SOME OF THE NEW NOVELS

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31001, 5 March 1966, Page 4

SOME OF THE NEW NOVELS

The Man Who Didn't Count By G. M. Glaskin. Barrie and Rockliffe. 320 pp. It is interesting to trace Mr Glaskin’s footsteps as a novelist. He has written stories set in the East Indies and in Australia, and now he writes of an Australian expatriate author first in London, then in Amsterdam. The romantic interest of “The Man Who Didn’t Count” comes from a young woman who has spent her childhood in Surabaya. When the story begins, Morton Thomas is finding out that he is certainly ceasing to count for much in the literary world. At the age of 45 he has written nearly a score of novels; but he has never produced a best seller, and publishers are wondering if it is really worth while having him on their lists. Even his agent despairs of him. Only a resounding scandal or a bizarre adventure could restore Thomas’s prestige. The idea of a bizarre adventure appeals to Thomas; he immediately gets in touch with Godfrey Church, a former colleague on the “Straits Times” in Singapore, and now a highly successful columnist and broadcaster. He asks Church’s advice. He says he is being followed everywhere by two men of sinister aspect. Church is impressed: but then so is Thomas himself when a man in a motor car tries to run him down and when he finds his flat has been ransacked. In fact his fantasy has come to life. He discovers that two men are in fact shadowing him. Naturally Thomas is bewildered, and after some sensational incidents he leaves London in haste and flies to Amsterdam. There he meets a Dutch girl of generous sympathies and enjoys some weeks of tranquillity that enable him to forget not only his recent adventures but also the decline of his literary fortunes. However, his pursuers soon reappear, and this time they act. Thomas is accosted in the street and hustled into a foreign embassy. It now appears that his captors suppose that he is an English scientist, Hugh M’Kinley, who had defected and then escaped back to England. The physical resemblance is striking Only after sustained brainwashing do the captors discover their mistake, and then they decide to contrive an interesting experiment. They will see if they reallv can change Thomas into M’Kinley and then deliver him to the British authorities to stand trial as a traitor. Every refinement of “brain-bending” is tried out on Thomas, until finally he has no idea that he is not M’Kinley. The macabre scheme almost succeeds. Deliverance comes from the independent existences of dreams, which are apparently not so easily affected by the techniques of persuasion. Mr Glaskin writes brilliantly on the cynical, heartless processes to which unfortunates like Thomas are subjected: but novel readers may sometimes wonder whether the last part of “The Man Who Didn’t Count” does not really belong in a book on abnormal psychology.

The File On Devlin. By Catherine Gaskin. Collins. 286 pp.

The author is to be congratulated upon writing a first-rate cloak-and-dagger mystery without the usual trimmings of fisticuffs, blondes or frequent homicides. Such deaths as occur do so “off,” and the book hinges upon whether a world-wide celebrity has died or simply disappeared. Lawrence Devlin, famous traveller-writer, who has recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, fails to return to his base while piloting his own plane somewhere in the wilds of Asia. The wreckage of the aircraft is found just on the Russian side of the Afghanistan border, and no trace of Devlin remains in it. Devlin's daughter. Sally, motherless from childhood, lives in London, and the father and daughter have always been very close, until his marriage to a rich American whose family has a wide influence in world affairs. To Sally’s mortification her step-mother has always avoided meeting her, and as Elizabeth Devlin has installed her husband and herself in a Swiss castle, Lawrence and his daughter have had only a few brief reunions in London since his marriage. Elizabeth Devlin’s determined withdrawal into an almost nun-like private life after her husband’s disappearance arouses the suspicion of British Intelligence, which ultimately leads to a carefully arranged invasion of Elizabeth’s Swiss stronghold (on a specious excuse) by a publisher friend of the missing man. Jackson Hayward, a writer-cum-under-cover man for the British Intelligence service, Josh Canfield, and Sally, who is quite ignorant of the real reason for the plan. The book works up to an exciting climax, as the strange regime existing in the Devlins’ castle is gradually explained, and the mystery of Devlin’s fate revealed. Miss Gaskin has coloured her story with a liberal dash of romance, and the book is excellent of its kind. The Sinews of Love. By Alexander Cordell. Gollancz. 256 pp. Alexander Cordell’s novels are always exciting, and the latest, his fourth, “The Sinews of Love,” is at times bewilderingly so. The life of the Chinese in Hong Kong is likely to be full of puzzling problems for westerners; but in this novel Mr Cordell presents a panorama of violence and catastrophe that is at times almost overpowering. It is all the more surprising that this is seen through the eyes of a Chinese girl not out of her teens; and just because the author writes with such assurance and apparently with so much intimate knowledge the bemused reader asks can such things really be? All the same, the fact that "The Sinews of Love” challenges the attention so powerfully gives the measure of this writer's ability and enterprise. When Pei Sha’s parents are killed by a tidal wave, she, together

