FROM THE NEW FICTION LISTS

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33083, 25 November 1972, Page 10

FROM THE NEW FICTION LISTS

The Persimmon Tree. By William Taylor. Whitcombe and Tombs, with Robert Hale. 207 pp.

A veteran All Black and retired chicken fanner, Tom Parrott, is bundled off to an old people’s home in the first chapter of this novel; it ends with his accidental death during an unofficial fire drill practice evacuation at the home. It might be thought that this does not offer very promising material for a novel, but in fact Mr Taylor (who already has several books to his credit) has, in Tom Parrott, created a character of such rugged, two-dimensional stature embodying all the pig-headed prejudice, senile sourness, and brazen boorishness, that a dynamic satire of antipodean values is almost inevitable. Other characters are introduced sparingly, and the actual story-line is very thin, but details such as the homosexuality of one of the Parrott sons and the re-marriage of the daughter-in-law arouse quite enough energy to keep the old man amiably grumbling away in his room. Unfortunately, the novel is not primarily about Tom Parrott, and pride of place is given to his son, Gerry, a character so utterly uninteresting that the book lags considerably between one visit to the old man and the next. Presumably to mute the satire and elevate the novel’s literary pretensions, Mr Taylor has entrusted Gerry, who is himself quite a cynic, with the business of narration, and this angle of vision, combined with the fact that Gerry also has to pay his father’s numerous expenses in the home, means that the novel seems rather closer to Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One” than was perhaps necessary. If more attention was directed at life within the home rather than at loosely-related reflections on the past, then, one feels, the result would have been much more satisfactory to the reader, and a more honest reflection of the author’s creative achievement.

Do You Remember England? By Derek Marlowe. Jonathan Cape. 222 pp.

At the beginning of “Do You Remember England?” Emily, recently separated from her husband, goes for a holiday alone on a small Greek island, taking with her volumes of Proust and Agatha Christie. The event itself is unimportant except insofar as it reveals the distinctive nature of Derek Marlowe’s imagination, for the novel reads strangely like something that Proust might have produced had he set his mind to writing Agatha Christie. The plot, which concerns Emily’s relationship with a melancholy lover who cannot bear to see people grow old, is developed with all the tension and mystery that might be expected of an expert thriller-writer, yet the plot becomes in the reading fess important than the immediate impressions and fluctuating moods conveyed by the style. The writing is elegant and languorous; Mr Marlowe takes his time, lingering over details, halting the development of the story in order to analyse moments of significance in the lives of his characters. There is little action or drama until the ending which, though predictable, comes as a shock, for the mood of nostalgia which Mr Marlowe has so far sustained is suddenly shattered. “Do You Remember England?” is altogether a stylish and accomplished piece of writing, which, as few straightforward thrillers can, gives as much pleasure on a second reading as pn the first.

The Maine Remembered. By Melanie Pflaum, Pegasus Press. 150 pp. Despite, or perhaps thanks to, its brevity, this is an engagingly vivid and enlightening story of young love in a setting of revolution, danger and death in Castro's Cuba. There is an overtone of history in the title. The Maine was a United States battleship whose equivocal sinking in Havana Harbour in February, 1898, brought on American intervention against Spain, and Cuban liberation. By 1960 the wheel had turned full circle, a habit revolutions have, and the United States had replaced Spain as the imperialistic enemy. Revolutions also have the habit of destroying their leaders, and although Castro has adroitly survived so far, many of his aides and helpers have fallen. This is well brought out in Melanie Pflaum’s novel, for Luis Betancourt, a provincial Viceroy under Castro, faces ruin and disgrace after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. His young wife, Concha, heiress to a large estate which Castro has expropriated, shares his dangers and vicissitudes. It is the star-crossed love between these two Cubans that holds the central interest. Luis realises that in marrying the daughter of a landed proprietor, he is giving a hostage to fortune. Concha realises that in marrying Luis she is “marrying the Cuban revolution.” Yet they go on unfalteringly, and the quality of their love enriches the revolutionary cause. This is depicted in epic strength and also in sensitive nuances by the novelist. In writing of Cuba, Melanie Pflaum brings to bear first-hand experience gained on the spot, for she and her husband held journalistic assignments in Cuba in-the 19605. She invites comparison with Emest Hemingway, who she knew in another Iberian revolutionary setting in the Spanish Civil War. Where Hemingway is masculine, litotic and brooding, Pflaum is tender, probing and glowing. Pegasus Press has done its usual elegant job of production.

