SOME NEW FICTION

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32038, 12 July 1969, Page 4

SOME NEW FICTION

The First Circle. By Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Collins and Harvill Press. 581 pp.

“No, my dear sir,” said Rubin, “you are in hell, just as before. But you have graduated to its best and highest circle the first circle.” Rubin is one of the most sympathetic characters in this complicated novel, and he is speaking to a newcomer to the special prison, Mavrino, a man arrived from one of the Soviet labour camps. “The first circle” is an idea taken from Dante, who, as a Christian, did not want to place the philosophers of antiquity in the torment of hell itself, and created a special place for them outside heaven. Special prisons such as Mavrino which is the setting of the book were established by Stalin as part of his post, war regime. In these prisons were placed on some pretext or another all the scientists and skilled technicians who could be thought hostile to the Stalin government Most of the men were first broken down by years in labour camps, but the novel shows that the “first circle” is in fact a refinement of torture, because there is time to think, and the scientists are in contact with workers brought in from outside for special projects, while knowing that they themselves will never be freed, unless, perhaps, they collaborate by spying on fellow prisoners. The author, who draws from his own experience, describes the moral climate of the time with meticulous detail and great compassion for individual cases of hardship. He makes a terrifying revelation of the corruption of the communist ideal under Stalin, yet even when Stalin himself enters the book we feel pity rather than horror. Those inside the prison have ironically greater spiritual peace than those outside, who have everything to lose. Having lost everything, the prisoner finds and cultivates his immortal soul. Innokenty, the naive diplomat whose act of kindness means he is now “To Be Kept in Perpetuity,” finds, through his experience of prison, a belief in the objective nature of good and evil. A wife accuses her imprisoned husband that he has got used to being there, that he enjoys prison, and in a sense it was true. The moral dilemmas faced by people in this novel have more than their particular application, and the author does not hand out solutions at the end.

True Grit By Charles Portis. Jonathan Cape. 215 pp.

“True Grit” is a “send-up” of the hair-raising heroic tales of the Wild West so familiar to television viewers. This book itself is going to be made into a film, and one wonders how the screen will catch the dead-pan tone as well as the relish with which the monstrous events are related to us. ‘True Grit” first appeared in the "Saturday Evening Post,” and it responds best to being read slowly, as if still in episodes, because its chief delight is not so much in the action as in Mattie Ross’s trick of irrelevant digression. Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old girl, is the author’s answer to the tight-lipped deadly marksman, the RObin Hood hero of the Wild West romance. Mattie thought that true grit was the best thing any person could have, and at the beginning of the book she is searching for someone with enough of it to revenge the death of her father. Having found the man for the job, a dubious sheriff known as Rooster, she finds she cannot trust him to see the culprit killed and decides to go along too to see justice done. Mattie is single-minded in her purpose and drives a harder bargain than most men could in the frontier country of Yell County, Arkansas. Rooster puts up with her, though she has more true grit than

any man would surely hope to see. There is plenty of shooting, galloping, real heroism,

and unenviable endurance, in the story. The pit of rattlesnakes and ghoulish skinshedding skeletons, the bit of arm with which Mattie scrapes a foothold to safety, are horrific enough. This is the best kind of caricature; the author clearly enjoys his stuff.

The Man In The Yellow Raft. By C. S. Forester. Michael Joseph. 191 pp.

Mr Forester’s unrivalled talent for portraying the lives of seamen is fully deployed in these eight stories of U.S. naval exploits in the Pacific during the war. So completely natural and vivid is each experience that it savours less of, a story based on fact than of the fact itself thinly given the guise of fiction. ‘The Man in the Yellow Raft” is an enchanting study of a very young, rather spoilt, naval rating who is made to learn discipline the hard way. “Dr Blanck’s First Command” is another, though different, study of a fish out of water and tells how 55 men survived a dangerous voyage on a lifeboat, because of a medical research - worker’s diligence in studying the principles of seamanship during the long hours of dull and uneventful days at sea. The torpedoing of the ship to which he had been assigned as doctor brought out all the brilliance of a retentive memory. The last sentence of this story is a little gem of humorous comment The rest of the book’s contents are all examples of the stresses of wartime naval operations, and underline heroism and endurance, not to mention the meticulous calculations which have to be made in given circumstances by naval men if success or failure is to be the answer. The many technicalities which the author is obliged to explain to the uninitiated reader are made clear through Mr Forester’s special skill in this field.