with the other children, sails off with the fisher folk, into the China Sea. The life is hard and the living precarious; but Pei Sha records every impression with sharp sensibility. She is an intelligent girl, who has been educated in the old Chinese classical lore as well as in the mission school. But the situation of the little family, crippled by inherited debts, is really desperate. Finally, Pei Sha decides to sell herself as a concubine or second wife. .As she is attractive in every way, she is soon taken into the family of a financier, Lo Tai. The intricacies of Chinese family life do not daunt Mr Cordell, and this part of the story is really remarkable. But unfortunately for Pei Sha’s plan, she is already in love with Jan Colington, half-English, halfDutch, and as a result of this the life she has created for herself cannot continue. When the book ends, she is back almost where she started, helping to sail a big fishing junk in pursuit of the snapper off Kwolong. The title of the book is apt It comes from a line in a late Restoration play; “Money is the sinews of love, as of war.” The Bawdy Wind. By Man Maynard. Hammond. 221 PPThose who sit each week with their eyes riveted to the television screen while the inhabitants of Peyton Place reveal more and more of the emotional and sexual tangles of the town will revel in this book. With six main characters (three male and three female naturally) we have by the end of the last exhausting page seen most possible combinations and run through most emotions. The story mainly concerns a young musician, Roger Walton, and the three’ women, Stacey, Connie and Fran who each play a part in the drama which ends with Roger in a murderer’s cell. Mrs Maynard has drawn a superficial picture of a gossiping brittle community interested only in the affairs of others and within this community she concentrates on a few introverted characters whose only communication with each other is through sex. The author is clearly attempting

to contrast the three women and show how differently each affects and is affected by Roger but in fact the main impression which emerges is that the three are remarkably similar in their overwhelming preoccupation with sex and in their inability to comprehend how real love can be something more than desire. The title of the novel is taken from the piece tn "Othello:” "The bawdy wind which kisses ail it meets is hush’d within the hollow mine of earth and will not hear it." We would have been no worse off had the novel "The Bawdy Wind' been hush'd and we had not heard of it. This Animal is Mischievous. By David Bcnedictus. Blond. 248 pp. David Benedictus has a pleasant vein of originality, well illustrated in this tale of racial antagonisms, which first manifest themselves in England, and end in a grisly scene on Mount Parnassus. The chief characters, a twin brother and sister, are devoted to each other (though the girl has the stronger character,) and are sympathisers with the AfroAsians working in England, a feeling which is intensified when a Fascist organisation mounts a campaign against them that does not stop short of murder. Tim and Georgina attend meetings of both black and white conspirators, as well as their respective social events. This makes the couple suspect to each body, and while on the run from possible assailants the brother and sister take refuge in a cottage on the Cornish coast. Here they rescue a half-drowned girl from the sea, who complicates the mystery of her identity by suffering a complete loss of memory. What follows is rather unnecessarily involved, and Georgina’s fate at the hands of those she has dedicated herself to support, is a piece of grim irony. The Study of character of the respective leaders of black and white factions is very well done, and the author’s final plea for mutual love instead of hate, as the only acceptable motive power for human living is quite unambiguous.