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THE LIFELINE by Hugo Charteris. (Collins.)

HOUSEHOLD GHOSTS by James Kennaway. (Longmans.)

Life in remote parts of Scotland, it seems, is as weird as ever; and has produced, this year, two novels definitely out of the ordinary run. (The Fiction Consumers’ Association is planning a ban on all novels set in London next year; also all novels set partly in Europe and partly in America.) It is, in fact, obvious from the dust-jacket of The Lifeline that it will be something unusual: ‘arresting’, ‘original’, ‘idiosyncratic’, ‘wayward’, and ‘unpredictable’ are some of the epithets applied to Mr Charteris’s earlier work. The Lifeline has also managed, of course, to snare somebody into comparing it with Linklater and Compton Mackenzie; which all goes to show that some reviewers merely find out the geographical location of a book (‘Mr Durrell’s Forsterian evocation of the Alexandrian scene’) and then call it a day.

     The Lifeline, then, is a piece of Highland high comedy describing the progress of a huge bearded TV actor who turns from playing Little John in a Robin Hood serial to running an hotel: the main secret of his success is the lifeline, a system of tapping the huge storage casks of a local distillery for free supplies of whisky. The narrative is decorated by some authentically local characters, such as Aeneas McKay Skimbo, a Catholic crofter not quite five feet high and possibly a hundred years old; some fine burlesque scenes, such as the selection of a local Ted for the finals of the Fluach Football Queen contest; and Mr Charteris’s well-developed gift for comic hyperbole: (‘the signature that followed was like a huge spider’s web photographed in the ten-thousandth of a second when it is sucked up by a vacuum cleaner’.) It is wittily, as well as funnily, written.

     But this is only half the story. Unlike Mr Linklater or Sir Compton (or Mr Waugh or Mr Amis, or anyone else you are likely to be compared with if what you write isn’t marked SERIOUS clearly enough for anyone to read) Mr Charteris produces his comedy as if it were a side-issue; but since the main issue never emerges, he joins the fashionable ranks of comedians who communicate, under the laughs, a sense of appalling unease. The jokes are obviously there to divert us from something too serious, or too plain tragic, to be endured: but what? Tulloch Traquhair, the hero, relapses when left alone into broody uncertainty even about himself:

‘What had happened to his two wives? . . . ‘Where did he come from? . . . Who were his people? . . . Where did he go to school? . . . Was he quite sure that he still knew the answers? Like heavy snow the years seemed to have covered his tracks as quickly as he made them. Convenient and misleading metaphor! Truer to say he had needed to cross out the past systematically . . .’

     The character of his secretary, a broody man governed by his own existential law (‘The environment is master, and must be destroyed’) is another disturbing factor which might almost have come out of the pages of Camus: but just when the metaphysical suspense becomes unbearable, we are dragged off to another orgy of slapstick; the final effect is like a coitus interruptus of the brain. The question of Traquhair’s origin is solved in a burst of genealogical absurdity as far-fetched as the coincidences in Doctor Zhivago; the hotel survives both the danger of police action and the visit of the Canadian Prime Minister; the secretary destroys a 71/2 litre Donizetti without destroying himself; but one is left staring at the mottoes from Nietzsche which Mr Charteris has put on the title-page, with a feeling that the whole thing could only be explained, as opposed to merely enjoyed, by a further set of events which must have taken place off stage. For yet another comparison I would suggest Nabokov, who sometimes conveys the same giggly thrill by a barrage of comedy so inconsequent that it can only be a screen for something else; through the fog of elliptical witticisms and elaborately irrelevant incidents, vague ‘significant’ monsters loom.

     Mr Kennaway is ultimately a more straightforward case; but he also favours a deliberately baffling construction, with all the bits filled in in the wrong order, and a plot in which emotional counter-currents and family revelations (the Household Ghosts of the title) provide a complicated, cross-woven fabric of mystification. And one of his characters, in expounding his theory of ‘the obligatory scene’ makes exactly the point that I have tried to make in the last paragraph: that in life, as distinct from novels or plays, the really crucial confrontation, the event that explains all others, may never take place at all. Cowardice, chance, or muddle, present us with something like the fragments of an emotional pattern; but the vital piece which the patterns calls for is one which reality never supplies. By his method of narration, Mr Kennaway certainly gets this point across; but I am not so sure in his case that the significance we are meant to glimpse is a really interesting one.

     For one thing, I dislike skeletons in family cupboards: I am always left unconvinced by people whose lives are broken by discovering, in full maturity, even who their parents were, let alone what crimes or errors they committed. And belief is not encouraged by the character of the parent himself, an old baronet who did (or didn’t) once cheat at cards and was (or wasn’t) the object of more than conventional affections from his fellow officers. I am also put off by the tone of Mr Kennaway’s major pronouncements, which is one of false stoicism (‘. . . the icy tone of someone who not only has the courage to admit to others that he is no good in bed, but braver still, to confess it to himself . . .’), of understatement altogether too hard-boiled for normal critical consumption:

Standing rather vaguely, moving pound notes in and out of his wallet, he added, casually:

‘I suppose we’ll probably never see each other again. That’s rather how life works.’

     Mr Kennaway is much better when he is not out for an epic effect: his attention to the significant minutiae of behaviour produces some really remarkable vignettes:

‘Have you had a bath?’

‘Sorry?’

He had taken, lately, to prefacing most of his replies like this, as if he had not quite heard what was said. It gave people the impression that his mind was always occupied elsewhere; that he knew no rest.

It is as if he succeeds most in the areas where has has made least conscious effort. The book is really constructed around four main characters: wife (baronet’s daughter), husband, lover and wife’s brother; and it is the brother — the least involved in the relationships which make up the theoretical meat of the story — who steals the show. ‘Pink’ is an unforgettable portrait of failure, with an appropriately Calvanist flavour of predestination about him; he chronicles his own downward progress in a marvellously captured private vernacular, and is finally packed off to an asylum in Aberdeen protesting, to the cousin who drives him to the door: ‘In point of fact it’s nothing much more than a five-thousand mile check-up. Thirty-fifth year, I am. Oyez.’ On the evening of his father’s death, he goes down to the bar of the Queen’s Hotel for his usual drinking session; and defends himself when challenged with:

‘What’s the alternative? Pink asks. Sitting through there watching TV, or sloping off to my own fart-sack half an hour after the scoff?’

For the fascination, if not the pleasure, of this, it is worth putting up with any amount of Mr Kennaway’s throwaway lines.