FROM THE NEW FICTION LISTS

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32566, 27 March 1971, Page 10

FROM THE NEW FICTION LISTS

The Way Out of Berkeley Square. By Rosemary Tonks. Bodley Head. 208 PPThis is an unusually successful novel by a novelist who is also a recognised poet; here the sustained wit of a more finely-drawn Bridget Brophy or Muriel Spark gives way to a resonance of emotional introspection which can only be compared to Virginia Woolf in its psychological realism. This is not to suggest that the book is in any way “difficult” or “ massive”; it is always thoroughly entertaining. Arabella is the heroine, and the medium through which we follow the events. She is “stuck” physically, housekeeping and hostessing for her immensely wealthy London businessman of a father; and “stuck” emotionally, between the exacting demands of her father and those of her young, soul-seeking, poet brother, spiritually and actually isolated in Pakistan. Letters to and from her brother, and conversations with her father and their retrospective recollection, fill her life entirely: and she is thirty. Her clothes are splendidly modem and dashing, an extension of her personality; her sense of occasion is faultless; she is undoubtedly desired by many men, not simply for her wealth. But the men she meets cannot match her in their emotional response to passion. Then the man she affectionately calls “Wolf” complicates her life: he is her ideal foil, but happily married. Her moral discrimination will not allow her to ruin another woman’s happiness. The final tenuous equilibrium is delicately achieved, and by means of implication rather than statement Is there a way out of Berkeley Square? Rosemary Tonks’ novel is an artistic success. Good-night, Prof, Love. By John Rowe Townsend. Oxford. 133 pp. The distinction between a “junior” novel and a novel for adults is often not very clear. John Rowe Townsend has been a runner-up for the Carnegie Medal (for children’s books) with a previous novel “The Intruder.” This novel has a hero one year older (seventeen), less danger, more plausibility, and sex. It is a basically simple tale, simply and successfully told, of Graham Hollis’s emotional voyage of discovery. With one week of holiday left before his final grammar school year, Graham’s accountant father and respectable mother leave him alone in the

family house with every faith in the conservatism of his judgment. Graham has much reading to be got through, but instead daydreams about an unreal, beautiful Barbara. By chance, and through his goodwill, he finds himself employed as washer-upper in an unrespectable cafe where he has noticed the young waitress, Lynn, to be overworked and disrespected. He becomes Lynn’s champion, without much egging on by her, and inevitably her lover and potential saviour. Will she run away with him to Gretna Green? Confrontation with his parents naturally makes Graham the more determined in Lynn’s defence. Does he really want to become a safe accountant like his father? Suddenly he sees there are more possibilities than one in the world. His maturer vision after a brutal betrayal (by whom? a conspiracy?) is finely handled. The Crocodile. By Vincent Erl. Jacaranda Press. 178 pp. Tha this is the first published work of fiction written by a Papuan does not necessarily mean it is a worth-while book. The fact confers a certain initial interest on the novel but in the end it must stand or fall on its merits as a work of art. “The Crocodile” stands, a trifle shakily at times but remaining upright. It would be useless to deny the faults in the work. Not infrequently the narrative is halting and the dialogue stilted despite the fact that it was written in English and has not been subjected to translation. Occasionally, too, the drawing of some of the minor characters is inadequate and unconvincing. The merits of the novel however far outweigh the defects. Vincent Eri tells the story of Hoiri Sevese, a Papuan villager who had a mission school education and married a girl from his village. The novel deals mainly with his desire for revenge after the death of his wife and with his bewildered observation of the ways of the white men in New Guinea especially during the war with Japan. Much of Hoiri’s traditional way of life makes fascinating reading and his reflections on his white rulers should provide a salutary shock to many white readers. But apart from this insight into Papuan thought the novel has also a vivid life of its own and is written with depth and perception. The author was in 1970 one of the first graduates of the newly established University of

Papua and New Guinea where he took a course in creative writing. If the University continues to produce writers of his calibre we can look forward to a rapidly growing body of Papuan literature.

The Crossing. By Brian Rothery. Constable. 159 pp. Stories of human endurance in the face of peril and hardship are apt to leave a reader vicariously exhausted, and as “The Crossing” was based upon a personal experience of the author it is not difficult to share the resigned despair of Peter Jacobsen as he strove to stave off death by starvation in the wastes of Greenland. Jacobsen’s dilemma was the result of a mistake on the part of the organiser of a scientific expedition m which a British party was engaged. The season was spring, and Jacobsen was to spend three months by himself in a hut on an icecap, his little stronghold amply stocked with food. Alas, the Organiser had dumped the necessary supplies on th? other side of a lake which divided Jacobsery from his base, and the obstacles between him and his source of sustenance were formidable—a deep fjiord, bounded by savage falls qn one side, and an almost unscaleable mountain on the other. His attempts to reach the other shore by raft failed, and he took to the mountain but had to turn back from sheer exhaustion; and all the time his small supply of food was dwindling. His only companion throughout this ordeal was a small arctic fox, and he was tempted to kill the confiding creature for food, but could not bring himself to commit such an act of treachery. How this cruel problem was finally solved the reader must find out for himself. The author has coolly and dispassionately set out a human quandary which luckily does not beset most of us, and the result is a tour de force.

Us Lot. By Maryann Forrest. Michael Joseph. 256 pp.

This second novel is in many ways more refreshing and entertaining than Maryann Forrest’s first, largely implausible fantasy, “Here—Away From It All.” The Adriatic island of the first novel has a part to play here too, but the opulence of the life-style of the characters in this novel makes the island scarcely important in its physical sense at all. “Us Lot” are a rich crowd, so rich and successful that money almost never needs be mentioned; only clothes matter, the chic-er the better to be flung off and on, swum in, slapped in and slept in. The narrator of the events changes, but Salome begins it and ends it and has most of our sympathy; She has just left school, and is married to the superbly handsome and soon-to-be-successful Beowulf, son of the great writer Hereward. Salome’s brother Josiah, a great and nearly recognised painter, has a supporting role. Maryann Forrest manages quite successfully to convey Salome’s state of emotional intoxication with Beowulf and his family and unorthodox flamboyant friends (Nick and Puck, in . a yacht off the Greek island, are a pair worth meeting): she also manages to show her gradual realisation of herself as a separate identity among Beowulf’s charmingly self-intoxicated friends. Her problem is that she herself has no talents; it takes a while for her to realise that she might be acceptable as herself, not merely as Beowulf’s wife. The organisation of this- novel into sections with different narrators is not an entirely successful scheme here; it tends to break up the flow of the novel too abruptly.