Graham Hough

The remarkable literary career of Richard Adams began only eight years ago, but it has already reached substantial dimensions. Watership Down in 1972 was followed by two other works of mystery and imagination, relying more or less heavily on the animal world, and now by The Girl in a Swing, which is ostensibly about human beings. These are not the skimpy, slimmed-down fictions so general today, but highly-worked, close-packed narratives, each of four hundred pages or more. Add to these two or three nature books and a recent collection of folk-tales, and we have what for many writers would constitute a life’s work. Not only is Mr Adams immensely prolific, he can carry an audience with him: Watership Down had an immense readership and the reviews of the next two books were uniformly ecstatic.

The title of Olivia Manning’s last book, from Housman’s heroic-ironic epitaph on an earlier war, announces a summing-up: the last volume of a trilogy, the trilogy itself the continuation of a previous one; the final flowing out to sea of a roman-fleuve of six volumes, completed just before the author’s death. Yet it is a conclusion in which nothing is concluded, not even the war – only a few accidental lives. The Sum of Things is as weirdly absorbing as its predecessors, and it is as hard as ever to say why. As before, the characters are utterly distinct, yet without any emphatic lines or strong colours. They have forgotten what it is like to be even partly in control of their own lives, for the huge network of wartime circumstance has taken charge of them. The scene is still the Near East, the world still that of British Council lecturers, minor embassy officials and lefty journalists, with the fighting, now farther away, still rumbling in the background. The key characters Guy and Harriet Pringle found their marriage pretty well on the rocks at the end of the last volume, and for most of this one they are separated. It is supposed that Harriet has been drowned at sea, torpedoed on her way back to England. In fact, she missed the ship and is swanning around in Syria and Lebanon, unaware that Guy in Cairo believes her to be dead. We follow separately his fortunes and hers, with their casual, eccentric contacts, until near the end they are reunited – as uncertainly as ever. Nothing has changed. On the very night Harriet comes back from the dead Guy goes off to give his Egyptian students a lecture on self-determination.

Even to Iris Murdoch fans, of whom I am one of the most constant, Nuns and Soldiers will be a disappointment. It is a long solid book, purposely digressive, and there is a good deal of hard slogging before we get to the main theme. The title promises more than the performance. There is only one nun and no soldiers at all. We are in London in 1978, in the thick of a large, prosperous, mainly Jewish family – bankers, civil servants, professional men. The interest centres in Gertrude, late thirties, not Jewish, just widowed of her almost too ideal husband Guy. She is surrounded by sympathy and consideration, but also by eager curiosity on the part of the family circle about what she will do next – especially as Guy has left her all his considerable fortune. It is not a particularly attractive milieu. The married life of Gertrude and Guy is presented as so insufferably mature, cultivated, public-spirited and smug that the reader’s first instinct is to close the book before it has begun and forswear the society of mature, cultivated, public-spirited persons for the rest of time. But Iris Murdoch’s writing has the power to engage the reader in its conflicts, even without the pleasures of recognition or sympathy; and though they are slow in developing, the conflicts are not absent. There are lengthy annexes and excursions that gradually become folded into the main design. And as always with Iris Murdoch, the apparent moral simplicities prove ambiguous or uncertain.

Thoughtful as always about how to win friends and influence people, Geoffrey Grigson in his latest book of poems congratulates himself that his elderly eyes

This is John Updike’s first collection of stories for seven years. There must have been problems, he says, to account for such a long delay. His preface glances ruefully at some of them – social and political disquiets between 1971 and 1978; but, in fact, the stories hardly move into the public domain. One of them is actually called ‘Problems’, and is cast in the form of exam questions. A, sleeping with B, a new partner who thinks he loves her, has a vivid and longing dream of his old partner C. Which has he more profoundly betrayed, B or C? This would serve pretty well as a paradigm for most of the present collection. Another is called ‘Domestic Life in America’; and if life there is interpreted as dull unease, half-hearted infidelity, not quite unbearable tension, this would describe the repeated theme. It makes for economy. The same apparatus can be infinitely extended, re-used with changed names for the indistinguishable partners, a different selection from an interchangeable set of unhappy offspring, and a slight shuttle to alter the setting. The family is the centre, but the family in decay, its bonds strong enough to cause neurotic dependence but not strong enough to give strength or support. The main activity is divorce – the glumly ‘civilised’ divorce that involves endless meeting, backtracking, wondering whether it is all worth while.