The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 29

THE GUARDIAN Friday June 3 1988 BOOKS 29 Chiaro turns to Funny condolences scuro JUHr Richard Boston Julia O'Faolain grand-opera libretto. Interestingly, it hardly matters. The revelation comes so late that our enjoyment is largely unimpaired. The unlikely end, like the arrival of royal messengers in old plays, merely intimates that the entertainment is over and very PHOTOGRAPH: FRANK MAHTIN Fuentes: completes the circle of Hispanic fiction from Cervantes to his own generation Carlos whispers they have just telephoned me that you have finished the strange adventure of being married to Frank." Knowing that Frank had been virtually penniless in his later years Shaw offers financial assistance, and again with great tact: "Death does not always select the convenient moment when there is plenty of ready money in the house to meet the expenses. Hence the enclosure." Volume 4 of Shaw's letters is not all that big.

It's smaller than a suitcase and weighs much less than a ton. There is one big disappointment about this book, which is that it brings to an end this splendid edition of Shaw's correspondence, edited by Dan H. Laurence. I want more. Volume 4 gives us nearly 750 of the thousands and thousands (literally) of letters that he wrote in the last quarter of his very long life and the old boy is on as cracking form as ever.

He wrote faster than other people can read, and there's never a dud word. It seems to me that it is not sufficiently recognised that Shaw was one of the greats. He could sit at the same table as (alphabetical order) Byron, Chaucer, Dickens, Pope and Shakespeare. In these letters he covers every subject from music to his sex life, the Elgin Marbles, shorthand and censorship, suicide and split infinitives. He even writes to Churchill a couple of lines about how to run the Second World War.

(It concerns the French Fleet in 1940, and seems to me to have been a bright idea, but there's no room to go into it here.) In these pages we come across everyone from Einstein to Eisenstein, as well as Keynes, Yeats, Elgar, Lenin, Noel Coward, and H. G. Wells and always Shaw is so sensible, and expresses himself not only with humour but also with good humour. As in the previous three volumes, the editor has given relevant information before the letter rather than after. In other words he has used headnotes rather than footnotes.

It seems to me that the device is entirely successful, and that congratulations should go in loads to Mr Laurence for this splendid four-volume enterprise. And last, and not least, to Bernard Shaw, who wrote the script. Bernard Shaw: Collected Utters 1926-1950, edited by Dan H.Laurence Max Ralnhardt, 30) IT'S volume 4, 1926, and Shaw has turned down a knighthood but agreed to attend a dinner in his honour. The BBC wanted to broadcast his (unscripted) speech but also wanted an assurance that jit would not be politically con troversial, so ne turned mat down too. He nearly turned down the Nobel Prize for Literature on the grounds that in his view he hadn't produced anything that year, and that anyway he didn't need the money.

His wife persuaded him that the Prize was a tribute to Ireland, and the money went to a specially created Literary Foundation. "The Nobel Prize was a hid eous calamity for me. All Europe wrote to me for loans, mostly for the entire sum, when the news was announced It says a good deal for female virtue that only two women proposed that I should take them as mistresses." In another letter he writes "I hate giving people money," and then encloses a cheque. He was constantly giving people money, or offering it, and had the rare ability of being able to do so without offending the pride of the recipient. When his old antagonist G.

K. Chesterton died, Shaw wrote to G. K's seems the most ridiculous thing in the world that 1, 18 years older than Gilbert, should be heartlessly surviving him. However, this is only to say that if you have any temporal bothers that I can remove, a line on a post card (or three figures) will be sufficient. The trumpets are sounding for him, and the slightest interruption must be intolerable." When Frank Harris died Shaw wrote a very different letter to the widow.

Shaw always had a soft spot for the old scoundrel, rascal, boaster and philanderer who sponged off him throughout his life, and when Frank popped off Shaw wrote to Mrs Frank what must surely be the funniest letter of condolence ever penned. It goes like this: "Dear Mrs Harris The pieces on Diderot, Gogol and Bunuel are also outstanding, in a remarkably coherant sequence woven around Fuentes' two favourite obsessions, the function of the novel and the problem of identity. These come together most notably in the only entirely fictional piece in the anthology, an intertex-tual tribute to Borges starring Borges, Erasmus and Fuentes himself. To add to the virtuosity of the achievement, the entire collection was written directly in English of the North American variety and is addressed, it must be said, primarily at a US audience. This becomes clear long before the final article, standing alone in a section rather optimistically entitled in which Fuentes, in a celebrated speech at Harvard in 1983, made a diplomatic but courageous and effective attack on the crass and immoral policy of the US in Central America.

