BOOKS
563
the Volcano,
I know of no modern novel that unfolds and con–
veys a sense of place as this one. Not only a sense of it, but a
physical knowledge of it, so that road, street, cliff, square, palazzo
and hut are all around us, visible, smellable and tactile. The char–
acters are astonishingly good, all of them, major and minor, mural
and miniature; each comes to individual life, distinct and clear
and unexaggerated. Mr. Styron's language, in the beginning a little
self-conscious, patently sheds its Faulknerian heritage, grows into
an efficient (though still formal) machine, exact and solid. His
themes, multifarious and hidden, entwine and grow one into the
other, so that issues and people are inseparable, and consequently
"non-paraphrasable." The question of evil is uppermost, but just
who is evil is not as obvious as appears; and the questions of
guilt and sin and responsibility are also intrinsic to this book.
I have seen other reviews of
Set This House on Fire,
less
af–
firmative or enthusiastic than this estimate. In the long run, critical
judgments will not effect the significance and durability of the
novel which, in spite of defects or weaknesses, I consider a first–
rate work. Come to think of it, at its heart, it has a good deal of
Lowry's
Under the Volcano.
The painter of Styron has much in
common with the Consul of Lowry: the excess, the alcohol, the
relationship to landscape, the illusory line between reality and
dream, the delusions and visions and nightmares. Only the bitter
hopelessness in Lowry, steadfast and eternal, is replaced
by
a
bitter-sweet, possibly tougher, tentative hopefulness. I am not
hinting at even an influence; I am suggesting a similar concern,
a diving deep into place and people and discovering at the depth
a world of tragedy and violence. At the heart of Mr. Styron's
story I found myself being pulled into too deep water; in Lowry's
story I drowned, as, of course, one drowns in Dostoevsky's novels.
I mean only that one gives over completely. Mr. Styron, in his new
novel, is close to that tyrannical power.
Harvey Breit
