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THE HORSEHAIR SOFA by David Hughes. (Hart-Davis.)

EVERY ADVANTAGE by John Verney. (Collins.)

All criticism is finally subjective, and perhaps seldom more so than when attempting to decide whether or not a comic novel is a success. However cleverly constructed and well-written it may be, presumably it can only be said to succeed if it amuses you. Fully aware then that one man’s laugh may be another’s groan of boredom, I had better state immediately that David Hughes’s The Horsehair Sofa struck me as being extremely funny, easy to read and, perhaps because of its comparative brevity, nowhere tedious. The story is told in the first person by Marcus Gore, a conventional young middle-class Englishman whose sexual experience is pretty dim. He has just married, but, due as much to his mismanagement as to his state of extreme repression, the honeymoon goes wildly wrong. In his desperate attempt to find the reasons for this and to satisfy his bride in the expected manner, he becomes hopelessly and comically involved with a collection of shady characters including a sinister bogus psychiatrist who has problems of his own.

     One of the difficulties in writing this kind of light novel is to keep up the pace, to sustain the interest so that one’s readers are not given time to think whether or not they’re still being amused. Mr Hughes has solved this particular problem by writing his novel in forty chapters, each of which is extremely short: rarely more than twelve hundred words and often as few as four or five hundred. The resultant jerkiness of design is part of the comic device as well as being expressive of Marcus’s frustration.

     This method of writing in short sequences has necessarily influenced Mr Hughes’s prose. The economy it encourages combines with the amiable dottiness which characterizes the endearing Marcus to produce an engaging effect not unlike a slightly more grown-up P. G. Wodehouse:

Perhaps we had read too few books. I once knew a man who took a pride in practising on unsuspecting ladies the advice put forward by authors of handbooks in respect of trial blandishments, eccentric positions and so forth. If he did not care for the result, he addressed witty letters of criticism to the publishers. He was a wise fellow, and I had been wrong to question his morals. Perhaps, on the other hand, we had expected too much from an activity which is, after all, no more than a convenient method devised by nature for reproducing the species. Anyway, whatever lay behind it, it was all a ghastly flop.

     All ends happily with a consummatory rough and tumble in the marriage bed. And yet, as they say, a lingering doubt remains: there has been a certain lack of inevitability in Marcus’s behaviour in the varied and curious situations into which he has been thrown. Willing suspension of disbelief becomes a distinct strain, and by the end of the book I was inclined to suspect he’d have been more happily and suitably married to the young Italian servant (‘Giuseppe, a brutish type, with blond crew-cut hair’) of whose virility he appeared to be so psychotically envious. And, to judge from a bedroom scene where Marcus’s wife, Priscilla, dresses as ‘a sort of neat lady Mephistopheles’ and, crying, ‘All right, this is how you like it, isn’t it?’ Lashes at Marcus with a riding-crop, I’d say she had made a shrewd guess at his true nature as well.

     John Verney’s Every Advantage is a longer, more complex and leisurely affair A type of roman a clef, it is concerned with a young middle-aged publisher whose marriage (this time of some years’ duration) appears to be on the rocks, and whose business isn’t doing any too well either. He is engaged in writing his memoirs, ostensibly to clear up a point about his parentage, but really to keep present reality at bay.

     We are given large slices of the memoirs, and in fact Every Advantage is really a book within a book. The character of Paul Pot, the publisher, is observed with sympathy and insight, and is so fully and roundly presented that the memoir chapters fall easily and naturally into place as the kind of thing such a person would write:

In the nursery we possessed an old wooden gramophone with one record, providently brought from England by my mother. On one side Melba sang that she would give you the keys of heaven. On the other a baritone, whose name I forget, sang that he heard ‘the angels’ voices calling, poor old Joe’. About heaven I had no clear mental image, associating it vaguely with a gaol, to which, even then, I knew keys were necessary. About the angels’ voices calling I was perfectly clear. Angels were small Indian women with black shiny hair, a red spot in the centre of the forehead and a drop of gold stuck into the lobe of each ear. A diaphanous mauve sari, draped from the back of their heads, disappeared mysteriously into a sort of yellow quilted waistcoat, to reappear again, having gained opacity in its wanderings, as a complicated skirt arrangement. To catch my ayah undressing and thus to discover what really went on top of what was the first of many ambitions never to be realized. The prejudices I formed against angels in these early years has persisted ever since.

     That the problems of Pot’s married life, his relationship with his son, his business difficulties should all resolve so easily when the jigsaw puzzle of his memoirs finally clicks into completion is perhaps not fully convincing. But Mr Verney catches beautifully the sense of a life lightened and made bearable by a sudden change in immaterial circumstances. His point is a subtle one, more easily felt than understood, and around it he has written a compelling and fascinating first novel.