304
THEODORE SOLOTAROFF
which they pursue their ends by the most efficient means possible.
Until now, the General has been content to let the rational bar–
barism of the State, with its decision-making machines, do his
thinking for him: "freedom" in this ideology is "the freedom to
serve. The freedom to submit uncertain questions to those in
authority above you."
It
goes without saying that he is cynical
about Western values, but not much more so than is Evarts, the
conductor, who acts as the spokesman of its dying humanism. In
the long dialogues and interior monologues that make up much
of the action, Evarts emerges as less the adversary of the General
than as the disaffected critic of his own culture, opposed to its
nationalism, its war-mongering, its own hypocritical masks of
tyranny. To Evarts, both sides are equally despicable; he seeks a
third way in some quasi-religious form, his battles, as he says to the
General, are "mystical and hidden things that I often don't realize
are taking place at the time."
If
the General's position is conven–
tional enough, the conductor's is painfully vague, amounting to
little more than the desire to contract out, to sit still in an evil
time and await the saving moments of the spirit, to accept one's
fate passively, even indifferently. Eventually, the conductor's posi–
tion prevails, less through the influence of his argument than
through the symphony his orchestra performs for the General,
who eventually allows the musicians to escape and is afterward
sent in disgrace to Siberia, armed now with Evart's ideas about
consciousness and resignation.
All of which adds up to a wooden and unconvincing novel
and a 50ft, vague tract for the times. More's the pity, for in this
paragraph of description and in that passage of dialogue, Sillitoe
goes on exhibiting his great promise. Without asking that he go
back to writing the same books about the Midland factory class
all over again, one hopes that he will go back to choosing subjects
that he can handle with the solidity and significance of his earlier
work.
Among the Dangs,
George P. Elliott's first collection of stories,
is, on the whole, a pleasure to read, the fiction of a writer who is
consistently lucid and inventive, consistently
intellige~t,
who makes
his words stick to the page and his characters stick to a context
of recognizable and "felt" experience. His stories here tend to
be