This sober political piece coexists uneasily with the jaunty and sometimes scabrous tone of the first two essays. Indeed, there appears at first sight to be no consistent thread holding the three parts together, but then Fuentes' writing has always been more notable for brilliance than for restraint. Slowly, however, one realises that the title has a second layer of meaning and Gerald Martin Carlos Fuentes, Myself With Others (Andre Oeutsch, 1988, 10.98). I I HE ever-youthful ico's greatest living novelist, is 60 this year and has issued a new collection of essays to mark the occasion. The title, Myself With Others, is appropriately euphoric, if hardly euphonic: the volume begins as a mixture of celebratory verbosity and shameless name-dropping (dedicated to Claire Bloom and Philip Roth, but with references to numerous other friends of the author, including almost everyone who has been anyone in recent Latin-Ameri can culture, plus Bunuel, De-bray, Kundera and Sontag, to name just a random tew irom nearer afield).

The first lines set the tone: I was born on November 11, 1928, under the sign I would have chosen, Scorpio, and on a date shared with Dostoevsky, Cro- melyncK and vonnegut. My mother was rushed from a steaming-hot movie-house in those days before Colonel Buendia took his son to discover ice in the tropics. She was seeing King Vidor's ver sion of La Boheme with John Gilbert and Lillian Gish." In short, it might seem, a ROBIN COOK'S Mortal Fear (Macmillan, 11.95) adds to a sub genre he has made his own: bedpan gothic. His hero, fast with a cardiac needle, has a "handsome, hawklike The heroine moves with "effortless The dialogue echoes a medical textbook exsanguinated at the dinner For all that, given growing anxieties over health care, Dr Cook touches a nerve. Here a successful Boston medico's Al patients inexplicably die.

So too does an eccentric eminent colleague. Helped by a nightclub dancer, secretly working for her Harvard de Matthew Coady Bobby's goal The Silence in the Garden By William Trevor (The Bodley Head, G9.95) TV TTOVELS ABOUT the fW decline of Anglo-Irish I Vfl big houses form a lively and evolving sub-genre. Pulsing with inter-textual echoes, they contain more violence than they used to and are now more apt to bring to mind the house of Atreus than that of Madame Ranevsky. Action tends to peak the early 1920s and, as those years recede, fresh parallels nudge the narratives into allegory. The pitfalls are abstraction and whimsy, but William Trevor is too canny a realist to fall into either.

His characters are presented with a particularity so plausible that his unveiling of their secrets can leave us almost as shaken as we might be on discovering that an old friend was a terrorist. He pulled off this feat in Fools Of Fortune, a sad, tender but funny story about how a great-house family in County Cork was brought low by the bloody reprisals of the Troubles, and in his new novel he attempts to do it again. The Silence In The Garden is set in the same county and a number of features recur. The new family, the Rollestons, originally came "with slaughter in their wake" but later, during the Famine, atoned by dint of charity and by waiving their rents and tithes. This led to a reduction in income and loss of title to land and when a twentieth-century son-in-law conceives an ambition to restore their fortunes, he is perplexed by their refusal to let him try.

So, until the novel's final pages, is the reader. Then we learn that the family's history blood-guilt followed by redemptive self-sacrifice has been re-enacted in the present generation. A resident cousin's diaries, kept in "leather-bound account books," reveal the moral arithmetic and the dark tale behind the mild one which we have been reading. The contrivance creaks a bit, partly because these diaries have been selectively quoted from the story's start and also because the secret itself would hardly seem plausible even in a Going Dan van der Vat Holland: its history, paintings and people, by Adam Hopkins (Faber, 6.95) WHEN the world shook to the double crisis of Suez and Hungary in 1956 many Dutch people, liberated from the Nazis only 11 years before, hoarded such items as flour, rice and tinned food. Even my uncle's posh lingerie-shop in The Hague was stripped of its stock.

