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THE CUCKOO by Rudolf Nassauer. (Peter Owen Ltd.)

DEVIL’S NIGHT by Oliviero Honoré Bianchi. (Eyre & Spottiswoode.)

BEBO’S GIRL by Carlo Cassola, translated by Marguerite Waldman. (Collins.)

THE TRAVELLER by Gisèle Prassinos. (Harvill Press.)

THE CHINESE EXECUTIONER by Pierre Boulle. (Secker & Warburg.)

One of the more disquieting features of an age already belching with the popular cant of traduced and half-digested psychology is an increased appetite for novels preoccupied with the abnormal and the psychotic. The day of the Idman is upon us and the writer has only to create the sour stench of madness about his work to find an avid public whose critical faculties have long been dulled to the fact that not every nympholept is a Humbert, no more than every fledgling playwright who splutters out a stream of non sequiturs from the TV is a Pinter. It is this lack of discrimination that concerns me, for if it obviously accounts for the success of such appalling works as Peyton Place and the film Psycho, it does, I think, also blunt recognition of the essentially trivial and restricted nature of such books as Rudolf Nassauer’s The Cuckoo, an elaborately constructed account of a ménage à trois, sufficiently steeped in curdled introspection, tortured relationships and high-flown metaphor — (‘Other than in first love, when man and woman join to form an island, men and women make links with one another, and use each other as bridges to reach new vistas of the world’) — to satisfy the most morbid and inflated tastes.

     The story is told by the husband of the unhappy trio, an irritatingly inept and sententious writer, reconstructing the events leading to his wife’s suicide as a sort of therapeutic exercise which will decide whether or not he should kill her lover, Aaron Fawkes. Aaron, the cuckoo of the title, is a posturing, rich American, with a mouthful of rotting teeth and a dilettante interest in filmmaking. Welcomed into the writer’s home, he begins an affair with his wife, Ria, while the deprived husband nods his sad approval and ruminates at great length on the nature of love. (I confess that by this time I was so exasperated by the ‘civilized’ tone of the whole business that I longed for him to take some ‘unhealthily’ natural step like knocking out Aaron’s bad teeth or putting up his rent.) Slowly, Aaron begins to reveal himself as the selfish intruder he is, able only to accept, never to give. On the strength of his films, which are mostly the creation of Ria, he wins fame on television, then abandons her to marry someone else. The distraught Ria kills herself and the writer is left in the ruined shambles of his nest to ponder on his thoughts of revenge.

     There is much in this book that reveals Nassauer, handpicked by many eminent critics for his first novel The Hooligan, as a writer of considerable skill and psychological insight. It fails, I think, in the narrow limits he has imposed on it. Little more than a short story stretched out to support a novel, we are still left with a curiously disappointed feeling of just how little we have been told about the three main characters. They remain obstinately anonymous, little more than three spectres flitting around in a vacuum to prove that it still takes complete human beings to make a good novel.

     Devil’s Night by Oliviero Honoré Bianchi is only notable for a particularly preposterous blurb. Searching for parallels to this ‘work of irony’, it invokes the names of both Kafka and Dostoevsky but then dismisses even them as inadequate. In fact it is yet another novel to satisfy our craving for the morbid, but this time much closer to the ugly excesses of Peyton Place. The action takes place in a single night when a boy and a girl, urged on by an older accomplice, plan to rob a museum of its gold plate. For the girl, Gianna, daughter of the museum caretaker, it is a way to win the love of Fabio. For him, however, it is merely a chance to make some money to escape the wrath of a pregnant girl friend’s father. But the story centres on the malignant Mainardis of the weak heart and violent sexual lusts. Enraged by the girl’s refusal of him as a lover, he plans to betray them to the police. Things go wrong, however, and in one hectic, scrambling night of confused, panting terror, he imagines he has killed his mistress, rapes a whore, plans to burn his shop and commit suicide, and has two heart attacks, the second one apparently fatal. The whole book sweats with loathsome introspection and queasy, unhealthy sex. I found it nauseating and tedious.

     Ever since that topheavy girl slopped through the paddy fields in Bitter Rice, the Italian film and novel have been stuck with her as the classical image of the Latin Woman. They may have shaded her down a little, even sophisticated her to some extent in the suburbs of Moravia, but she is still essentially the same. Her continual fascination for the Anglo-Saxon is, I think, due to the conflict of hot, Latin passion and an anti-sex morality that gives every bout of lovemaking with her (and after all, what else are Italian books about?) the added excitement of the classical rape.

     In Bebo’s Girl by Carlo Cassola, a fatuous love-story, she is the girl-friend of a young trigger-happy partisan who gets fourteen years in jail for killing a Fascist policeman. For a time she forgets him and settles for another, less violent youth who writes her poetry. However, realization of how dependent he is on her returns her to her first love and she settles down to wait for him in a sort of Pollyanna glow of goodness and virtue. On second thoughts, perhaps she has changed.

     I can think of a half-dozen well-bred, literate lady novelists who could have written The Traveller by Gisèle Prassinos, in between giving select little dinner parties. It has the sort of unmistakably cultivated sheen about it that augurs well for its selection at one time or another as the Woman’s Hour serial. Laura, a Jewish girl, is abandoned by her mother as she flees with her older children from occupied France. Brought up by a tough, cat-loving spinster, she treasures an idealized picture of her family right into her married life. Then, out of the blue, she hears from them again, inviting her to join them in America. This is the crisis that forces her ‘to come to terms with her past and her future or to remain a traveller’. A soft, sentimental story, I was fascinated by the skill with which a well-bred, literate lady novelist (as distinct from a well-bred, illiterate lady novelist who never faces such problems) can, with a low-throated earnestness, transmute the incredibly harsh realities of life into something sweetly sad.

     The Chinese Executioner by Pierre Boulle is a satirical tilt at the barbarous and grossly stupid ritual of capital punishment. It tells the story of Chong, the executioner of the title, who is himself charged with murder for administering poison to the condemned before lopping off their heads. Boulle has a certain flair for the vivid and the fantastic, but his arguments lack that savage bite and intellectual hardheadedness necessary to good satire. A well intentioned book, but I cannot see it drawing blood or even fury from the ‘Hang ’em Brigade’.