, Mrs Hytha Bratbe who is immensely successful and wealthy, her lover Doddley, and her daughter Alexandra. Expelled from school for something not entirely her own fault, Alexandra hopes for help on coming to terms with life from her adored, omnipotent mother, but Mrs Bratbe is too busy to pay attention and merely sends her daughter to stay with friends in France. Alexandra is intelligent, unsettled and given to direct action, so before long she is in disgrace again, this time for a peculiarly bizarre and brutal attack on a priest. Back in England, suddenly wealthy by a lucky bet on the Derby, she is co-founder of an unusual club, where passages from the writings of Greek philosophers are read, seriously, by naked girls. Comes the August Picnic, an a annual event at which Mrs Bratbe entertains literally hundreds of visitors from the Prime Minister to the local villagers, in the ground of her Sussex estate. All the seeds of subsequent catastrophe are there, not only for Alexandra, her mother and Doddley, but also for many other characters. These other people are far too numerous to mention, but nearly all are essential to the book as a whole, for if the original trio is the heart, yet a heart is a poor thing without an organism surrounding it Ultimately, by the age of twenty Alexandra is rich, partly crippled, alone save for her illegitimate child, and yet curiously at peace with herself. having made a certain spiritual progress by her tumultuous actions. Mrs Wheldon is unusually versatile—not many writers can achieve good conversation and poetry and a good sermon and social satire all in one volume. Of course there are faults: the stream-of-consci-ousness passages are not entirely successful and there is almost an arch naivete in some of the surnames, such as Pundit-Proud and Hopeseau. But then, the invention of convincing names is very difficult, as Rudyard Kipling remarked when visiting Salt Lake City. Be that as it may, it is by no means common to find a writer whose faults spring from having too much to say rather than too little.

I Want What I Want By Geoff Brown. Wiedenfeld and Nicolson. 226 pp. Sexual divagations have been pretty thoroughly explored in modern fiction, but the publishers can justly describe this first novel as an “astonishing tour-de-force.” Transvestitism, which in this case has no lesbian or homosexual connotations, is inexplicable to anyone except psychiatrists, though one historical character at least, the Chevalier d’Eon, has had two books writen about his sexually blameless career as a wearer of male and female attire by turns. Roy Clark, was, unhappily for him, quite single-minded in his obsession. He bitterly

regretted having been born a man, stole women's clothing from washing-lines, was soundly trounced by his father— a down-to-earth fish shop proprietor, and was sent to a mental home for treatment. None of these measures altered his distaste for male bodies, except for an occasional sense of degradation at longing so wholeheartedly to be a woman. The inheritance on his twenty-first birthday of £5OO gave him the chance he was looking for. He ran away from home, and under the name of “Wendy Ross” spent a few happy months, indulging his love of feminine garments, and the fun of wearing make-up. It was his meeting with Frank Cracknell which really turned him into the “crazy mixed-up kid” so dear to the hearts of amateur psychologists. He developed for Frank a completely female adoration, and consulted a specialist in the hope that a change in his sex might be effected. This hope was doomed to disappointment, and the end of the book is a tragedy of a sort, more from the prospects it envisaged, than from any actual happening. A suicide attempt failed, and Frank was left to face the future as best he could. Mr Brown’s presentation of this novel is convincing, and it will he interesting to read further work from his pen.

The Blue Bird Is At Home. By Brooke Astor. Wiedenfeld and Nicholson. 217 PP-

The author of this witty amatory trifle accurately hits several nails on the heads of social and moral values in an absurd world. The story is set between the two wars, and the principal characters are Jane Stowe, who, at 18, has just finished her schooling in Paris, and Jim Allstead, the psychologically immature son of a grim, self-made American millionaire and his colourless wife. Jane is wholly innocent of the processes of biology, and her parents important figures in the American diplomatic world—have not bothered to enlighten her. When she marries Jim after a whirlwind courtship, she has no idea of the effect her constitutional frigidity is going to have on him. The sexual obligations of a wife are, in her opinion, boring, undignified and uncomfortable. Unlike so many Victorian maidens who must have shared these opinions on their honeymoons, and subsequently produced 14 children, she did not find that “Love blossomed with time.” It simply bored her more, and created a situation which Jim met by having an affair with Jane’s best friend. Jane herself developed a decorous affection for sundry “father figures” until it became clear that their instincts were regrettably like Jim’s. Such an impasse could not long continue unresolved, and after the parents of both young people had clashed in the area —Mr Allstead lunging at the Stowes with his cheque-book, and the latter neatly riposting with their Ministerial status —the whole problem resolves itself in a natural manner. The reader may*’ find this denouement a little difficult to accept, but the romping light-heartedness of the book makes up for its improbabilities.

The Bloody Wood. By Michael Innes. Goilancz. 192 pp. The raison d’etre of this ingenious thriller is the possession of a Stately Home in England and the problem attached to its inheritance—not perhaps one likely to afflict most of us, but one which gives Michael Innes full scope for his gifts of characterisation. The" Martineau family has owned Charne for a century or two, and Mrs Martineau—childless and dying of cancer—does not like her husband’s nephew the obvious heir to the place, Bobby Angrave, a clever conceited young man in his second year at Oxford. She has therefore made plans for her husband to marry again, and father a few more Martineaus. Mr Martineau himself, would like to settle the matter by marrying off Bobby to Diana Martineau, who is a cousin but no blood relation to Angrave, and so keep the property in the family. Sir John .Appleby, Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, is staying with the couple when Mrs Martineau meets her expected death—not from natural causes, but by being pushed into an ornamental pond. Driven apparently frantic with grief, her husband dies about half an hour later in his study by a shot from his own revolver. The ingredients of the resulting investigation include, beside Bobby and Diana, a sinister butler, a widow who is vaguely supposed to be Mrs Martineau’s choice as her successor, a doctor with an unfortunate past, and a hysterical young woman with a passion for Bobby. The smell of red herrings is, at times, overpowering, and the solution of the mystery just a trifle contrived, but Michael Innes’s witty picture of this anachronistic world is, as usual, above criticism.

The Genki Boys By Terence Kelly. Macmillan, 278 pp.

One can readily believe that a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp on a small island near Hiroshima was notable mainly for its dullness. But this does not excuse a lengthy novel on the subject being distinguished in the same way. Mr Kelly, himself a prisoner-of-war for four years, deals here with a life where all that matters is the next meal, the possibility of a break from hard dockyard labour, or the scrounging of cigarette butts. He has deliberately avoided the usual tales of torture and brutality but he dwells so much on the dreary sameness of every day in the camp that one feels it extending to every page in the book. No tension is aroused by the Genki Boy’s pilfering from the ships and little excitement by the news of their freedom after the Hiroshima holocaust. This almost complete lack of action and excitement could have been compensated for by a penetrating and profound examination of the effects of hardship and enforced association with uncongenial companions on the different characters of the men. This it is clear is what Mr Kelly was attempting to do; yet here there is a sameness and all the men appear to react predictably and similarly. Moreover interest is dispersed among so many characters that one does not become very concerned with any of them.