The reac tion evoked smirks in Britain, a country last seriously invaded by the Dutch in 1688. 1 can remember being ragged about it at school here. So when I read the opening words: "The main difficulty in writing about Holland is what to call the country," I wondered how on earth the writer was going to cope with such knotty subjects as the great national trauma of the German occupation, given British incomprehension of that continental experience which is the stuff of my earliest memories. I need not have worried. My fatherland, whether styled the Kingdom of the Netherlands or just pars pro toto Holland, fell into safe hands when Mr Hopkins found, on wanting to know more about it, that there was no suitable introduction to the country and decided to write it himself.

It is a skilled word-portrait of an intricate nation no less complex for being small. The author felt there could be no proper appreciation without constant reference to the stupendous achievements of its painters, from van Eyck to Mondrian. He rightly sees this as a central mystery of a country which strikes many visitors as the apotheosis of the bourgeois. Mr Hopkins starts his chapter on the revolt against Spanish rule by recording that Philip ITs grandfather hired one Hieronymus Bosch to paint an altarpiece on the Last Judgement. The author portrays the Dutch golden age, which began well before the Spaniards conceded defeat, by interweaving history and the work of Rembrandt and his contemporaries into a harmonious whole.

One is left wondering how anyone could treat the story differently. Yet the reader wanting information about the country as such need not fear that the art has been overdone at the expense of the struggle against the sea, of religion or resistance to oppression. And when the writer gets to the Second World War, the I good it was while it lasted. Fun in the shadow of the sinister is a Trevor forte and, though his chiaro benefits from smudges of scuro, his best talent is for the quickening of the commonplace. Ordinary life on the small island where the Rollestons live is depicted with his usual empathy.

Familiar Trevor figures animate it: the lonely boy, the insidious bigot, the lascivious but comically pitiable widow. Vivid details pin them to the page. Dialogue palpitates with authentic incon-sequentiality. Farce registers disjointed hopes. At the heart of things, the Rolleston Siblings seem unable "to escape from the shadows of their abandoned Similarly, in Fools of Fortune, there was talk of "truncated lives, creatures of the Both novels choose to present Anglo-Irish collapse as the result of willed action.

But the Chekhovian vision of a class losing energy as the ebbtide of history leaves it stranded seems closer to this writer's own instincts. His plots, as though respond ing to recent headlines, show violence breeding violence but meanwhile the plight of the declining gentry is more effec tively rendered by this glimpse of a group of them out for a stroll on a "warm and sleepy" afternoon when, "on the road beyond the entrance gates, little puffs of dust rose from each footfall Trevor's imagery is often subtly multi-layered: graphic, symbolic and even tragi-comic as when the islanders, worrying about the spiritual stain on an illegitimate boy, entrust him with the upkeep of a holy well. Old clerical denunciations of woman, "the unclean come to mind when the boy who emerged from an unhallowed since unmarried womb is advised by a nun to make up for this by thrusting his hand into the well's holy clay. Such subliminal comments skim and ricochet with lingering pleasure in the memory. Dutch most searing national experience since the fight against Spain, he proves that he has truly mastered his subject.

Marked by a delicate respect for a singularly dreadful ordeal not shared by the British, the chapter shows a sureness of touch which ought to be warmly appreciated in Holland. It is just right. But Mr Hopkins is not in the eulogy busines. The warts are here too: the failings of the House of Orange, the brutality of the end of empire, the pressure to conform socially (as distinct from intellectually), the Amsterdam drug-culture, the sometimes cloying orderliness elsewhere, the bourgeois values, the often startling blunt-ness, the argumentativeness, the circumspection with money, the failed social experiments as well as the many successes. As we western Europeans move haltingly towards hanging together for fear of hanging separately in the world of the superpowers, we really ought to get to know each other better, a stricture which I feel applies particularly to my British motherland.

