West and East

The new writers in this prose anthology – A.O. Chayter, Alan Coren, Ted Hughes, Jim Hunter, Julian Mitchell, Jason McManus – are all British, with the exception of the last named, who is an American. One remembers nostalgically that great fountain of modern prose (documentary and fictional) which burst forth in John Lehmann’s New Writing, and never became a river, but sank back underground. These later writers, none of them old, possess many virtues but lack hope; and so they lack gusto, which needs hope to survive. I recommend ‘The Cactus Land’ by Alan Coren as an exact account of the relation between the Arab gigolo and an American woman tourist. It has the sardonic bite of Moravia. His fellow writers do not reach this standard, though all are very readable.

page 456

The novel by Kamala Markandaya has not the communal breadth of her earlier work, Nectar in a Sieve, but it is perfectly and simply made. She tells the story of an Indian clerk whose wife has begun to follow a guru, to gain release from physical and spiritual sickness. His sense of insecurity leads him to seek out prostitutes (she, as a Hindu wife, would withhold blame) and bring pressure on the guru to leave the neighbourhood; he is successful, but the guru conquers on another level, for he finds he can no longer close his heart to his destitute fellow-creatures. As a sketch of a warm, mature marital relationship subjected to hard stresses, this novel lacks nothing. It could scarcely have been written outside India, where the mutual obligations of husband and wife are so strictly and sanely defined. The author has a sovereign command of English, and this is a rare thing even among the best Indian writers.

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