NEW FICTION

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31304, 25 February 1967, Page 4

NEW FICTION

The Secret of Santa Vittoria. By Robert Crichton. Hodder and Stoughton. 447 pp.

This novel has quickly and deservedly reached the top of best-seller lists in both the United States and Britain. The period is the last war; the scene is an isolated valley in Italy where a small, grape - growing community lives. The war is a distraction that has concerned the community very little, except that, the wine from several seasons’ fat black grapes has been unsold, and is stored, waiting to go to the market when normal trading is resumed. But with Mussolini dead, the war makes an impact on the community, especially when the departing German Army shows an interest In the valley and its million bottles of stored wine. This is the framework within which Mr Crichton weaves half-a-dozen fascinating plots and counterplots. The community sheds for the time being individual and family differences and feuds and unites to protect an asset it is unthinkable to them they should lose. People from outside the community come in to play their parts, but, eventually, the fight for the wine narrows to two men, the bombastic Bombolini, who has become the Santa Vittorians’ man-of-the-hour, and the Gentian officer, Von Prum, a man possessing a fanatical concept of honour. Between the two a fascinating duel of wits develops, on Bomboiini’s side aided by a knowledge of Machiavelli, whom he has read 43 times. The story is unusual, detailed and full, but what is responsible for its richness is its characterisation. Mr Crichton has captured the spirit of the small town’s people; each member fits into a mosaic, adding a touch of bright, neutral or sombre colour. Mr Crichton handies the grape-growing and harvesting with expertise. Not many recent books include within their covers the drama, excitement, villainy, compassion and first-rate story-telling of “The Secret of Santa Vittoria.”

Pick and Run. By John Farrfmond. Harrap. 202 pp. This story is not calculated to edify readers or even to

promote much sympathy for the characters, all of whom are devotees of private enterprise in an illegal practice, and quite untouched by any sort of team spirit. Adjoining the pit-heads of Northern England are the Rucks—a kind of forlorn no-man-land over which truckloads of dross and debris from the mines pass daily on their way to the rubbish dump. Among these waste products is a sizeable quantity of coal, and it was the custom of Joe Baker and several other fossickers, of both sexes, to climb aboard the slowmoving trucks and scrabble in the filth to extract it. By selling their hard-won sacks of coal to neighbours at something below Coal Board prices they could earn a modest living. In the general free-for-all in getting on the trucks no quarter was given or asked, and genuine friendships among the gleaners were few, though all of them were solidly united against the security-men whose unenviable job <it was to catch them in possession of their illegal gains. Joe lived with his old mother, a miner’s widow, and had a distaste for the discipline imposed by wage earning. But he had a conscience of sorts. An explosion in a kitchen grate caused by an undiscovered detonator in a colleague’s coal-bag nearly led to a breach between the two young men, for Joe wanted to report the matter as a precaution against future disasters. Getting Nelly Anders with child did not disturb his equanimity for Nelly had engineered their affair, but he drew the line at seducing a friend’s wife. The coming of open-cast mining to the neighbourhood put an end to Joe’s livelihood and we must leave him to the distasteful prospect of wage-slavery. John Farrimond writes with a pleasant lack of sentiment about an unemotional but not unlikeable community of underdogs.

The Sweet Birds of Gorham. By Ann Birstein. Gollancz. 212 pp.

A minor literary figure joins the staff of a minor American university—this has been done before. An affair develops with the resident wolf. As onlookers there are a group of married couples,

the men ineffectual and the women domineering, plus a con-man type of buildingssupervisor. At this point one begins to wonder whether the information on the dustjacket that the author is the wife of a well-known novelist is intended to explain that the plot is a reject from his wastepaper basket. The one redeeming feature is the character of the heroine, a woman apparently as fragile as a sparrow but possessing a wit and perceptive shrewdness that give her resilience and vitality. When Miss Birstein can infuse that vitality into the supporting cast she will doubtless write a very good novel, but here we have only a solitary lass among the sheaves of corn.

The Little Saint By Simenon. Hamish Hamilton. 218 pp.

This is a most unusual book from the pen of Georges Simenon, there is no murder, no mystery and no tragedy. Of the book, Mr Simenon says: “For the first time, I was able to create, in The Little Saint a perfectly serene character, in immediate contact with nature and life. That is why, if I were allowed to keep only one of all my novels, I would choose this one.” It is the story of Louis, one of the illegitimate children of a street seller of fruit and vegetables, living in Paris before the 1914-18 war. He is small and gentle, something of a freak in a crude and violent world, protected, strangely enough, from cruelty and viciousness by that same gentleness. He is very attached to his mother, a warmhearted, loving woman, promiscuous, but no prostitute. It is the little things, hardly Incidents, that happen round him—schooldays, the lives of brothers and sisters and of families who live in the street, the market and, above all, his mother, that point the way to The Little Saint’s future and his search for perfection. He is an old man when he is asked, “. . . how do you see yourself?” He did not reflect very long. His face lit up for a moment as he said joyously and modestly: “As a small boy.” And that is how the reader, who cannot help but love The Little Saint, will remember him for a long time to come.