This book ranks with a handful of excellent recent studies in English of larger European states, all written by journalists. Mr Hopkins is the latest to show in this way that our profession still has its uses. By interpreting the Dutch to the British with profound understandine in a book which is much more than a mere introduction, he has done a signal service to both. A British view of Holland? cloaks a project which the author is careful not to emphasise but which, given its self-evident success, may make this a milestone in the internationalisa-tion of Latin-American literary culture. Fuentes, whose Where The Air Is Clear was the Latin-American boom's first major novel in 1958, could already jus tifiably claim to have been the central unifying force behind the movement since the early 1960s (though he is far too shrewd, not to say generous, to mention it).

This anthology takes his historical achievement a stage further by describing and complet ing the circle of Hispanic fiction irom uervantes to his own generation of Latin-American nov elists and by integrating the lat ter, decisively but with remarkable sleight of hand, into the orbital circuits of Western literature as a whole. He has two indisputable aces: Borges, doyen of deconstruc-tion avant la lettre, and Garcia Marqez, the Latin American novelist of the century. Fuentes plays the hand for all it is worth (as if his own fate depended on it), and wins handsomely. In so doing he has provided us with possibly the most significant collection of essays published by a Latin-American writer in the past 25 years, pro viding yet again how easily this exasperating magical realist rises from the ridiculous to the sublime. and retribution in which comeuppance is delivered by unexpected hands.

Has irresistible buttonholing quality of neighbourhood gossip. The Long Chain of Death by Sarah Wolf (Crime Club, 9.95). Seemingly unrelated accidents emerge as homicides when US small town schoolmaster takes closer look. Revenge melodrama which goes over the top. Takes reader with it but only just.

There's promise here it's her first. The Run Around by Brian Freemantle (Century, 11.95). Shabby, impecunious Charlie Muffin, despair of British Intelligence, races time to identify Soviet assassin bound for Geneva Middle East peace conference. Variable suspense rating. Plenty of authentic sounding tradecraft and ironic wham-bang finale.

of how Pablo Neruda used to read his poems, to the most inapposite and demoralising occasions in his life of more or less unredeemed squalor and poverty. Altogether, this is a most heartening and captivating account of how alienation can be used as a source for fruitful fantasy. Every time the world bruises Daud he comes back with some little poetic perception that transforms the incident. Highly recommended. The kindest thing I can say about the rest of this week's fiction is that it is always difficult to judge work which remains totally locked in some foreign culture.

Assia Djebar's A Sister to Scheherazade, translated from the French by Dorothy S. Blair, concerns itself with two women, Isma and Hajila, wives of the same man, telling their stories as a sort of expose of the oppression suffered by women in North Africa. Without some knowledge of contemporary Algerian society, this is an impenetrable tale, though the author does have a sharp visual sense (she is a film-maker as well) and the book's successes are matters of light and dark described rather than the Maghribi woman's difficulties made comprehensible to outsiders. Nirmal Verma is said to be the acknowledged master of the short story in Hindi. He Is perhaps not well served by all his translators in the collection The World Elsewhere and Other Stories, but the book does contain a handful of things which manage to cross cultural and linguistic barriers, and survive even the cliches injected in passage, notably The Dead and the about the intense relationshio of a son and his dying father.

magical realist autobiography of one born, come what may, in the best of all possible new worlds and destined to discourse his way, always triumphantly, across the peaks and troughs of the United States culture in which he was largely educated, the Mexican culture which he only fully discovered in his teens, and the European culture which is every Latin-American intellectual's lost but always reconquerable birthright. This at least was my initial response, characteristic perhaps of our rather pinched and mean-minded intellectual climate, after reading the first two essays making up the section "Myself and entitled "How I started to write" and "How I wrote one of my They were certainly entertaining, but also, I felt, somewhat tasteless. Was I becoming part of the current anti-magical-realist reaction, the so-called Burges-sian backlash? I read on. In almost complete contrast, the second and longest section contains a series of essays on the which range from the excellent to the magnificent. They include a much admired study of Cervantes which, newly revised, looks set to become a classic, and a meditation on Cervantes' literary descendant Garcia Marquez, which is unsurpassed in any previous work of similar length.

gree, the baffled protagonist uncovers a fiendish plot to cut health service costs everywhere. A last chapter confrontation with mad-scientist logic medicine didn't spend so much on the dying, it could do so much more to help the lends a frisson to the current NHS debate. Hypochondriacs will love it. Out on the Rim by Ross Thomas (Mysterious Press, 11.95). Anonymous donor offers Filipino guerrilla chief a fortune to quit.

