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Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
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doesn’t know what to do with it, and the sharp little playboy, sexually and materially on the make, bound together by disease and death. The author has loaded all the dice against himself and then transformed these people by making them make a mutual and moving discovery of their essential natures. It is an inversion of the way Mr. Maugham goes about people, where underneath the conventionally ‘nice’ exterior often lies a seething mass of ulterior motive: here it is underneath the unattractive exterior of these two men that one is shown the reality which is the charming truth about them. This novel is certainly caviar to the general - many people may dislike it. But some, I think, will welcome a new and remarkable talent, and certainly if one gets the chance of a little caviar, it is madness not to try it.
Fear Is the Key
by
Alistair Maclean
September 1961
Heroes of thrillers have to be tough in order to survive being on the right side for more than fifty pages. John Talbot, the narrator of this fierce, tough and breathless story is pretty well indestructible. After a brief prologue, which sets the scene - Florida and the Gulf of Mexico - he is in a hot country courtroom, as the prisoner. He shoots himself out of this, taking as hostage a young, blonde girl named Mary Ruthven, who turns out to be the daughter of a millionaire. After some nerve-wracking hours on the road - police blocks, all radios calling out for him (he has shot a policeman) - he and Mary get picked up in a motel, and taken to her home; a simple colonial mansion studded with anti-burglar devices, which seem needless, as it was already packed to the roof with relentless ruthless and, to put it simply, nasty men. General Ruthven seems to have locked all doors on a stableful of thugs.
The General owns an oil rig called X13, twelve miles out in the Gulf, and it is there, and many fathoms below it that most of the story is fought out. The last scene is in a bathyscaphe (it is fascinating how more and more fashionable life is being conducted under water - viz. the last James Bond), and finally, the good end happily and the bad unhappily, which according to Miss Prism, is what fiction means. In this case, the bad come to various, violent, and definitive ends, and the good have that touch of romantic tragedy about them which is concerned with abstract satisfactions like revenge and justice. I enjoyed this book very much: I like suspense, and action, and wondering what will happen but not caring too much about it all. Mr. Maclean seems to me to be growing as a writer in this medium: he is acquiring greater economy and precision, and also walking that tightrope of not quite cheating the reader about fore- and after- knowledge of events.
The Old Men at the Zoo
by
Angus Wilson
September 1961
Mr. Wilson’s new novel is set in 1970 at the London Zoo. The narrator of the story is Simon Carter, ex-Treasury, and now the Zoo’s Secretary; married to a rich and charming young American and with two children. He is a naturalist with a great love for badgers (who as we know, take a deal of watching if one is to see anything of them), and has therefore some informed interest in the Society he serves. His life, like so many others when viewed in these general terms, seems to be both pleasant and stimulating. In fact, or life - and this novel is a most faithfully brilliant exposition of that transient quantity - Carter is beset by the warp and woof of loyalty and conscience: on the one hand, he has the Director, Leacock, over sixty, and relaxing into euphoric generalities the practice of which - at their best - involve everybody else in unnecessarily hard work; on the other, there is Sir Robert Falcon, Curator of Mammals, and number two in the Society, who has a belligerently nostalgic passion for maintaining and substantiating the old Zoo architecture and ways.
Carter, wedged between these two with the responsibility of reconciling and administrating their
Fear Is the Key
by
Alistair Maclean
September 1961
Heroes of thrillers have to be tough in order to survive being on the right side for more than fifty pages. John Talbot, the narrator of this fierce, tough and breathless story is pretty well indestructible. After a brief prologue, which sets the scene - Florida and the Gulf of Mexico - he is in a hot country courtroom, as the prisoner. He shoots himself out of this, taking as hostage a young, blonde girl named Mary Ruthven, who turns out to be the daughter of a millionaire. After some nerve-wracking hours on the road - police blocks, all radios calling out for him (he has shot a policeman) - he and Mary get picked up in a motel, and taken to her home; a simple colonial mansion studded with anti-burglar devices, which seem needless, as it was already packed to the roof with relentless ruthless and, to put it simply, nasty men. General Ruthven seems to have locked all doors on a stableful of thugs.
The General owns an oil rig called X13, twelve miles out in the Gulf, and it is there, and many fathoms below it that most of the story is fought out. The last scene is in a bathyscaphe (it is fascinating how more and more fashionable life is being conducted under water - viz. the last James Bond), and finally, the good end happily and the bad unhappily, which according to Miss Prism, is what fiction means. In this case, the bad come to various, violent, and definitive ends, and the good have that touch of romantic tragedy about them which is concerned with abstract satisfactions like revenge and justice. I enjoyed this book very much: I like suspense, and action, and wondering what will happen but not caring too much about it all. Mr. Maclean seems to me to be growing as a writer in this medium: he is acquiring greater economy and precision, and also walking that tightrope of not quite cheating the reader about fore- and after- knowledge of events.
The Old Men at the Zoo
by
Angus Wilson
September 1961
Mr. Wilson’s new novel is set in 1970 at the London Zoo. The narrator of the story is Simon Carter, ex-Treasury, and now the Zoo’s Secretary; married to a rich and charming young American and with two children. He is a naturalist with a great love for badgers (who as we know, take a deal of watching if one is to see anything of them), and has therefore some informed interest in the Society he serves. His life, like so many others when viewed in these general terms, seems to be both pleasant and stimulating. In fact, or life - and this novel is a most faithfully brilliant exposition of that transient quantity - Carter is beset by the warp and woof of loyalty and conscience: on the one hand, he has the Director, Leacock, over sixty, and relaxing into euphoric generalities the practice of which - at their best - involve everybody else in unnecessarily hard work; on the other, there is Sir Robert Falcon, Curator of Mammals, and number two in the Society, who has a belligerently nostalgic passion for maintaining and substantiating the old Zoo architecture and ways.
Carter, wedged between these two with the responsibility of reconciling and administrating their
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