Books: A Sick Novel

THUS AM I SLAYN (255 pp.)—Howard Clewes—Dutton ($3).

Here is a novel that is all skill and brilliance on the outside—English Novelist Clewes knows his way around words—but morally sick at the core. As such, it seems symptomatic of much current writing.

Author Clewes sets his scene in an unnamed central European country during the war. A scraggly group of eleven partisans lives quietly in an abandoned village, half an hour’s walk from the town where a force of middle-aged German soldiers is stationed. No longer believing in anything except that mere existence is more important than any cause, the demoralized partisans have no intention of fighting any more.

Through the local priest they have established an unofficial truce with the Nazis. When the German general plans a “raid” he tips off the priest, who in turn warns the partisans. The eleven members of the “23rd Corps” scatter to the woods until the “raid” is canceled and then return to” their village. The formalities of war are observed, but no blood is shed.

This odd truce is upset by the parachute arrival of Adrian Bullivant, a British officer and even more of a weakling than most weak young men in modern British novels. He has come to instruct the 23rd Corps to blow up a dam in behalf of the Allied armies, but once his foggy mind grasps the impossibility of such a project he settles down to enjoy life.

Soon after him arrives Slater, a loutish newspaperman modeled after characters in Evelyn Waugh’s early novels. Slater wants a raid even if it means the death of Bullivant and the 23rd Corps—just so long as he gets his scoop. He bullies Bullivant into bullying the partisans. to agree to fight. His scoop is ruined when, in a farcical scene, 19 other newspapermen descend on the camp to cover the raid. Comic fiasco turns to tragedy: the partisans attack, only to suffer casualties from the Allies, who have in the meantime taken over the area. Men have died needlessly because of Slater’s viciousness and Bullivant’s weakness.

All of this comes off quite convincingly in Clewes’s tight novel. But after having enjoyed this odd story the reader may wonder: What is the author trying to say? That Bullivant is a weakling and Slater a no-good and that weaklings and no-goods cause trouble’? Granted. But is that sufficient ground for implying, as this novel clearly does, that the partisans’ original attitude was morally right, that passivity is preferable to active resistance to tyranny? The Dreader may wonder what is the decay of values, the spiritual malaise that leads so talented a writer to write so morally ambiguous a novel.