lOOKS
47)
is
wrecked on the island, and is converted to its way of life, but not
quickly enough to prevent his helping the Oil Interests to destroy it.
There is a dreadful revivalist Ranee, to show that there is still fake
mysticism around, and a cynical Indian called Mr. Bayu, last of the
long line of Huxleyan
bons vivants
or Scogans. But most of the char–
acters live without complexities, whether of irony or anything else,
"making the best of the here and now," coping intelligently with
birth and sex and death, with economics and visionary experience. The
novel
is
an extended study of such a society, made up mostly of
conversations, lectures, extracts from key educational books, and re–
ports
on mushroom-visions. This kind of society has to get along with–
out art, since nobody is unhappy enough to make any, and the book
reflects this state of affairs. It is a kind of sterile hybrid, bred of a
volume of sermons and
She.
I have never felt free to join those who
profess an easy contempt for this writer; anybody who can dispose of
his amount of information does us a favor by showing how little we
use our heads. And if he is essentially
philosophe
rather than novelist,
that makes his good novels remarkable as testimony to what can
be
done by intelligence and information in the absence of original talent.
But he has obviously lost interest in fiction. Much of
Island,
the
sermonizing in fact, has great interest, and so have his recent essays.
One may look forward to many more volumes from Huxley, but it
is permissible to hope that this is his last novel.
Raymond Williams is around forty, but already a sage not with–
out honor in
his
own country and elsewhere. This is his first novel,
and it is about a topic very much on English minds, the relationship
between young men who have been educated out of the working
class and the old unchanged family circle. This immediately gives a
false impression; there are plenty of skimpy and derivative
books
around just now which simply cash in on this fashionable theme, but
this isn't one of them. Williams' book is a novel, fully
written;
slow
and heavy in its movement, but rightly paying this price for profound
feeling. A scholarship boy, now a university teacher, goes home to the
Welsh border for his father's last illness. The pain and social mistrust
of his visit, the slowly elaborated significance of the basic resemblances
between father and son that have nothing to do with caste, call for a
degree of honest contrivance and laborious construction; but this pays
off because Williams generates the sense of a radical fineness of feel–
ing, an understood love. This emotional truth had to
be
painfully
researched, especially as the characters are rarely allowed to cross
the great frontier between feeling and saying. The book flashes back