Generally a Virgin. By Thomas Hinde. Hodder and Stoughton. 191 pp. Thomas Hinde, who seems in some of his work the most English of novelists, has set himself in “Generally A Virgin” the seemingly impossible task of writing an American novel: American in setting, in style and in viewpoint. The scene is the campus of a liberal Eastern university, the hero a boy newly arrived from the mid-West, the story an account of his bewildered attempts to adjust to the radical values of an environment which by its very existence contradicts everything his childhood and early education have taught him. Hinde represents Jo as a mid-century American Everyman: because of the convictions instilled in him by his upbringing, his inherited belief that there can be only one true American way of life, he chooses to become an F. 8.1. informer, but at the same time he is in love with a revolutionary, a girl who has rejected her heritage entirely and spends her time smuggling drugs and blowing up buildings. That an English novelist should succeed in presenting, from an insider’s point of view, a situation which symbolises the contemporary American dilemma, is surely remarkable, yet Thomas Hinde fails to realise completely his ambitious theme, paradoxically because he has managed his transatlantic metamorphosis rather too well. The idiom of American youth, the general sense of bewilderment and uncertainty on American campuses, are scrupulously recorded in the prose, but with a fidelity that does not serve the narrative well, for Hinde’s characters are so confused in their thinking and

so inarticulate in their speech that the novel itself becomes incoherent: a tour de force vitiated by its own virtuosity. In My Father's Den. By Maurice Gee. Faber. 175 pp. The main structure of this book is very simple. A school-girl is murdered, and the development of investigations is presented from the view-point of Paul Prior, the girl’s English teacher, who is, to start with, the chief suspect and who continues to be the victim of local residents’ anger even after the police have established his innocence; the novel ends with the arrest of the murderer, who has been discovered by Prior, more by coincidence than by any very persistent effort at private detective work. In such an outline, the novel sounds like a conventional, unpretentious effort, and on this level of the story it makes relaxing light reading. However, Mr Gee has seen fit to interpolate five chapters containing Prior’s life story; these occupy more than half the book, and are rather difficult to justify. The autobiographical chapters involve all the main characters connected with the murder, and consequently provide a useful background of motivation. They also have a good deal to say about Puritanism, which is also an important factor in the murder: Prior’s father’s den offered a refuge from his mother’s fanatical puritanism. In aD this, there seems to be the components for a penetrating study of New Zealand society and its response to a rebel from its ethics, but Mr Gee unfortunately has short-circuited his elaboratelycontrived scheme: because the rebel himself is given the job of describing what he has rebelled against, it means that the novel fails to generate any sympathy with (or even much understanding of) the internal pressures of puritanism which, lacking any safetyvalve, inevitably explode into violence. Thus a very promising novel loses its sense of direction.

Tristan. By Herve Bazin. Translated by Derek Coltman. Hodder and Stoughton. 315 pp.

The author has the advantage of a ready made story packed with drama and nostalgia and he tells it convincingly. When the volcano on Tristan da Cunha erupted about 10 years ago, the world became aware of the island’s existence and of the plight of the islanders who sought exile in England. The numerous island characters are introduced in the early chapters when the tremors and earth rumblings cause some alarm, which amounts to a dramatic climax when the volcano erupts and evacuation becomes imperative. Missing the challenging life of the island, and with low resistance to disease which brings death to some, the islanders are desperately unhappy. As one of them remarks, “the seal out of water is a sorry creature.” They shrewdly observe that the people in Britain with all their material comforts are not really content and they find the English so pemikity and busy they form the conclusion that their hearts are always in their heads. The English on the other hand find the islanders equally strange and unattractive with their old sensible-fashioned clothes, their rustic wisdom and their quaint talk that makes them sound like characters out of Dickens. Even though the islanders know that the volcano may erupt again at any time they decide to return and when challenged with the wisdom of this decision one of them is ready with an apt reply which makes the reader sit up and think. “And are not you afraid of your atomic bomb? We have a volcano but at least we didn’t invent it.”