The fundamental things

Press, 10 December 1983, Page 22

The fundamental things

Love and Glory. By Melvin Bragg. Seeker and Warburg, 1983. 252 pp. $27.85.

“Love and Glory” is a story of personal and professional compromise in the world of television, and in his efforts to justify it the author proves a case for returning to fundamental values and oldfashioned fidelity. One of the strengths of the novel is the relationship drawn between the protagonist, a media man swallowed up. by a big institution then spat out again, and his boozy, sharp wife, Joanna. The character sketch of Eric, the colleague who is usurping him down at the office, also brings a touch of satirical relief to what is a tired, sated view of a very mannered society. Other associations — his old school chum and successful Lothario, lan Grant, his adolescent stepson, his dying mother, and the young girl with whom he hopes to find lost youth,

vitality, and an integrity that he no longer believes in even as he seeks to regain it — are, in contrast, unconvincing figures that the author has roped in for purposes of his argument.

Melvyn Bragg is a competent, intelligent writer. But he is caught in his own trap when he gives in to the temptation to glamorise certain tawdry images while ostensibly criticising them. Also, he snipes at his social opponents, a row of sitting ducks, as he simultaneously wears his own liberal conscience on his lapel like a sad, wilting flower.

There is too much padding around the bones of the plot of “Love and Glory,” and I suspect that the author has more facility to express an idea than he has things to say. In this rather fat book there is a lean hard novel struggling to get out. — B. V. Bell.