SOME OF THE NEW NOVELS

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30959, 15 January 1966, Page 4

SOME OF THE NEW NOVELS

Past Master. By Nigel Tranter. Hodder and Stoughton. 414 pp.

Threaded together in the form of a novel, this is really the history of Scotland during the fateful decade before James VI united his country with England, when he succeeded Queen Elizabeth I as James I. It is also a detailed study of the man to whose brilliant powers of intrigue, and utter lack of scruple, James owed his carefully nursed and often imperilled English inheritance, Patrick, the Master of Gray, son and heir of the fifth Lord Gray, had twice been exiled from Scotland for treasonable activities when the story opens in 1593, but being “The handsomest man in Europe,” and a brilliant courtier, he had gained the ear of Queen Elizabeth while on a diplomatic mission for Scotland, and undoubtedly had a hand in helping to remove her rival (his own master’s mother) Mary, Queen of Scots. Having successfully talked himself out of the King’s disfavour by pretending to uncover a plot against him, Patrick Gray became “eminence grise” at the Scottish court for the next 10 years. Regarded with the hindsight of 400 years, James I appears to us as a soapopera comedian playing the romantic lead. It took all the wits of Gray, known as the Scottish Machiavelli, to put this odd mixture of cowardice, poltroonery and wellknown homosexual practices on the throne of England, and in order to do so he played religious and political factions against each other with merciless disregard for human happiness. Religious bigotry, which would be unheard of in our own still violent, but in church matters more tolerant days, could be counted upon to serve Patrick’s devious purposes, and he managed to obtain gold from Protestant Queen Elizabeth as well as from the Pope of Rome on the specious grounds of furthering their respective interests. All this is history, but a romantic theme runs through the book

Bargees

Hold On a Minute. By Tim Wilkinson. Allen and Unwin. 185 pp. Glossary and Bibliography. Jim Fem, and his model-cum-film-actress wife, Gay, did not embark upon the task of exploring Britain’s canals (known to the initiated as “cuts”) in two narrow boats just for amusement. Jim, with a war wound which had affected his head and spine, was tiring of dull office life. Gay, glad to cock a snook at fashion promotion, and the soulless role of a film-extra, took her hair down (in both senses) and got happily into old clothes as a hard domestic worker. They touted cargoes in all weathers, through infinite numbers of locks, for very small financial rewards, and they loved it. They took steel to Birmingham, coal to and from London, milkpowder to Leicester, wheat to Northampton—all involving slow water journeys of 100 miles or more. After their expenses had been met they cleared about £2 a week profit, but in terms of human experience and warm friendships they became rich beyonj expectation. At first the “Cut” folk were suspicious of these too-well-spoken amateurs, and thought they could become a nuisance if not an active hindrance to serious workers. As “Trainees” they were to experience the rough side of tongues with a limited but colourful vocabulary of abuse. Fortunately neither Jim nor Gay took this homely cursing in bad part, though a bowlerhatted. cocky and offensive trades-union official who blew his whistle when three minutes more work could have enabled the Ferns to go on their way, had to run for his life from Jim’s pursuing wrath. It was a great day for all concerned when the Ferns engaged 17-year-old John Redknap as crew. The boy’s knowledge of boats so far exceeded their own that he was able to teach them technicalities of which they could have for ever remained ignorant. Jim. for his part, taught John to read and write. So segregated is the life of canal communities that their children are untutored in the three “rs,” and may never catch up with formal education. National Service, which cannot be evaded, sometimes rectifies this deficiency, with the result that an already dying profession is becoming steadily more denuded of personnel, as the young returned serviceman is only too apt to seek a job amongst the “caffs,” dance-halls and cinemas of urban civilisation. The friendships of this isolated people, meeting every so often in the same pubs, and exchanging their own brand of news during their short periods ashore, is staunch and lasting. Inefficiency in loading, which is getting worse and worse, and the neglect, from lack of repair, of lay-bys and other essential necessities for canal workers, is gradually dooming their business to extinction in favour of the quicker but far more expensive service of road transport The author proves himself a capable spokesman for the people he learned to love and respect, and does his best in this book to revive public gfeA interest in the inland waterways of Britain. 1

involving the unhappy love of Patrick’s illegitimate daughter, Mary, and the young Duke of Lennox, who was heir - presumptive to the throne of Scotland until after the birth of James’s children by his vixenish wife, Anne of Denmark. The author has done a magnificent job. Without straying for a moment from the period, either in habits or phraseology, he has avoided the pitfalls so drearily common to historical novels —salaciousness, pretentious technicalities about the warfare of the time, and, worst of all, anachronisms.

