Two Novels of Childhood
BUCKLEY, DAVID
Two Novels of Childhood The Game. By Michael Hoistings. McGraw-Hill. 169 pp. $3.50. The Stars Grow Pale. By Karl Bjarnhof. Knopf. 311 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by David Buckley Author, "Pride of...
...in one, he has an epileptic seizure at a birthday party...
...The Stars Grow Pale is also a novel in which the main character, a physically handicapped boy, feels alienated from the other children...
...the silence, too, of the boy's home, where feelings and emotions are seldom expressed in words...
...At such times, the tone becomes a little too hectic, and the illusion of reality is seriously weakened...
...He builds a sled—which the boy rejects because it is different from that of other children...
...It is the pervasive, sometimes gently humorous, quiet and beautiful tone which gives this novel its sense of truth...
...The silence is finally broken when the boy's talent for music is discovered...
...For his narrator is a 14-year-old—yet too often he makes comments far wiser than his years permit...
...The boy also remembers the time he was rescued from the Thames by a police launch, and the time he inadvertently saw a woman struggling to give birth in a Kingston hospital...
...But the restraint is consistent with the boy's development and follows inevitably from the family and landscape of which he is a part...
...When the boy discovers that he is going blind—the central fact of the novel—his air of detachment is startling, yet believable...
...His father now tries to communicate his feelings to the boy through actions...
...The best parts of this first novel deal with the children's more immediate interests, their games, their unspoken code...
...It is part of the silence he has learned...
...The consistency of the tone, the balancing of events, give to this seemingly episodic novel its principal source of unity...
...It is a very short book, yet it contains eleven loosely connected chapters, each of which centers on a single scene, and one soon begins to get the impression that there is too much contrived excitement here for such a limited number of pages...
...Yet he moves through a world of children, where adults seldom intrude, and the children, despite his own misgivings, accept and love him...
...But, despite the similarity in the initial situation, this novel achieves effects markedly different from those of The Game...
...He takes his son out at night so he can see and remember the stars...
...By choosing to organize this material around a first-person narrator, the author has also immediately and dangerously limited himself...
...What could be emotionally convincing often seems merely sentimental...
...This is partly because adults, usually excluded from Hastings's novel, figure prominently in this one...
...Because of his color and because he is an epileptic, he often considers himself an outsider...
...In two of the scenes, the boy makes love to an older girl...
...The style is muted, restrained...
...In an effort to extend his novel's meaning, the author pronounces adult judgments through the ever thinning mask of the child, and in a style that assumes at intervals an almost Faulknerian intensity, considerably beyond the narrator's range...
...it is not with his eyes set upon a hopeful future but rather with a sharp feeling of regret for the childhood he must leave behind...
...Again we have a first-person narrator, but here he is of an indeterminate age, looking back through a span of years at his own boyhood...
...Yet, on the whole, The Game suffers from the fact that its technique is not always suited to its content...
...And yet by his use of short simple sentences, the repetition of key words, the author makes his style evoke the consciousness of a 12-year-old who looks at his world and finds it, for all its pain, good...
...It also illuminates the author's own vision of life, where dramatic situations are faced and finally accepted...
...he cuts down a tree for Christmas and he spends all his money decorating it...
...When at the close of the novel he stands on a street corner, "catching a bus to Jamaica...
...These chapters are vivid, often moving...
...This provides a perspective of feeling within which the events can be dramatized...
...His parents have to accept his eagerness to leave home and study in Copenhagen...
...if anything, it relies too much on understatement...
...The author can use them to test and expand the children's awareness, hence the meaning of the novel...
...Primarily, it is a place of silence, the silence of Denmark's countryside...
...in another, he and his friends watch the antics of a feeble-minded child in a neighbor's garden...
...Reviewed by David Buckley Author, "Pride of Innocence" The hero of The Game is a 14-year-old Jamaican Negro living temporarily in London...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 24
