A rebellious novelist

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

A rebellious novelist

Parthian Words. By Storm Jameson. Collins and Harvill Press. 156 pp. “Can I be the only survivor of a generation, rebellious, irreverent towards all sacred monsters, which did not take itself with this comical seriousness?” asks Miss Jameson, and sends the reviewer hurriedly researching to find an informed reply. The dust-cover biography maintains a chivalrous silence about her date of birth, but does provide the information that her family has been in a small Yorkshire port for six hundred years; but even if she has been with them all the time (no evidence is provided either way) she hardly qualifies to be a contemporary of Beowulf. The unfortunate appearance of the situation is that she is a lone survivor from a colony of Brobdignagian cynics, and that her parthian arrows will hit virtually everyone but herself. This is a book about the theory of the novel and the decadence of modem man. Its main assertion is summarised in the Epilogue: “I am bored, lethally bored, bored in the marrow of my being, by ninety-nine out of a hundred new novels put before me as worth attention.” A lot of Miss Jameson’s

Parthian venom is wasted on repeating this sentiment in a remarkable number of ways, but one looks in vain for a confession of what happens when she reads the other one per cent: this is a morose, bitter book in which the author appears to punish herself as much as her fellow novelists. She describes herself as “a serious-minded novelist who has made a living by writing far too much” and says that she writes “from the still warm ashes of a society given me by my birth and growth in it” On the favourable side, Miss Jameson continually reveals an indomitable admiration for several of the nineteenthcentury novelists, and this does give a certain amount of weight to her attacks on the moderns, as well as providing some sort of criterion. Also, she is a very skilful stylist indeed, and repetitions arise just because her cynical destructiveness seems to have hardened her into a severely limited vision. This is a book which will give satisfaction only to the author’s fellow-cynics; consumed in small doses by other readers, it will have value as a carefully thought out challenge to many aspects of modem fiction that are often taken for granted.