A Bird In The Hand. By Lesley Rowlands. Ure Smith. 240 pp.

The dust-cover of this book, which portrays a shapely feminine body in a bikini—a hat tantalisingly covering the face —while stretched out on a beach, suggests that the young man holding the body’s hand might be enjoying a happy honeymoon. This is a misconception; for though Clem Bird’s first instinct on meeting Glory (the girl’s improbable name) envisages just such a culmination of their relationship, she does not—in the graceful Victorian phrase—“yield to his advances” until the last page, and/then only by suggestion of things to come. Poor Clem is rather a psychological mess. After a few years in Europe, gathering experience, mostly of an amatory kind, he has just returned to Australia with a renewed aversion for (1) his mother; (2) any kind of job; and (3) the rich girl who has been marked down by both their parents as a suitable (and embarrassingly willing) wife for him. Having met Glory for the first time in the dustcover picture, he takes a room in the odd lodginghouse which she shares with two Indonesian and two Vietnamese students, a nymphomaniac, and a landlady who “communes” (her own word) with a boy-friend all day on Sundays, while inveighing against the evils of sex during the rest of the week. It is not an easy menage to fit into, and to keep his mother and the nymphomaniac at bay (he finds Glory singularly elusive) he accepts a job through his father’s influence, in a Civil Service department where he daily signs mountains of files, not one word of which he understands or wants to. Pressures mount, as well as they may, in his life and he takes off for three weeks’ leave in that Antipodean Lido, the Surfer’s Paradise. Here, once again, a woman (married this time, and a late but enthusiastic developer in the matter of sexual instincts) impales him on the horns of another amatory dilemma. However, he is rescued from a fate not exactly worse, but very nearly as exhausting, as death, and all ends happily. In spite of the situations described there is no real impropriety in the book, which is compellingly funny.

The River Watcher. By Hugo Charteris. Collins. 320 pp.

Poaching, once a solo and almost romantic crime, is now big business and its mechanisation demands the activities of a group rather than an individual. Violence, not unknown between gamekeeper and poacher of old, has also caught up with the times and takes on the more sinister aspect of gang warfare. To combat this larger scale poaching a new character, the river watcher, has appeared. Disliked by the authorities and ostracised by the local inhabitants the river watcher’s lot is both a lonely and dangerous one. This is the background to Hugo Charteris’ latest novel which is set in the Western Highland village of Corrie. Remote though the setting may be there is nothing remote about the characters or themes developed in it. Conrad Manders, ex-British Nazi Party and owner of the big estate, Elizabeth the returned divorcee, and the river watcher, form as strange a triangle that one is likely to meet. This is the story of an emotional struggle for power between two men, the nature and origins of which lies hidden in their pasts. Mr Charteris’ sharp characterisation of both major and minor characters is set in a prose that can only be described as unusual. “The River Watcher” is not a novel for a single sitting but requires rather a slow digestion to savour the hidden irony and the novel use of words which the author uses with tremendous effect.

Games of Chance. By Thomas Hinde. Hodder and Stoughton. 255 pp.

