SOME NEW NOVELS

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32661, 17 July 1971, Page 10

SOME NEW NOVELS

Whitewater. By Paul Horgan. Bodley Head. 336 pp.

This hovel appears to have a diversity, of themes. Perhaps the one to emerge most strongly is the complexity of the generation gap. It is about those who have been forced to accept boundaries and those who fight against them in their minds a world where young men see visions and old men dream dreams. Belvedere is a small town of limited dimensions where everyone knows everyone else. Billy Breedlove, crackling with energy and conviction, is the public figure in the high school. Billy creates opinion and everyon? plays the game according to his rules. He has a more serious friend, Phil, and while Billy always wants and gets the possible, Phil settles for the impossible. Billy knows how things work and his truths are simple while Phil’s are made up by a combination of what he knows plus what he imagines and suspects. Both boys love Marilee who was going to be a nun until she discovered she enjoyed being attractive too much. Then there are the three sets of parents who worry about their children like all parents do, and it seems with good reason. There is a mystery surrounding Whitewater Lake and tragedy strikes first Billy and then Marilee. We recognise in the many characters someone we already know— Victoria Cochrane, the cultured widow who tries to open the boys’ minds to the many faces of truth; Miss Mallory, the town librarian who turns a little Strange; Leora Gately, who manipulates people into social cliques; and her husband Tom Bob, who drinks to escape it all. This is a masterly novel and the author has a gift for making commonplace happenings take on new dimensions.

A Canterbury Tale. A Game for Children. By William Bloom. Michael Joseph. 220 pp.

“A Canterbury Tale” is in many ways a beautiful book about a first love affair between two schoolchildren, Tristram and Jenny. But a further dimension is added in the character of kelvin, whose omnipresence, omnipotence and manipulation gives an uncanny atmosphere to something that would otherwise be a modem version of “Romeo and Juliet.” Kelvin predestines their love, and in his perpetual watch over their activities, his fantasies are fulfilled far beyond his most intense erotic hopes and his own life is consequently calmed and sublimated. Set in the small cathedral town of Canterbury, where private affairs are common knowledge, the book examines not only Kelvin's imagination game, but also the sick and tragic world in which we live—where young love is only recognised by jealousy and shock. What is only natural to the children in their moral and social innocence, is made to seem something shameful and wrong by those who pretend to know better, ■file ultimate disillusion of the children with the world and their own beliefs is inevitably tragic. Sexual content in the book, although fairly pervasive, is not overplayed. What there is is essential to the story and at no time does it dominate; it intensifies. William Bloom has an innate sensitivity in his writing, which is a quality that most sexual novels today lack. He has a profound understanding of adolescent emotions and it is only to be hoped that mere sexual ethics do not prevent those reading it who would most benefit from the message.

The Antagonists. By Ernest K. Gann. Hodder end Stoughton. 287 pp.

Ernest Gann’s gift for portraying epic stoicism is well illustrated in the historical campaign described in this book. The period is 73 A.D., and the antagonists are a Roman legion and a tiny fragment of defiant Jews holding out against them in the old Herodbuilt stronghold on the mountain of Masada, standing above the deadly miasmic plain bordering on the Dead Sea. The grizzled Roman commander, Flavius Silva, hero of a hundred battles (a friend of Titus, son of the Emperor Vespasian), and his adversary Eleazar ben Yair, the dedicated defender of Masada, both know that much blood will be shed before this last comer of Palestine can be conquered. But whereas the 900 Jews on their fortified heights have ample, water and supplies, the 10,000 Romans, sweltering below sea level in an unhealthy furnace of heat know that the defences can only be breached by artificial means. Accordingly, the Romans are constructing a ramp which will bear a movable tower high enough to make the necessary assault. The events which lead up to the terrific climax of the Roman conquest form the plot of a saga of suffering and heroism. The portrait of Flavius Silva, stem and just—a strict disciplinarian yet with moments of humanity, is fully life size, and his love for the Jewish girl, Sheva, the only soft spot in his make-up. Eleazar, grimly entrenched on his formidable heights, has

to compete with the warring Jewish sects which form his garrison, and to

submit to ritualistic customs in which he does not believe. Flavius also has his difficulties in the shape of a cunning Roman envoy of Vespasian who aims to take the credit in Rome for the final victory. The Roman and Jewish commanders are not without admiration for each other, but Silva’s attempts to spare the lives of his adversaries if they will but surrender come up against rock-like defiance from the Jewish leader, and the end is sadly predictable. The author has avoided the pitfail of anachronistic speech and attitudes so commonly found in historical novels, and must be congratulated on his representation of one of the most colourful sieges in history. Lament For Leto. By Gladys Mitchell. Michael Joseph. 223 pp. Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley went on a yachting cruise to the Isles of Greece. When she came back she said to her son Ferdinand, “Will you have time to listen to an intolerably long story?” As usual she manages to touch the spot With her knitting needle. For, grievous though it be to say so, this story is, for the most part, a crashin gbore; and if the Greeks do not have a word for that, they ought to have one. In the party there is a classical scholar and a botanist One is finding temples and the other mosses and wild-flowers. They keep on doing it; but they never describe them so that you can recognise them. There is a lot about Apollo too, but only the innocuous bits. All this goes on for over 150 pages before anything happens and then slowly it appears that an unattractive woman may have met her end by taking a spill from Sappho’s Leap. But did she fall or was she pushed? And who cares anyway? Certainly none of the dull people around her.

The corpse is identified as that of someone else and everyone returns to England as torpid as they set out. Dame Beatrice comes across with an explanation, and coming from her, we must accept it.

The Best of Families. By Ellin Berlin. Michael Joseph. 320 pp.

A very human story this, it is a family saga; fiction, but an eloquent and one would say accurate piece of social history as well. The reader becomes willingly involved in the joys and sadnesses of the wealthy, sociallyacceptable Cameron family. It is a moving story of four sisters, their father, relatives and friends. Most of the action in the fashionable part of New York, beginning with the century and ending in the permissive age. It is a reminder that the present easy attitude towards divorce in America was not always there. The eldest daughter is divorced and disgraced and she suffers for it among her set for the rest of her life. Another sister offends the Episcopalians by turning Roman Catholic and marrying (happily) an artist of that faith. The other two girls marry and grow old as the reader watches and sympathises with them and their problems during two world wars and a procession of social changes and youthful attitudes. Thanks to the skilful, simple writing and sympathetic presentation of the characters by the author, who is the wife of the composer Irving Berlin, this story has exceptional quality.

The Jesus Factor. By Edwin Corley. Michael Joseph. 317 pp.

Questioning the use of the atomic bomb, this novel makes an alarming proposition—what if the atomic bomb does not work, and what if it never worked? Hiroshima is re-examined in detail, and the theory is put forward that it was never atomically bombed, but was the fantastic invention of the United States military who successfully managed to cover up the fact that their atomic bombs, when dropped from the air, did not work. Other countries throughout the world are seen to have the same difficulties, and it turns out that the entire nuclear arms race has been based on a fallacy. With the world only hours away from nuclear destruction in the novel, this question becomes the basis of the ultimate decision, that is, whether any of the world leaders are willing to press the button that will start an atomic war. The Jesus factor is the code name for this secret which has been kept since Hiroshima and Nagasaki ,in 1945, which are shown to have been caused naturally by an earthquake. The United States Air Force, which happened to be in the area at the time, the story contends, took advantage of this by flying over the cities dispersing radioactive fallout and firebombs. “The Jesus Facto?’ is a gripping book which holds the reader’s interest to the main story of Senator Hugh McGavin and his fight against ultimate atomic world destruction.