a gallimaufry

A Share of the World, by Hugo Charteris

Moonlight made a world of the near and the far. The near was vast and black, split up by spaces of nothing, and the far was pale and precise. A bush beside him was a gigantic black, but a star, a remoter sun, was a pin-hole in a bling between shoals of cloud in the low tide of weather. Light was pale smoke which showed things best when it got behind them rather than on them. [...]
Voices clamoured in his head, I can’t go on, I must go on. They’re there, just in front, they’ll wait till you’re on top of them and the shots will go through and through you like the needle of a sewing-machine through linen.

Described in the blurb (accurately, I think) as ‘a lost classic’, this is a reissue by Michael Walmer of Charteris’s first novel. It was originally published in 1953 to instant critical acclaim – there is praise from Rosamund Lehmann and Francis Wyndham on the cover, and Evelyn Waugh selected it as Sunday Times best first novel for that year. I read it as part of the Read Indies month hosted by Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Lizzy’s Literary Life.

John Grant is a very young officer who has just been dispatched to the front in Italy, during the Second World War. He has been ordered to lead a recce to a farmhouse to see if German troops are still there, or if they’ve withdrawn. The first part of this novel tracks him moving through the moonlit countryside on this mission, his fear, his doubt. It will come as no surprise that things end badly. The second part of the novel is concerned with John’s life after the war has ended, and his decision to court and marry Jane. Linking these two parts is the sinister figure of Bright, embodiment of John’s shame and self-loathing; the dynamic of hunting; a sense of mysticism:

John found himself on his knees holding the wounded man’s hand. [...] All the tension and ache of his own impotence was now flooded away in a purge of pity. This he understood. This freed him, expanded him with a general affinity which went beyond the lines.
Not Germans, not human beings against us, around us, he thought. But IT. Behind everybody’s face all the time.

With incredible skill, Charteris evokes the weirdness of life on the front lines and the almost unbearable tension of Grant’s nocturnal foray into the unknown. His vivid similes are unexpected, his immersing of us in John’s thoughts and feelings so complete that everything is strange, and everything is psychological. He filters everything so completely his own preoccupations, nobody else has an existence beyond their relation to himself. The white Italian farmhouse becomes emblematic of his struggle to overcome the parts of his character he despises; the Matlock family home where he tries to seduce Jane is a sort of trap. In both situations, John is tested by John and found wanting, by John.

(British infantry moving cautiously through the ruined streets of Impruneta, Italy, 3 August 1944. By Johnson (Sgt), No 2 Army Film & Photographic Unit, photograph NA 17570. Imperial War Museum, found here)

Woven into the wartime scenes are flashbacks to John’s (even) younger days, in which he became inculcated with the standards of masculinity he fails to live up to. Most of them are concerned with his experiences at Eton and his officer training, but the earliest is a disturbing childhood memory. John has crept out of bed to sit on the stairs, listening to the grown-ups at dinner. And then:

John heard a creak above him. […] He looked round and up. A man stood at the top of the stairs. The sudden sight of him was the cold end and blank of thought. The sick wait for this to be different – the sick reluctance to have anything to do with his eyes.
The man had blue sandshoes on, a black overcoat with a collar up and a torch, and the bristles on his peel-coloured face looked like some sort of patchy disease. No sound came from him. He seemed to be looking straight at John; then at his hand and sucked a finger. […]
The man came down ten steps as though he had slid down a wire on a velvet loop […]

Everything is there: the very slightly discombobulating prose, John alone and shut out, the feeling of horror and powerlessness, the malignant figure who I think later becomes elided with Bright in John’s mind.

The destructiveness of John’s self-disgust and solipsism is reflected in love as well as war. John has two romances, if they can be called that. The first is with Susan, who is fourteen and comes to his bed one night. It’s not clear how old exactly John is, charitably let us say he is eighteen, but he feels guilty about this and carries on a secret correspondence with her, deceiving himself that they should marry when in fact it is clear that they have nothing in common. Fortunately, Susan turns out to have more sense than him. His love for Jane is built on an even weaker foundation: he sees her dancing at a party, having never met her, and decides to marry her. Marriage will prove that he is a man and save him from ‘the web of himself’. Jane is preoccupied with her dying father and uncertain in her response to John. His anguish confuses her. Never have I hoped so ardently that a character would refuse another – for both their sakes.

 

Picnic at Porokorro, by Hugo Charteris

Well, from one state of tense uncertainty and disintegration to another: colonial West Africa. Picnic at Porokorro, first published in 1958, has just been re-issued by Mike Walmer, who very kindly sent me a review copy.

(Photograph of Hugo Charteris from a newspaper archive, possibly the Daily Telegraph, hence the markings; found here)

Hugo Charteris, novelist and journalist, and his old friend Nicholas Mosley (yes son of Sir Oswald) spent three months in 1957 on safari in West Africa as colonial rule was coming to an end. This novel is the direct fruit of that. It takes place in an unnamed West African land, where the British Mineral Trust operates a diamond mine. The administration is white; the actual mining is done by ‘licensed native diggers’, black Africans from across British and French West Africa. The narrator is one of the white BMT administrators.