This curious study of the wayward workings of the human mind is in two distinct parts. ‘The interviewer” is the story of an anti-social type of journalist, Michael Vint, with a savage hatred of anything and anyone that typify, in his view, the “Establishment.” He is sent to a remote part of Devon to report on the married life of a young film star with a middle-aged ex-patriate Englishman whom she had met in El Salvador, and approaches the withdrawn and monosyllabic husband, Julian Gort, with a blundering technique which leaves each man hating the other. Convinced that Gort has been up to some mysterious business in El Salvador, and realising that the man regards him as a cad and an oaf, Vint continues to pursue his quarry with impertinent questions, during which he takes a covert interest in Mrs Gort,

who he thinks is attracted to himself. The cause of the mystery surrounding the couple’s domestic life proves to be entirely different from his conception of it. The denouement suggest • that this is a short story blown out to 137 pages, but the following part, “The Investigator,” provides a continuity of the original idea. Here, the eccentric Mr Parks, who is a member of a firm which invents and markets new games, is another harbourer of suspicion, which, in his case, develops into a sinister certainty. He is sure that the heads of the firm’s depart--1 ments are involved in some dreadful plot, and with the help of a giggling typist he resolves to unmask it, buying a tape-recorder for the purpose. Mundane conversations take on a new significance, and the growing impatience with Parks of his superiors cements his decision to find out what they are up to. This is the better story of the two. Parks’s mounting belief that he is being persecuted, and his periodical escape into the realms of horrifying fantasy are ludicrous and pathetic by turns, and provide a compassionate commentary of mental imbalance.

The Cold Moon of Spring. By E. E. Coumbe. Collins. 205 pp.

This competently written story, by a young New Zealander, concerns a soldier in Korea and on leave in Japan. Charlie Brough, after “two indolent years at Canterbury University College without passing a single unit,” reads his exam results and walks straight to the recruiting officer. A well-observed description of Japanese life precedes arrival in Korea’s poverty and filth, with people living off waste from army kitchens and mobs of children begging. An unpretentious account of Charlie Brough’s war—as an artillery signalman, he did not even see the enemy—leads on to the armistice. With peace more or less restored, the army again demands that rifles, boots, and brass buckles should be cleaned; and the usual sort of army humour results. “Replacement” of missing equipment and a certain amount of brawling are typical features. Though not strikingly original, these episodes are wellpresented witf quiet understatement. Brough’s first leave in Tokyo leaves him bored with woman-chasing and drinking alcohol, and cursing himself for wasting time. On his next leave he travels by himself to see something of Japan. With the incredible luck which sometimes befalls characters in novels, he strikes up acquaintance with a young Japanese stndent on holiday. Unattached, talented, and beautiful, she rapidly appoints herself his guide, and the second half of the book is motivated by their growing, chaste, affection. Brough’s first thoughts of love are well presented, and the narrative avoids most of the temptations which afflict romantic writers.

The Tree of Dreams. By Mika Waltari. Hodder and Stoughton. 251 pp.

These four novellas are by a distinguished Finnish writer, and well repay translation into other languages, though the characters are not distinctively national, but

depict the strength and weakness of human make-up everywhere. All are described as love stories, but only the first has a flavour of erotocism, and is the most conventional of the quartet: the rest deal with calf-love, illicit love and a love without hope. Of them all, “Never a Tomorrow” is the most moving, and memorable. A man and a woman (the wife of the man’s employer), accidentally kill a small boy who runs straight into their car on a lonely road, when they are returning home from an illicit meeting. With agonised consciences they conceal the body, and the rest of the story demonstrates the nagging insistence of remorse, and their final atonement. “Fine van Brooklyn” is a rich example of the author’s gift of humour. An earnest Finnish student, working in Paris, takes a holiday at a French resort near Mont Saint Michel in order to examine some neolithic remains, and meets there a Dutch girl and her father — a very boring amateur archaeologist. The girl flirts outrageously with the student, and leads him on shamelessly, though, inexperienced as he is, he sees through her essential cheap falseness, Nevertheless he becomes hopelessly ensnared in her toils, and the description of their abortive affair, with its tragic-farcical ending, against the background of a French holiday resort, keeps the reader enthralled. “Something in people” is set at the time of the Russian revolution, and tells of the love of a poor boy of poor and humble family for a girl of his own class, who will have none of him. Hauka is ugly, dishonest and violent, and the dire effects of his hopeless passion for Osmi are described with consummate artistry. Two of the translations are by Lily Luiene, one by Alan Beesly and one by Paul Sjoblam.