Tangled Lives

Man's Inhumanity Dulls Moral View

By Eugenia Thornton

=

÷

CG, 2001.

I feel about Radcliffe, by David Storey (Coward-McCann, $4.95), the way some of my predecessors felt about D. H. Lawrence (whose style has influenced Storey) and others felt about the aspidistra in the parlor. In short, everything the man says is true but there's so much green vitality in the room I find it hard to breathe. The first thing I should

say about this novel is that I think it may well turn out to be authentic literature. The second is that you'd better not bother your pretty head with it unless you can take absolutely uncompromising realism and equate it with authentic art.

Radcliffe is the story of a profoundly emotional homosexual attachment between two extremely unattractive men-the Radcliffe of the title, sad scion of a good family gone to seed, and Tolson, a tough working-stiff who dominates the relationship.

ALL KINDS of people get tangled with these two, and before the story ends we are

given a dash of incest (just to keep the franchise), and a horrible, bloody, detailed murder to soothe our sense of fitness. In the entire novel there is not a single character of noble conscience, true loyalty, perfect devotion, or total villainy.

No individual character has the slightest moral sense save for the moral values! contained in fear and humiliation. The book is full of material usually referred to as unpleasant and our old friend S blank X is much in evidence.

This is neither a pleasant| nor a perfect book but if you have the strength to take and understand all that Storey is telling you, I am convinced you will grow in the process.

AN ENGLISH novel, ab-| solutely different in manner and matter but equally worthy of your attention is A Place Of Stone by Jim Hunter (Pantheon, $3.95). Although Hunter is still a young writer his work is already well known in England and I believe it will become equally popular with us, for he writes the kind of solidly plotted, articulate problem novel so hard to come by in recent years and so much missed by many of us. A Place Of Stone is the story of a painter-teacher named Bill Stock, his wife Freda, their grown children, Sheila and Christopher, and what happens to them and their relationships with each other during the final year of Freda's life. The scene shifts between their country home in England and a seaside house in Brittany where happy hours have been spent in the past.

The situation is gripping

Jim Hunter

and Hunter gets inside it and inside his characters with triumphant success. Let me assure you that A Place Of Stone is a human and humane novel in the highest sense of those two frequently misunderstood and over-used words.