710
JOHN THOMPSON
for the hopeless ugliness that one might as well have
had
but
' did not. How 'precarious life is!
Although she was ashamed of doing so, Jenny took a great interest
in these and other mothers. As regards about two out of
three
of
them there was a terrific difficulty in imagining them taking part
in the act that, seven or five or even three or fewer years ago,
had ended up in the children they had come to meet or brought
along. They looked-the thing had got to be faced-much too
horrible. Not only that, but the kind of man who thought they
were not horrible, or not horrible enough to make much odds, must
himself be more horrible still. . . . Jenny hoped that it was just
that all those husbands were drunk, blind drunk, all the hours
there were.... At the end of the line today was a creature looking
like a giant mad sheep. . . .
This is a girl's or boy's cruelty and pity, the comic cruelty, and
with it goes the girl's or boy's smirking, and greed, and Amis's
Horatio Alger view of success, and the delight in disconcerting the
officious-this last managed not quite so well here as it used to be
by Evelyn Waugh's heroes, who could do it by inquiring, "Why
do you spit when you talk?" Amis's Patrick Standish can only
say, trying to put down the College secretary who has scolded
him about parking his car in the wrong place, "But I thought
things were supposed to have changed since you were a young
.man. They've had plenty of time, God knows." Thus it seems
sometimes that he doesn't deserve Miss Jenny Bunn, but it is he
who gets her, and says to her, on the last page, "It was inevitable."
"Oh yes, I expect it was," she says. "But I can't help feeling it's
rather a pity." It is. And rather a pity, maybe, that Amis's heroes,
for all their clear-eyed, cruel honesty, have little but a boy's brash–
ness beyond that. A boy's world can be, among other things, very
funny, but .one can't live in it forever without becoming more
than funny, without becoming grotesque.
of
plot, in
A Severed Head,
Iris Murdoch makes a good joke,
of character something not quite a joke, of setting, something real.
London, I take it, is London, the year is now, and this is what
happens there but not really. So it was with the best of her other
novels. The plots were complicated, full of reversals_ and con–
sequences and recognitions, the characters were like those 'we mlJ.St
