Twins — a matter of class

Press, 12 September 1981, Page 17

Twins — a matter of class

Andrew and Tobias. By J. I. M. Stewart. Gollancz, 1980. 221 pp. $17.95. (Reviewed by A. K. Grant) Professor J.’ I. M. Stewart is otherwise known as Michael Innes, the author of numerous detective novels in which murders in oak-lined studies are solved by a combination of good breeding and dogged British pluck. He also writes novels under his own name. If this example is anything to go by, he should have done it the other way around. The book is about identical twins who are rescued from a liner sunk by enemy action. One is adopted by Howard Felton, proprietor of Felton House, whose family have held land in southern England since before the Norman Conquest. The other twin is brought up in Glasgow,

unbeknownst to Howard, and Tobias, the twin he has adopted. Many years later, Andrew, the Glaswegian working-class oik (although he is not really, because it turns out eventually that he is rich, even though Glaswegian), turns up at Felton House per medium of an amazing coincidence. The rest oi tne novel is devoted by J. I. M. Stewart to working through what he obviously perceives of as the intriguing consequences of having two twin brothers, one of whom has been gently reared and the other not. The novel reeks of English snobbery and the English fascination with class. Class is, for the English, what sex is for more normal peoples; a dark and exciting mystery by which they are perpetually obsessed. This novel is difficult to assess in what, with all its faults, is a more egalitarian society. The emotional charge which drives it forward may result in cracklings of excitement in the Home Counties, but to a New Zealand reader it just seems rather silly. This response is not assisted by Professor Stewart’s occasional, ill-judged forays into the description of sexual passion: e.g. “Her lips were moist and would be hot. It came into his head (and it would be a wonderful thing to say to her later) that her breasts were moving as if somebody was at work on them with a bicycle pump.” Norman Mailer, where are you now that we need you? There may well be parts ’ of Christchurch, and parts of Canterbury, where this novel may be read by something remotely resembling the audience to which it was addressed. But those who do not get their rocks off on English class attitudes, and who regard those attitudes as a disabling element of that society, will be able, having picked the book up. to put it down without too much difficulty.