Rogue Male – Geoffrey Household
This novel, published in 1939, is set just before WWII had broken out. It takes the form of the journal of “a bored and wealthy Englishman who had hunted all commoner game and found a perverse pleasure in hunting the biggest game on earth.” He had tracked Hitler (whose name never once appears in the book) to a house where he was staying in Poland. The writer of the journal (who also never reveals his name) has no political interests and no mission in mind – he claims that even when he was lying on the edge of a cliff with the “great man” in the telescopic sights of his rifle, he wasn’t sure if he intended to pull the trigger. But at that moment he’s attacked by a guard. In his journal he reports that he was tortured extensively (fingernails pulled out, etc.), then left for dead. He isn’t dead – not quite. When the authorities come to recover the body – and find it missing – they begin a world-wide manhunt for the rogue male. Most of the novel follows his escape and his period of hiding from determined agents. The amount of prolonged misery he goes through caused me to wonder if it would be worth living in so brutish and furtive and lonely a state. At the end he manages, by an ingenious devise, to kill the evil Quive-Smith (who has him trapped in what is, literally, a hole) and regains his freedom. Household closes things out with a letter, from which we must assume that our hero has set out again on the same mission as before – though this time he’ll pull the trigger. The book is written in a simple, straightforward style, and it kept me engrossed. But after a while the thoroughness with which Household describes everything became tiresome; too much detail amounts to empty verbiage. And for all his determination to make things authentic, near the end the author introduces a plot twist (involving a confession Quive-Smith wants our hero to sign) that has no logical basis. But Rouge Male is one of those books that must be judged in context. I don’t mean to be sarcastic when I use the term “our hero.” He’s a stoic Britisher who through intelligence and skill and perseverance manages to win out over tremendous odds. This tale of survival – which was repeatedly reprinted from 1939 to 1943 – was relevant and, in a dark way, inspiring to British readers in the midst of a war.

Accident – Walter Mosley
Mosley abandons traditional narrative, and I abandoned his novel at the halfway point. Impressionism can work in painting, but not in telling a story. Language is meant to order things. If you were describing an accident you were in (to the police or to a friend) you wouldn’t leave out connecting sentences or engage in a leap-frog of the mind or insert asides. The listener would think you were brain damaged. Here’s an example of Mosley’s approach: “The good brown earth in my hands. Once this would be a thing of tension; bells and music. Now we act it all so slowly. The camera stays for minutes on a close-up. Speaks for itself. Silence. Time running out.” Writing of this sort is trying to attain some intellectually inspired end. The reason I stuck with the book for so long is that when Mosley has at least one foot on the ground he’s good. Characters and plot peek out, and I was interested. But these moments of clarity were few and far between. I wonder what Accident would look like if Mosley rewrote it in a manner that was as simple and straightforward as Rogue Male. Of course he wouldn’t; he’s gone off in a direction that has garnered him praise from the intelligentsia. In a five page Afterword a professor gives a professorial explanation of what Mosley is seeking to do: “See his tactics, instead, as a disclosure of the complexities of narrative discourse.” But what gets buried, in these tactics and complexities, is the human element. I usually glance at the endings of books I don’t finish to see what became of the characters. I didn’t this time. I wasn’t interested, and I knew it would be complicated.

The Hotel – Elizabeth Bowen
This was Bowen’s first novel, written when she was twenty-eight. Despite a prose style that was a bit difficult to follow, I was initially interested in the residents of an upscale vacation hotel somewhere in Italy. But increasingly the “bit difficult” prose became more convoluted; one can only wonder when one reads a sentence like this: “Her personality had a curious way of negativing her surroundings, so that unless one made instant resort to one’s senses the background faded for one and one conjured up in one’s half-consciousness another that expressed her better, that was half an exhalation from herself.” A similar shift toward awkward complexities occurs in the plot, with Sydney taking the central role. This young woman has an emotional attachment with an older lady by the name of Mrs Kerr. I never could understand what this attachment was (or what any of Sydney’s problems were). A clergyman by the name of Mr Milton arrives at the hotel and enters into a nebulous relationship with her. They become engaged, she breaks it off (for which Mr Milton should be eternally grateful). Then comes Ronald, Mrs Kerr’s son, who seems to lack a will (or a distinct personality); he wanders about. It’s only when the other hotel residents – the Lawrence girls, Colonel Duperrier, Mr Lee-Mittison – make brief appearances that the novel has a sparkling humor; if the focus had been on them, this could have been an entertaining romp. But Bowen was aspiring for something much more ambitious – and who is more lofty an object of aspiration than Henry James? So we get laborious explorations of states of mind expressed in a labyrinthian prose. Bowen would have been better off if she had been influenced by the early Waugh or Huxley.