We quarrel easily here. We all have to be careful – no one more so than Number One and Dickson, who are the most isolated of us all.

People at home will find it hard to understand the extent to which we all feel isolated. [...] It is not merely a question of being surrounded and vastly outnumbered by countless Africans with whom we can only communicate in a sort of baby talk. It is in the very air we breathe. You may say we exaggerate this, ‘imagine’ it, just as one of us sometimes suddenly imagines it is so much hotter than it is and succumbs to panic deciding, usually one midnight, that he can’t stand it another minute. Perhaps we do ‘imagine’ things, on the other hand it is only eight months since ‘last year’ – the riots – when, for 48 hours, communications were cut and it looked as if every single inland European would lose his life.

At this particular moment, the country is in a state of transition, moving from colony towards independence. While the British colonialists remain in charge of security and finance, a native administration has been established to deal with day-to-day matters and to evolve towards a parliamentary democracy through which the country will rule itself after independence.

All of the context is laid out clearly in the introduction to this edition, by Andrew Lycett. (You really ought to read it before you read the novel; however, be warned that there is a major spoiler in paragraph 8...) The novel begins with the abduction of the BMT’s head of security, Roberts, by ‘the Cowboy’ and his followers, a group of discontented native diggers. The BMT struggles to respond to this crisis, complicated as it is by the arrival of MacPherson, the local Provincial Commissioner, on a visit and, by coincidence, of a tabloid journalist, Warner. MacPherson is convinced that with his experience of ‘Africans’ he can easily calm the situation and he insists on going on a picnic to the centre of the trouble, Porokorro.

Porokorro means ‘the Place of Bones’.

So we know things are not going to end terribly well.

I thought this was a remarkable novel for two main reasons. The first is the way that Charteris winds up the tension. He writes in short, fragmented paragraphs. He scorns overly expository passages and leaves the reader to piece things together from the elliptical observations of the characters, many of whom speak mainly in some defunct public-school argot. He shifts unexpectedly, jerkily, between dialogue and the narrator’s perception in a way that is very discombobulating. His sentences are very spare, even flat.

The narrator himself – and I assume he’s a man because almost all of the whites are male and because of his misogyny – is also an enigma. We never learn his name or his job, although he speaks of the BMT as ‘us’ and it’s clear that he works there. Yet he is privy to scenes and thoughts that he cannot possibly witness. So who or what is he? He uses ‘I’ occasionally to speak of himself, but more frequently ‘we’ and ‘us’, as if he is a collective consciousness. Certainly there is something about this book, about the way that the narrator speaks of ‘us’ and observes the action without ever participating it, that reminds me of the choruses in Greek tragedies.

The second reason I think this novel is remarkable is the immense subtlety with which it reveals the utter absurdity of colonialism in West Africa and its destructiveness.

Even during a crisis we remain a very ordinary-looking lot at the BMT.

I think of us at our most typical playing cricket on Saturdays during the dry season, when the grass is bleached. There we sit waiting our turn to bat, under a palm leaf shelter with rather blank, uniform expressions, all wearing white linen, watching the efforts of our two representatives at the wicket.

The light is so intense that even sunburnt faces have, like the grass, a white withered look; and our women are as white-powdered as scones, against sweat. The whole effect is of a party grouped for security, on a raft, suddenly consoled with a mirage of cricket.

In this passage you can see the unnaturalness of the BMT’s situation, its vulnerability and isolation, its dangerous passivity. That image of the women powdered like scones is brilliant: not just are they scone-like (pale, warm, floury) but the scone is a food completely out of place in West Africa. Cricket is of course a very public-school activity and the BMT is riven with social divisions: which school you attended, what you did during the War, and who your aunt is, are all crucially important. In the essentially dreary and soulless world of the BMT, spite is one of the few energising principles.

By taking a narrator who gives a BMT point of view (albeit an acerbic and melancholic one), and is someone who holds racist and misogynistic attitudes, Charteris might seem to risk providing a one-sided look at colonial West Africa. However, the BMT’s cruelty is not glossed over and is perhaps more effective for coming from an insider. Gradually, we learn of the conditions to which the licensed diggers are subjected. They are expected to risk their lives mining, but give up all the diamonds they find to the BMT, and are searched rigorously and humiliatingly to enforce this. Frequently, the shafts they dig collapse, burying some of them alive. Nobody rescues them. Why has the Cowboy abducted Roberts? Initially, it seems sheer mischief-making, but in fact there is a shocking reason behind it.

This is a portrait of a minority exploiting a majority without compassion, destroying the living land in pursuit of tiny, dead jewels; a minority that is unhappy and frightened and peevish, existing in an atmosphere akin to ‘a Thames country club, circa 1938’. It is a fascinating counterpart to The Heart of the Matter and No Longer at Ease, and Mike Walmer has done well to bring it back into print.