602
PARTISAN
REVIEW
preparation I have some strictures: that a too great reliance on the
figure of Lucius' uncle in his mythic and prototypical aspect as drunken
sage and magician tended to make of him a 'character' in a disagreeably
operatic sense; that the part of the catastrophe most closely involving
this personage struck me as very arbitrarily produced; finally, that some
scenes of macabre comedy failed to make any relevant effect.
The critic must point to such things as he sees them; they are flaws.
All works of art are flawed, and this novel is a work of art. Books like
Voss
achieve a kind of high finish which does not much matter, but
books like
The V elvet Horn,
which in so many places reaches a major
solidity, and whose tensions, drawn with such difficulty, produce most
moving resolutions, belong to the realm of letters not less because their
tragedies are also in part the tragedies of their own composition .
P. H. Newby's
Revolution and Roses
is a comic novel. I want to
be quite explicit about this, because the dust jacket drives the point
home, with the related point that Mr. Newby is a comic writer, a good
many times, and because it is not something that would have occurred
to me independently. I have not read his earlier book
The Picnic at
SaHara,
which was also praised for its comic qualities, and so cannot
say whether the present work is simply a lapse or whether some more
general misunderstanding about comedy is at issue. Anyhow, I found
Revolution and Roses
strained, unconvincing and inconsequential. The
plot, which I shall not report in detail, concerns the adventures of two
Englishmen and an Englishwoman who, through their meeting with an
Egyptian soldier, become involved in events having to do with the depo–
sition of King Farouk. There are the usual comic misunderstandings,
confusions of identity, etc. Very infrequently something funny is said,
but the style in which all this is conducted is both labored and undis–
tinguished, and given also to long explanations of what surely should
be obvious. There is an occasionally visible ambition of producing dead–
pan political absurdities in the manner of the early Evelyn Waugh, but
the results mostly resemble, in their dire determination of sophisticated
fun, the mystery novels of Elliot Paul. I have sometimes been told I
have no sense of humor, so not improbably some precious essence of Mr.
Newby's novel simply has eluded me, but just getting through it was
a long, hard pull.
Evelyn Waugh's new book, though I could not take it with any
seriousness, was a pleasure to read. From the prevailing condition of
style
in
the novel, where sentences grow huge with difficulties unfaced,
and lush elaborations imply the novelist's belief that he is Swinburne,
