The volumes of this longdrawn quartet are named Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, and presumably the overall conception is indebted to Proust and his obsession with time stealthily passing and encroaching. Any other resemblance to the French novelist is coincidental, however, since much or most of Powell's prose reads rather like Waughtered-down Galsworthy. He seems to have drawn for several of his characters on people he knew, such as the musician Constant Lambert, and as a social chronicle these novels do have a period value; but too often the narrative limps or crawls, the emotional temperature rarely rises above that of a garden party in St John's Wood, and there is an oppressive sense of that particular English uppermiddle-class maleness fostered by the public school, the club and the boardroom. Although starting off at a reasonably brisk fox-trot, Powell appears to have wound down to a draggingly slow waltz-time. The series is due to be televised on Channel 4 and, like Galsworthy, probably will work well in a visual medium.
By Brian Fallon
Cocaine Nights, by J.G. Ballard (Flamingo, £6.99 in UK)
A travel writer arrives at a Spanish holiday resort to investigate the multiple murder his brother has allegedly perpetrated. Good grief, could this be a straightforward detective story from the blackly visionary Ballard? Not on your life. This pornographic morality play again demonstrates his ability to tightrope-walk between breathtaking surreal imagery and flat, trash prose. Representing a distortion of Graham Greene's universe of guilt and sin, Ballard, for all his bizarre, perverse and uniquely neutral surrealism is a most moral writer. The resort complex is an artifical haven plonked in a dead landscape already marred by sterile leisure complexes. As a metaphor for the fact that we are now too corrupt to indulge in the pursuit of leisure which obsesses us, this deadpan thriller-cumparable is yet another bulletin from an imaginative prophet conscious that the terrifying future has become the present.
By Eileen Battersby
Rainer Maria Rilke: Neue Gedichte/New Poems, translated by Stephen Cohn (Carcanet, £9.95 in UK)
There are actually two volumes of Rilke included in this collection, with the German and English on opposite pages. This was his "middle period", when he wrote under the influence of the plastic arts (Rodin in particular) and aimed at an objective, almost classical quality in reaction against the subjectivity and escapism of his early verse. Unfortunately, Stephen Cohn's versions are neither literal renderings nor works of art in their own right - in fact, he is sometimes wooden and clumsy, though he has his occasional successes as well. The book also suffers from the lack of a good, informative introduction, though the notes at the end are useful. It nevertheless contains some of Rilke's finest and bestknown poems, including The Birth of Venus, The Panther and Spanish Dancer.
By Brian Fallon
The River War, by Winston S. Churchill (Prion, £9.99 in UK)
As a young cavalryman Churchill took part in the battle of Omdurman in 1898 - actually, in the famous charge of the 21st Lancers which is supposed to have played a decisive part. The rout of the Dervishes was not the heroic feat the Victorians believed it to be, in fact it was a one-sided slaughter, but Kitchener was always a great propagandist for his own deeds. This was Churchill's first serious book and his account of the war in the Sudan has such larger-than-life characters as Kitchener himself, General Gordon, and the Mahdi, who probably has been libelled by history.
By Brian Fallon
The Yellow Admiral, by Patrick O'Brian (HarperCollins, £6.99 in UK)
I have never quite managed to convince myself that O'Brian's nautical stories are really as good as his admirers claim, even though I would much sooner read them than Golding's sea novels. This is yet one more of the Aubrey/ Maturin yarns, full of admirals and captains sailing the Channel or cannonading enemies, the sounding of eight bells, oficers parading on quarterdecks, and continual talk about what the Spanish or the French are at; on shore, the male characters generally pursue wenches, take endless mailcoaches, and put up at taverns (probably they rip an occasional bodice, too). At the end of the book is printed a warm and appreciative speech by William Waldegrave, delivered at the now-famous dinner in O'Brian's honour at Greenwich last October.
By Brian Fallon
Joy Adamson: Behind the Mask, by Caroline Cass (Orion, £6.99 in UK)
Joy Adamson became a kind of Joan of Art of African conservationism, boosted by the film Born Free. She was actually Austrian, and as a girl was both gifted musically and had some talent for sculpture, but the unrest of the Thirties drove her abroad, leaving a husband behind. Her later life in Kenya created an entirely different persona for her, the animal-lover, protector of the wild, and Africa-lover. She was in fact a difficult, egotistic woman, married three times and a dedicated seducer of other women's husbands, but incapable of staying with one relationship for very long. Her rapport with wild animals seems to have been perfectly genuine, however, and she surely deserves her high profile as a conservationist of so much that is under threat.
By Brian Fallon
Robert E. Lee: a Biography, by Emory M. Thomas (Norton, £10.95 in UK)
Lee has gone down as the beau ideal of a Southern gentlemen, and so in most respects he was, but he differed from the run of them in that he disliked slavery and initially was opposed to the South's secession from the Union. He fought in the Civil War largely out of loyalty to his native state, Virginia, in which he had deep, patrician roots. Lee was trained as a military engineer and as a young lieutenant was involved in drainage schemes along the Mississippi; his first taste of real fighting was in the Mexican War of the 1840s. When the Civil War came in 1861 he was at first a staff officer, but showed his talents as a field commander in the Seven Days' Battle which saved the Southern capital, Richmond. After that he beat one Northern general after another until Meade checked him at Gettysburg, but he still held his own against the previously all-conquering Ulysses Grant and his final surrender at Appomattox in 1865 merely reflected the general collapse of the Confederacy. In the postwar years, as well as being a devoted family man Lee was generally a pacific influence on the South and he also played an honourable role in public education.
By Brian Fallon
Le Testament Francais, by Andrei Makine (Sceptre, £6.99 in UK)
Makine's narrator is a Russian whose life and perceptions have been shaped and heightened by the experiences of his French grandmother whose memories and stories of Paris before the Great War draw him into a special world. Like its narrator, this lyric, if austere, novel written in French by the Siberian-born Makine is poised between two contrasting cultures. Proust's and Turgenev's influence somewhat overshadows the tone. A sad, wistful, brutally honest, oldworld tale about a romantic spell which is broken by reality, Le Testament Francais is a formidable achievement. It also celebrates the now frequently overlooked strengths of the traditional European novel at its most graceful. Certainly one of the most hauntingly beautiful books I've read.
By Eileen Battersby