BOOKS

Dominated by Compulsion

THE CHARIOTEER. By Mary Renault. 346 pp. New York: Pantheon. $4.50.

R

By SIEGFRIED MANDEL EADERS who became ac-

quainted only recently with Mary Renault through her magnificent historical novel, "The King Must Die," may be surprised to learn that she has seven earlier works of fiction to her credit, Since the Thirties, she has had a large English audience for what might be called "psychological romances" placed in contemporary settings.

"Middle Mist," for instance, concerns itself with three young ladies in Cornwall who slowly work out their personal problems; "Return to Night" festures a plaintive duet between a small-town lady doctor and a would-be actor; "North Face" allows two strangers to solve their marital difficulties while mountain climbing. In all these novels, Miss Renault masters a lyrical style, meticulous probing, and introduces us into a world of emotions so delicate and private that the reader often feels like an intruder.

and

Much the same can be said for "The Charioteer," an early Renault novel which pictures the subtleties and crudities that mark a subterranean fraternity of homosexuals in wartime England. Since Miss Renault deliberately refrains from sitting in judgment on her characters and offers no hashed-

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Mary Renault.

over sociological explanations, the entire novel hinges on the effective portrayal of Laurie Odell. We must infer that because Laurie never really knew his father, he was disposed to seek a masculine image and ideal among his surroundings.

At prep school (which in fiction seems to be a breeding place for taboo relationships) Laurie "was lifted into a kind of exalted dream, part loyalty, part hero-worship, all romance. Half-remembered images moved in it, the tents of Troy, the col-

Mr. Mandel, on the English faculty of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, is a critic of modern fiction from both sides of the Atlantic.

mattachine REVIEW

umns of Athens, David waiting in an olive grove for the sound of Jonathan's bow." In answer to this dream comes Ralph Lanyon, a campus hero, who symbolically offers Laurie a copy of Plato's "Phaedrus," a discourse on love. Later their lives become more firmly entwined when Ralph saves Laurie at Dunkirk.

While recovering from a kneecap wound, Laurie meets other members of Ralph's fraternity chillingly etched by the author. Some of them carry their inclinations to excess, and in distress Laurie turns to a mild-mannered hospital orderly for understanding. This relationship is doomed because Laurie is so completely dominated by compulsion and instinct that he has no choice but to commit himself to Ralph permanently.

As if to

S if to illustrate Laurie's expressed regrets that he was not born in ancient Athens where bisexuality was permissive, where he could have had a family and a lover, too, Miss Renault

wrote a sequel, "The Last of the Wine," a novel set in the times of Plato. Viewed from a historic distance the subject becomes less unpalatable. While working against the inevitable odds of deviational material, the author has a breadth of insight that rarely permits "The Charloteer" to falter. At times Miss Renault echoes the demonic tone of Proust's "Cities of the Plain" and adopts the outspokenness of such related contemporary novels as Charles Jackson's "The Fall of Valor."

"The Day on Fire" is a novel

about the life of Rimbaud, written at great length by a popular writer. It is all here, the harsh mother in the provinces. the running away to Paris, Verlaine, homosexuality, drugs. absinthe, excerpts from the poems (in translation), Africa, the bad leg, death. Reading Mr. Ullman's prose is like being at the heart of a very long thunderstorm, but, on the other hand, he does not sentimentalise his subject, he never apologises and seldom explains, and while his book is not intended for those who have, ever will, or ever could read Rimbaud, it is in its own way a serious work.

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