THE NOVEL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 487, 22 October 1948, Page 20

THE NOVEL

THE NOVEL AND OUR TIME. By Alex Comfort. Phoenix House Lid., London. INCE Mr. Comfort manages to say so , much that is valuable in his 74 pages, TI find it hard to forgive him for his slipshod writing. Why disconcert your reader with an obscure, unpunctuated sentence of 54 words on your opening page, for example? Under seven headings Mr. Comfort develops his theme that the novel is "the teadiest and most acceptable way of embodying ideas and artistic statements in the \context of our time." Society is now urban, fragmented, and ‘asocial, he says. That makes for social barbarism; and the novel, addressed to isolated readers

who may have little or no sense of community, is a characteristic form. It is a form which compensates for the lack of form in society, by making it possible for the writer to create an -entire world, and people it, in each

book that is written. Of course the writer must be responsible — and Mr. Comfort: means by that, responsible to humanity. He must see the man beneath the uniform, whether political, nationalistic, or whatsoever; and commit himself to no allegiances that would lead him into exalting the uniform at the expense of denying the man. Under the heading, "Mechanics of Patronage," there are some good remarks on the differences between English and American publishing, and the chances of the novel’s being free or acquiescent under political and military tyranny. But I am not too sure of the discussion of technique under "The Angle of Narration." ‘Technique changes we know, and no doubt there are fresh influences, such as the cinema; but explanations of professional techniques are quite often misleading; and the wish to explain may be in itself a sigtr of decadence. It seemed to me that Disney made a mistake when he took his public behind the scenes in The Reluctant Dragon. In "Violence, Sadism, and Miss Blandish," Mr. Comfort is on ground already covered by George Orwell-though it pleases me to be able to say that he is without Orwell’s puritan sourness. As, against that though, Orwell is more lucid. Throughout his book Mr. Comfort insists on what he calls "conscious insight into history." Readers will discover for themselves what he means, and perhaps I may add a statement of my own: that one should never leave off reading one’s Gibbon, and, at the opposite end of the scale, one’s Thucydides. It hasn’t all happened before, but something rather like it has. Also, one may sympathise with Mr. Comfort’s position as a new kind of romanticist, a position which, he claims, implies a belief in what he calls

anarcho-humanism. I think that what he means by the latter term is that in a society which believes in distributing income, he much prefers to believe that to distribute power would be far better,

Frank

Sargeson