FROM THE NEW FICTION

Press, 21 October 1978, Page 11

FROM THE NEW FICTION

You Must be Sisters. By Deborah Moggach. Collins. 222 pp. $12.95.

This first novel is a funny and touching account of three sisters from a “privileged” middle-class English background who grow to maturity in contrasting ways. Laura, clever but rebellious and moody, is destined for a brilliant career after reading psychology until she meets a gentle drop-out from design school. Claire, the conformist, is a dedicated teacher who finds fulfillment ultimately in the conventional marriage. Holly, the ycungest sister, is just entering adolescence, a fact witnessed by the guilt with which she hides her parents’ copy of “Young Marrieds” under her piiiow. Deborah Moggach is a young writer with a keen eye for social comedy. Irony and pathos are blended in situations which will be appreciated by readers who can still recall the painful processes associated with growing up. — DIANE PROUT.

Momo. By Emile Ajar. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Collins and Harvill. 182 pp. $11.95.

“My name is Mohammed, but everybody calls me Momo because it sounds littler. For a long time I didn’t know I was an Arab, because nobody insulted me. If there’s one thing I’m good at it’s running. You can’t get through life without it.” And Momo, in his Parisian slum, sets out to become a pimp. “What other career was open to me at the age of 10?” Even the police, when Momo tried to join them, “told me I was a minority.” Momo grew up with the other children of prostitutes in an illegal orphanage run by Madame Rosa. “Jews are people like everyone else, but that’s no reason to be down on them,” Momo reminds his readers. Madame Rosa kept a picture of Hitler under her bed

to remind herself, when she was miserable, that at least one of her problems had been beaten. She also kept so many sets of false papers that, good Jew that she was, she said even the Israelis would not be able to catch her.

Emile Ajar is a pseudonym so well maintained that the author refused to reveal himself even when “Momo won the much coveted French award, the Pi ix Goncourt. It is an outrageous, topsy-turvy book, viewing the world through the knowing innocence of a street urchin who had “never been a baby. I always had other things to worry about.” Perhaps it is a tale of persecution, but, if so, the whole human race is the victim. “The Jewish monopoly is finished. Other peoples hav: as much right as the Jews to be persecuted,” runs another burst of the dead-pan humour. “Momo” is a treasure. Naylor Hillary. Gallows Wedding. By Rhona Martin. Bodley Head. 303 pp. $12.30. Birthmarked and treated with suspicion in sixteenth century England, Hazel is driven from her home by the superstition of the townsfolk when she is still a child. Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries leaves her without a refuge. Desperate for food, the girl finds herself involved with beggars, witch-hunters, and tinkers, and finallv within the sinister grasp of a witches’ coven. She is saved from hanging on May Day with the gallows wedding of the title. Her rescuer is Black John, a landowner turned soldier and outlaw. This first novel by Rhona Martin deserved its award of the first Historical Novel Prize in memorv of Georgette Heyer. — SHIRLEY MCEWAN.