556
FRANK KERMODE
and infuriate the pop-eyes pot-bellied governor. Mr. Sillitoe
is
load–
ed with talent, and the other stories are distinguished, accurate,
and sometimes depressing.
Mr. Wilson's book is different from all the others not
only in that it is twice as long as any of them, but because it is an
obvious, though obviously unsuccessful, candidate for the epithet
"major." It should please admirers of Mr. Wilson's non-fictional
works, and also the possibly even larger group which might fancy
a novel about a sadistic mass-murderer. A few years ago there was
a Diaghilev exhibition in London, very pretty but with, I thought,
too strong a smell. To this went Mr. Wilson's young writer-hero;
and so did the modem Ripper, an upper-class figure called Austin
Nunne. The hero likes him, even confounds him with Nijinsky, for
whom he has a not altogether explicable reverence. Slowly he
comes to see his friend as an interestingly complex case, and does a
lot of thinking about him; but not so much that he can't have the
sort of time young men dream about. Within a few days he collects
two maidenheads, an aunt and a niece at that; frustrates a pyro–
maniac in the flat above; and befriends a sad painter who is jailed
on a charge of molesting a little girl. Anything can happen in Lon–
don. When he is taken to view the corpse of one of Austin's vic–
tims, Gerard (for that is his name) is not shocked into morality
and a willingness to tum his friend in, as the authorities naively
hope; instead he drags the cover off another dead woman; she was
burnt to death, and this does make him think. He does not desire
her, so death is absurd. We leave him in a delicious how-happy–
could-I-be-with-either dilemma between aunt and niece.
The book is less ridiculous than this makes it sound, but I do
not think I have been unfair; I refrain from discussion of the
thinking that goes on throughout, which evens matters up. The
jacket of this American edition gives a somewhat inaccurate ac–
count of the novel, nowhere more so than when it hints a com–
parison with Dostoevsky. Anxious though I am to cut a modern
figure before the American public, I can find no answer to this
except the mild and obsolete vernacular expostulation: "Chuck it,
Houghton Mifflin Co.!"
M,r. MacInnes isn't young enough to be
that
kind of angry,
but he is against a lot of damnable things and a good man to have
