Top modest, too narrow

Press, 18 April 1981, Page 17

Top modest, too narrow

A Quiver Full of Arrows. By Jeffrey Archer. Hodder and Stoughton, 19S0. 190 pp. $15.60.

(Reviewed by

Michael Morrissey)

I am not familiar with Jeffrey Archer’s • earlier works, “Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less” and “Kane and Abel,” which the flyleaf claims as “bestsellers.” For Mr Archer’s sake, as well as the reader’s, I

hope they are better books than this punningly titled tome. In the author’s note Archer cheerfully admits that one of his stories was inspired by Somerset Maugham. Archer is too modest — Maugham’s influence can be seen everywhere. Unfortunately, Archer’s range is narrower, his characterisation several layers deeper in cliche, and his trick endings spring out on the reader like a mugger in a darkened alley. It is hard to care, therefore, when sporty Oxford types, trans-Atlantic salesmen, foreigners who love England, clockwork civil servants, and faded aristocrats get their turn of the screw treatment.

Take a couple of Oxford, sorry Durham University, Immortals:. “Michael, who was six-foot-two, willowy with dark curly hair, preferred tall, bosomy blondes with blue eyes and long legs. Adrian, a stocky man of five-foot-ten, with straight sandy , hair, •always fell for slim, dark-haired darkeyed girls.” Skip the middle where the plot clanks noisily, and hurry on toward the (ouch!) trick ending: “She stroked him gently on the side of the face. ‘So when I met you and Adrian both safely living over three thousand miles away, I thought to mvself, whichever one Of you comes back'first . . Thus is the conquering male ego unmanned. The story is called “One-Night Stand.” The trouble is that Archer is neither Somerset Maugham nor — an author Archer would surely seek to emulate — Roald Dahl. He does not penetrate the social classes (whom he appears only halfheartedly eager to satirise); nor can he, in the adroit manner of Dahl, give the reader

the discomforting sensation of skewering a beautiful butterfly just as it is about to take wing. Archer’s arrows fall rather short of the targets which Maugham hit much more accurately, over half a century ago. Unlike one of Archer’s immortals, the effect is not so much of being “chilled to the very marrow” as of the marrow being emptied.