ANTI-STATIC
 

Praxis, by FAY WELDON, Hodder 4.95 pounds
The Dust Collector,  by JENNIFER LASH, Harvester, 4.95 pounds
Elgar On The Journey To Hanley, by KEITH ALLDRITT, Deutsch, 4.95 pounds
The Secret Memoirs of Lord Byron, by CHRISTOPHER NICOLE, Michael Joseph,        5.95 pounds

Betrayal, exploitation and oppression are states peculiarly associated with women in fiction at present, and they are related to a mode of perceiving which owes its existence, naturally enough, to the Women's Movement.  'Rather despairing books' which used to be written by women novelists have given way to works of fiction in which the origins of female despair and despondency are recognized and a blueprint for action is suggested.  So far, the major, bulky, proselytizing works have come from America:  novels like The Women's Room and Burning Questions, in which the emotions of urgency and anger have swamped the purely literary impulses to record and assess.  The repudiation of traditional, predetermined or distorted views, however, is most valuable and impressive when it is effected without ponderousness; and it seems that overt feminist fiction is beginning to move beyond the stage of realism and protest to a point where it can accommodate the personal and idiosyncratic.  Fay Weldon is certainly among the novelists who are imposing a style upon the flux of feminine experience.

        'Wherever she went she saw women betrayed, exploited and oppressed' :  the
eponymous heroine of Praxis is a late convert to feminism and briefly an enthusiast.  'Bastard, adulteress, whore, committer of incest, murderess, what else?  Hand me your labels.  I'll wear them for you,' she bursts out, willing to take upon herself the universal burden of female guilts.

         Many conventional social disadvantages are foisted upon Praxis (known in her less flamboyant phases as Pattie).  She is not only female, but illegitimate, and second daughter of a Jewish gentleman and a Miss Lucy Parker whose future is already circumscribed; nothing is in store for her, the deserted woman, but the lunatic asylum and the padded cell. 'A mad mother, a loony sister, an absent father.  Enough, after all, to upset anyone.'  Praxis muses, at a time when she is still trying to believe that the causes of her discontent are personal, not social.  The line is an instance of the humour that works by the classic understatement, and in the novel it is placed in effective juxtaposition with ironic exaggeration:  all the horrors of female imaginings are recorded in one form or another, along with the all the murky, underhand complications in women's lives.  "mother, what kind of world did you bring me into?'  Praxis cries out, echoing the quieter reproach of Plath:

          And this is the kingdom you bore me to
          Mother, mother.

         Inevitably, perhaps, the theme is centred on mothers and sisters, no matter whose.  Praxis's temporary foster-mother is a schoolteacher, a Miss Leonard who, at 45, goes out on a whim and gives herself in succession to a father, a son and a passing GI.  The result is Mary, plucked in time from the dead body of her mother who has fallen victim to a buzz-bomb (the year is 1945).  'A female Anti-Christ,' claims Praxis's demented sister Hypatis (Hilda), regarding Mary:  not an inapt assessment, perhaps, given Miss Leonard's unholy trinity of lovers.  Hilda, the bad sister, the ill-wisher, the scholar, the professional spinster, represents one option open to intelligent females, but she is one of the least plausible figures in the book.  The claim that her madness enables her 'to function as a man might do' is simply not convincing:  to flaunt obsessions which focus, in turn, on rats, stars and anti-static is not a way to prosper in the civil service.

           Occasionally, the outrageously appropriate event or fate becomes glib in the telling; the joke loses its sharp edge or the bitterness loses its undertone of humour.  But these are minor defects in a novel that never descends to crass introspection; it increases the significance of its characters, in the manner of the fable by keeping them at a proper distance, and presents its social observations in a form that is both eccentric and diverting.

            The characters of Jennifer Lash are also representative, but less successfully so.  They inhabit an unnamed city in Ireland 'within it, people gather, disperse, grasp and release that force which runs throughout and is both gutter and artery to all experience.'  I am not sure what this sentence means, but it is plain that the author subscribes to a curious belief -- more often manifested in the short story -- that the most profound aspect of an artistic sensibility is an intense reverence for the particulars of everyday life.  If these can be listed in a singsong tone, without grammatical coherence, so much the better.  The pursuit of minutiae leads naturally to dust, and so the dust collector is a figure positively bristling with implications.  Actually, the book is by no means badly written, and the central idea -- dust collecting -- has at least the charm of novelty, even if it is symbolically overloaded:  Jennifer Lash has tried to show us altogether too much in a handful of dust.

          There is nothing tricky or ostentatious about Elgar On The Journey to Hanley:  it is straightforward, competent historical writing.  Its subject is the tenuous and protracted relationship between the composer and a young woman named Dora Penny, whose passion, flare and exhilaration are all attached, in retrospect, to a series of musical events divised by the Elgars.  Dora, bicycling in a yellow costume along a country lane, is very much a girl of the period:  too well-bred to be avid, not sufficiently headstrong to appear distinctive.  Elgar is capricious in the usual way of the person subject to artistic pressures:  alternately charming and petulant, liable to behave badly at the dinner table.  It is perhaps not unexpected, in view of the Midlands setting and the bourgeois flavour, to find the prose reminiscent of
Arnold Bennett's.

           The novel is cautious and realistic, two qualities which are strikingly from The Secret Memoirs of Lord Byron, which Christopher Nicole has concocted on behalf of Lord Byron.  The result is just a great, rip-roaring mishmash, set in an age of fancy dress, heavy handed in style and somewhat repetitive in content.  To adapt Lady Caroline Lamb's comment about Lord Byron, it is thick, slick and tedious to read.
 

                                  --------------Patricia Craig