Con artists, including pretender to Chinese throne and seductive woman bodyguard, plot to cheat him and each other. Has more twists than a madman's maze plus cliff-hanging quality of an old time serial. Playing the Wild Card by Philip Evans (Hodder, 10.95). London football club out to sign called his stuff art and his daughter's stuff evidence of lunacy, so what was really the difference? "The difference," said Jung, "is that you are diving, but she is falling." This story of Abraham Yeho-shua's, carries all the connotations of that remark, yet goes even deeper in that, since the father cannot write and the son can, the dreadful question poses itself: is it necessary to be mad now in order to write poetry at all? It seems typical of this highly talented Israeli writer that we are left with more questions than answers after reading what he has to tell us and that the most urgent and disturbing questions are always more suggested by his work than stated in it. The other masterly story in this collection is 'Early in the Summer of which again takes father-son relations as its subject, revealing slowly the mind of a man who quite un-conciously desires to destroy his offspring.

Withering loneliness in the world and isolation within family structures, are reflected in many of the other stories also, all of them beautifully put together, though the translations are by various hands and not all of them as good as Miriam Arad's (responsible for the two stories singled out above). 'Mister set in Jerusalem in 1918 and the most recent of Mr Yehoshua's stories to be included, provides an arresting and original perspective on the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict I think this is an im portant book. so is Abdulrazak Gurnan Pitarims Waw. a second novel of quite remarkable accom-f -plishment by a writer born fi Zanzibar but now resident in 1 Canterbury. This recounts the Not falling but diving newspapers all the time to make things unpleasant." Kennedy's Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, also fares badly weak figure who didn't do his but the most virulent criticism is reserved for Vice-President Lyndon Johnson.

Robert Kennedy recalls the conversation with his Brother immediately after Johnson had been offered the vice-presidential nomination: JFK: "You won't believe it." RFK: "What?" JFK: "He wants it." RFK: "Oh my God." JFK: "Now what do we do?" What they did, of course, was grin and bear it but the relationship never improved, and Johnson's rise to the presidency after the Dallas assassination only irked the younger Kennedy even more. "Our president was a gentleman and a human being this man (Johnson) is not, he's mean, bitter, vicious an animal in many ways." Other cabinet appointments were more successful, and there are fascinating insights into how each of them handled the various crises which befell the administration during the early 60s. In true Kennedy style, almost any event of note is described as a "crisis" of some description. The showdowns with George Wallace of Alabama over civil rights and Nikita Khrushchev over missiles in Cuba are recounted in essentially the same manner, with Kennedy nerves of steel triumphing over evil in critical confrontations. In traditional Kennedy man ner, too, the recollections are fiercely loyal, and there is no hint of criticism of any decision the President took in three years.

The interviews reveal a Rob ert Kennedy still reeling from the assassination in Dallas, and he can only bring himself to refer to his toother's death as "the events of November As a primary source on the Kennedy years, this is an invaluable work, and deserves more attention than most of the nonsense which has appeared in the last two decades on the subject. Brian Dooley Robert Kennedy: In His Own Words, edited by Edwin O. Quthman and Jeffrey Shulman (Bantam, 16.95) IT IS about time that people stopped being so emotional about the Kennedys. Mention of the surname is almost guaranteed to bring out an immediate and un reasoned response, especially from the generation which believes it was inspired or betrayed by Of course, the blanket cynicism which clouds many people's view of the Kennedys is every bit as ridiculous as the mindless adoration which preceded it and the murky legends which have appeared in the last 20 years nave only contused the essential question of assessing the Kennedys' contribution to history. It is refreshing, then, to get back to first-hand accounts of the administration.

