The Good Life

The Tablet A Weekly Newspaper & Review
October 6, 1962 Vol. 216, No. 6385 pg. 938
 

Exactly What We Want.  By Philip Oakes.  Michael Joseph.  18s.
The Climate of Belief.  By Jennifer Lash.  Gollancz.  16s.
A Question of Choice.  By Prudence Andrew.  Hutchinson.  18s.
 

         Of missiles and such-like they say:  if it works, its obsolete.  Something similar can be true of literary conventions, and Mr. Oakes may have made a tactically unwise choice of method for his first novel, though it is a method which dazzled us all six or seven years ago when it first soared off erratically into its own special sort of dark and cold.  At this late dare, "Oh no!  Not again!" you are almost bound to cry when you find a grubby lout, the usual anti-hero from the provinces, dimly engaged in a vile pressman's life, grinning about beer, battering away wearily at the routine of promiscuity, opting automatically (when at the end a real choice does present itself) for the ignoble safe betrayal.  You won't miss the clever low observation, the many wisecracks well worth inclusion in your own repertoire, the high speed and the good anti-climatic shape, but you might conclude that such hackneyed stuff is now only worth reading for the sake of the many entertaining misprints in this particular book.  Erroneously, though:  the bugs have been ironed out, lessons have been learnt from what earlier travellers reported, Mr. Oakes is right on the ball, and all systems are much goer than ever before.  If only this was the first use of such material to underline the contemporary world's failure to offer any plausible image or dream of the good life!  How we would stare up, gasping!

         Casting around for such an image or dream, whether for development or debunking, one inevitable comes to the cloister:  for novelists, as for New Yorker artists, monasticism would have to be invented if it didn't exist already.  But there are snags, and it is especially important that somebody should warn the ladies off:  there are reasons for the rules of enclosure, other than those that occur naturally to writers of modern fiction, and the monasteries proposed by Miss Lash and Mrs. Andrews -- modern and medieval, romantic and counter-romantic respectively -- are not only improbable but unmanageable in literary terms, and no help at all to two very considerable talents.  At Credon, in The Climate of Belief, hot tensions of loneliness before God build up dreadfully enough, but on a ham and over-decorated stage in the Pre-Raphaelite manner with moonlight and bells and the auntient Catholic chaunts, a lonely lady lingering sadly by the wicket gate outside, a towering heroic intellect broken dramatically by pride, a novice rejected and running made in white linen at Mrs. Andrew's Woodchester the monks who try to elect a new abbot, while Edward IV pushes one way and Warwick the   Abbot-maker another, are baboon-monks, mopping and mowing in the squalor of their total corruption and folly, justly hated by the noble Lollardish villages outside with among them only one heretic and one half-wit to remember the one thing necessary and to survive in different ways, the final obscene disaster.

         Each of these images of the monastic state has, of course, some sort of basis in some sort of reality, but picturesque properties and old indignations act as drag and distraction and preclude any real coming to grips.  There are at least literary arguments for a new bare monasticism, a matter of Nissen huts and dungarees; meanwhile
Miss Lash and Mrs. Andrews would do well to hold a joint tea-party, and invite to it the healthy bun-faced monks in Brideshead Revisited, and listen to them talking about country cricket.
 

                                    ----------Christopher Derrick