Mixed Fiction
HOUSE OF LIES, by Franc,oise Mallet-Joris (311 pp.; Farrar, Straus & Cudahy; $3.75), is a novel with a curiously old fashioned, even Gothic air. An old, wealthy brewer is slowly dying of heart disease in a provincial Belgian town. Around him hovers a cluster of relatives who live for nothing more than the huge fortune they hope to slice. Only one person cares nothing for his money--an illegitimate daughter whom he has acknowledged, taken into his home and educated. Anything but original as a plot--but Author Franc,oise Mallet-Joris, still only 27, has already proved (The Red Room, TIME, July 16, 1956) that she can reach elbow-deep into suppressed human feelings and dredge up more than enough to fill out her simple framework. She writes about her heavy provincial countrymen with the tough sureness of a Belgian farmer calculating the points of a work horse.
As the story develops, it gradually begins to dawn on the simple heroine that what her father feeds on is power. Having used her to put away her drunken and embarrassing mother, he proposes, in effect, to buy his daughter's regard on his deathbed by offering her all he is worth. Not too bright, surrounded by the old man's covetous relatives, and wanting only peace and marriage to a weak-willed young man she has fallen in love with, Alberte knows only that she must escape the maze of greed that Threatens to trap her. Refusing her father's money, the young innocent rushes to her lover, who promptly walks out on her when he hears of her incredible folly in spurning a fortune. The book's prevailing color is grey; no touch of humor is added to lend palatability to its provincial harshness. The rewards lie in a firm, penetrating style, a relentless storyteller's determination to pursue the shabby impulses of humanity even if they lead to tragedy.
PEMBERTON LTD., by Anthony Glyn (376 pp.; Dial; $3.95), suggests that the British, who once acquired an empire in what has been called a fit of absentmindedness, are now writing novels about its loss in the same detached, faintly surprised style. Anthony Glyn, 35, is by heredity both an empire builder, with ancestors in the Canadian hinterland and personal service as an apprentice planter in British Guiana, and a novelist: his grandmother Elinor set the century's early decades aflame with Three Weeks. Grandson Glyn has written an insider's account of the last outposts.
The setting: a fictional British island called Natividad, home of Pemberton Ltd., one of those British family colonial companies for which the only near parallel in the U.S. could be found in Hawaii's Big Five. It is rich, it produces sugar, but, like empire itself, it is running down. The only man who has faith in Pemberton Ltd.'s future is the villain of the piece--Major Justin Pemberton, the board chairman, a London clubman who hopes that blue blood will write off the red ink. He pays the sugar workers 7-c- an hour and his cousin Hugo (who works for him "as a plantation assistant) a miserly -L-500 a year. The novel tells, in company-report detail, about sensitive Hugo's triumph over his tradition-stuffed cousin. Hugo's achievement is to liquidate Pemberton Ltd., put his tropical gear in mothballs and begin a career as a writer among the treacherous tribesmen of literary London. About halfway through the book, many readers will yearn for Grandma and the old tiger skin.
Still, Author Glyn's novel can be savored for its let's-not-look-back-in-anger humor as well as for its documentary value. The really interesting thing about the novel is a sort of sad young man's theory that the sun never sets on anything but the British Empire. The book jacket is appropriately decorated with photographs of a bowler hat and briefcase. The bowler hat of respectability may well bear more heavily on the British head than the pith helmets of the past.
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