These are the previously unpublished recollections of Robert Kennedy on the presidency of his brother, John. In the foreward, Arthur M. Schlesinger (who has played no small part in perpetuating Kennedy mythology of the complimentary variety), suggests that "John Kennedy was a realist disguised as a romantic; Robert, a romantic disguised as a realist." Robert Kennedy's romanticism was so well disguised during his days as Attorney General in his brother's administration that it was practically invisible, and in these interviews (conducted in 1964 and 1965) there is little hint of the rampant idealism which characterised his own campaign for the presidency in 1968. There are, however, revealing and genuinely useful insights into how the administration operated, and of President Kennedy's personal evaluation of world leaders. "He really hated Nehru and he didn't like (German Chancellor) Adenauer.

Adenauer was livine in sort of a different generation. He used to leak things to the that the book's arrangement midfield star now in Italy seeks low-down on his life style. Insurance gumshoe opens worm can of blackmail and bizarre sex. Lots of soccer knowhow but the tale, like a fourth division pitch, is a bit uneven. Bellringer Street by Robert Richardson (Gollancz, 9.95).

Stately home's tourist attraction skeleton disappears as gay heir is fatally bashed with cricket ball. Amateur detective (English drawing room vintage) sorts it out unmasking nasty matrimonial antics on way. Surmounts his second-novel hurdle with room to spare. Speak for the Dead by Margaret Yorke (Mysterious Press, 10.95). Shopgirl Carrie is covertly on the game.

Her husband (who killed his first wife) is on the bottle. His ex father-in-law has vengeful yearnings. Multi-threaded story of chance small adventures of a black hospital orderly, Daud, an attractive character who takes refuge in his own imagination when threatened by the word, writing letters to his friends in which reality is moved just a few inches sideways and every prejudiced old white man suddenly achieves a lurid colonial past and so forth. Daud lives and works in a cathedral city (unnamed but by the end we can be sure that it is in fact Canterbury), and loves a white nurse called Catherine Mason, and adores cricket (which Catherine doesn't), getting much solace from every run the West Indies manage to hammer off the England bowling, seeing each of these as an act of revenge for the imperial tragedy. What makes the novel live and sing is its superb good humour.

Some of the things which happen to Daud are actually very horrible, and near the end he is beaten up by racist thugs in a graveyard. They break his arm while he cries out, "I thank you, Men of England." In the last chapter there is an almost visionary account of a visit which Daud and Catharine make to Canterbury Cathedral, in which Daud celebrates the humanism of the builders and all the subsequent pilgrims in a way which would, I think, have drawn a nod of approval from Geoffrey Chaucer. The difficulties ofbeine black in contemporary English society may have been equally well presented by previous writers, but onnand I cannot think of a single one who has done it with a clearer and keener eye or a warmer heart I like Daud's literariness too, and the way he applies (sav) a nartidcular line of Verlaine's, or his knowledge Robert Nye The Continuing Silence of a Poet, by A. B. Yehoshua (Peter HalbanWeldenfeld ft Nleolson, 11.95).

Pilgrims' Way, by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Cape, 1 1.95). A Sister to Scheherazade, by Ass la DJobar (Quartet, 11.95). The World Else where and Other Stories, by Nlrmal Verma (Readers International, 9.95). YfT HAS been said that mod-II ern Hebrew writers seem II very adept at depicting JUL schizophreniform states. The title story in A.

B. Yeho-shua's collected stories The Continuing Silence of a Poet not only bears this out but makes of it a sort of metaphor of the human condition and more specifically a metaphor of the role of the writer within that condition. This story, written when Mr Yehoshua was still in his twenties, is told by an ageing poet who has a mentally abnormal son. The poet himself feels guilty because he cannot write as the times demand. The son, trying to please his father, produces schizophrenic "word salads" which he calls poetry and signs with his father's name.

Reading this very moving story, I was reminded of something Jung said in response to the similar but real-life case of James Joyce and his daughter Lucia. Joyce has pointed out that there were likenesses between what he was writing in Finnegan's Wake what poor Lucia produced in her breakdowns, only the critics Writer's Monthly FREE Yes, here's your chance to try Writers' Monthly absolutely free. It's the only magazine just for writers. In every issue, you'll find: tips from top writers; instructions in improving technique; new markets for your work; news; interviews; competitions; and a writers' book club. If you're in any way interested in writing then Writer's Monthly is just the right magazine for you.

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