Broom. By Stephen Lister. Peter Davies. 205 pp.

One of the charms of Stephen Lister’s novels is that he uses his own name in a first-person recital of his theme, thereby creating the illusion that these improbable happenings are, in fact, authentic. “Broom” (a free translation of an immensely long Spanish name) had been a school-friend of Lister’s and after making a sudden and dramatic exit from educational bondage at the age of 16 Broom had presumably returned to Valparaiso where his family owned a large and impoverished estate.' Some 30 years later the two men met again and it was evident to Lister that Broom was making large sums of money in an unorthodox, but not necessarily illegal, way. Recovering stolen property by means of being in with gangthieves, he was saving much money for insurance companies, and receiving a commensurate reward. As the story unfolds the fact emerges that just as good Americans are supposed to go to Paris when they die, good crooks go to Brighton when in need of therapeutic treatment for their souls, and lead, while there, lives of exemplary honesty. Broom, whose home was in this salubrious town, introduced Lister to a fascinating collection of underworld characters, but in due course was to fall foul of his associates among them, and after a severe beating-up went down to Lister’s Riviera retreat (made famous in many novels) to recuperate. The description of the Lister circle of acquaintance is, as usual, unfailingly entertaining, but Broom’s mysterious fall from grace with his criminal friends, add its aftermath, had made a different man, and he left England for his Valparaiso property never to

return. But, significantly enough, he was again wealthy when he departed from the English shores, and it must be left to Mr Lister’s ingenious pen to produce a possible explanation of Broom’s newfound prosperity.

The Toad Beneath the Harrow. By Roger Cleeve. Allen and Unwin. 271 pp.

In this story of mixed racerelations the author uses the flashback method of describing a conflict between two men, and their love-hate relationship which is to find an inevitable climax in tragedy. Ernest Meyer, the clever, diffident Anglo-Indian son of a white quartermaster in a prewar Indian cantonment, is accepted by an English school where oply one of the boys deigns to do more than tolerate him. This blonde young god, hqwever, is'Robeft King, son of the major commanding the cantonment, and while good-naturedly Insulting poor Ernie, calling . him “cheechee” or “wog,” develops a real fondness for the dusky boy, and induces his mother and sisters to accept him as a family friend. Years later, Ernie gains a scholarship to Oxford, and Robert, also an undergraduate, helps to ease his difficult path and make him socially acceptable. Once more the King family show Ernie kindness, and he comes to regard their home in Wiltshire as his own. Then his world falls to pieces and he finds himself facing disillusionment, thwarted love and a hopeless estrangement from Robert. On his return to India after Independence he is given a good Government post, and when he is sent to Kashmere to stop the activities of an English gun-runner who is arming the Kashmiris from Pakistan, against India, he is certain that his adversary is Robert, and that it is his grim duty to apprehend him. The book ends in a moment of truth which both men have to face in the mountains of Northern India.

A Turn In the Dark Wood. By Edward Carl Stephens. Macdonald. 284 pp.

We have all been in the grey flannel suit country described in this book before. Al Loam is a middleaged junior executive trying to organise his pointless employment into a flurry of activity to achieve the ulcers and business man’s nervousness which he considers suitable and admires. At home he has lost touch with his mature daughter and his sagging wife whose musical sneezes followed by her inevitable statement “Oh me, oh my, I snoze” drive him almost to desperation. His house he views as becoming “a place to shelter his paunch, the refrigerator which filled the paunch, and the brief case which kept the refrigerator filled,” but this last object—the symbol of his occupation—must always be bulging and kept by his feet even as he sleeps watching television programmes. Finally Al Loam fulfills his fantasy with a starlet but simultaneously with his sexual satisfaction is felled by a stroke. For some reason which is difficult to fathom this gives him fame when he is found partially paralysed in a crumpled bed, promotion within his business empire and the admiration of the whole managerial organisation. This is a light-weight book .entertaining and competently written, moving over the well-marked-out territory of the disturbed faceless executive who suddenly starts to wonder if it is all worth while. There are some humorous episodes in it but the message it is trying to convey has been more capably voiced in the last decade when such books have proliferated.