Books: The Death of Angels

THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM by Brian Moore. 250 pages. Viking. $4.95.

Seventeen-year-old Gavin Burke was watching his nubile sister. She threw her legs over a sofa arm, exposing cream white thighs and pink knickers. “Nice legs, hot stuff,” said the Black Angel. “Stop that. She’s your sister,” replied the White Angel. Black Angel: “Remember last week, going past the bathroom? You looked.” White Angel: “You’re diseased. Degenerate.” Black Angel: “Stop being so serious, I just said they’re nice legs.”

Poor Gavin. The time is the late ’30s, and the angels talk so much that he can seldom get a word in. And what would he say anyhow? He has failed his exams, so he cannot go to the university. He hates his own “girlish hands and all beaked nose thrusting out blindly like a day-old bird’s.” He is a Roman Catholic in dull bourgeois Belfast, where the “papist” minority moves with silent loathing among the majority Protestants —”the Prods.” In short he feels doomed, and no one disputes his judgment. Not his solicitor father, an Eire-iiber-alles bigot who delights in Hitler’s early military victories. Not his complacent mother, not his studious brother, not his pretty sister nor even his student-nurse girl friend Sally—”a nun in mufti.” In fact, about the only thing that gives him any comfort is something not even the angels could understand: modern poetry, and especially Wallace Stevens’ lines:

Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Himself Proclaimed. Rather than return to school, Gavin enlists in the air-defense service as a medical aide and is thrown among the rude, crude Irish whom he has never known—men who have not had jobs since the Depression. In a whirl of discovery, Gavin joins a Communist theater group, meets a Protestant minister who seems hep but actually is only homo, falls in love for a night with the pathetic and beautiful young wife of a slumming millionaire who had got her man by producing a virgo-intacta medical certificate.

When the first German bombers drone in over Belfast, Gavin is enthralled at the prospect of the adult world’s destruction. “Come on, Hitler, blow up city hall” cries a leftist friend. “And Queen’s University!” shrieks Gavin But in a qualm of conscience, he rushes back to the hospital for a 24-hour stint in the morgue, identifying and coffining the raid victims. Half-potted on hospital whisky, he grinds through the grisly work in a manner that wins admiration from doctors, medical students and even from his girl friend Sally. At the raid’s end, Gavin no longer hears the angels; instead, he hears a calm new voice within himself. He might fittingly have remembered another Wallace Stevens stanza:

In the little of his voice, or the like Or less, he found a man, or more against Calamity, proclaimed himself, was proclaimed.

Astigmatic Eye. Gavin’s achievement of manhood is the capstone of the book. In the course of 48 hours, he has earned that his father is fallible, that his girl is really rather silly and that he himself can command the respect of his fellowmen. In dealing with non-autobiographical characters in earlier novels The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, The Feast of Lupercal, The Luck of Ginger Coffey), Moore showed searching insight, uncompromising candor and the touch of a genuine talent. In this somewhat autobiographical novel Moore was also an air-defense corpsman in Belfast), his vision sometimes seems a little astigmatic, as if his eye clouded when the subject moved too near. But he displays the quality of a genuine novelistic talent—that is to say he makes vivid a considerable area of human experience.