England: The Road to 1984

...Bitter medicine, this...

...And the theme is one which should bring us all up short: the surrender, not of Berlin, but of Britain...

...His program, if such it can be called, is a cynical brew : "Socialism in the 1950s" he says, "was steered by a bunch of unimaginative, doctrinaire politicians onto a sandbank of parochial issues: Nationalization, old-age pensions, then colonial matters—can you wonder the electorate was apathetic...

...pacifists quite prepared to use violence to attain their personal ends...

...Only by so doing can we see that we have not yet decisively turned off the road to 1984...

...What hap pens from that moment to the final fantastic take-over of Britain by Soviet airborne troops is the meat of the book...

...Where in Point Counter Point intricate themes were fully developed from the separate tones and volumes of the different keyboards and then interwoven into a baroque masterpiece, the themes here are briefer, less varied and bound more tightly into a fabric whose warp is unmistakable...

...Patrick Lord Clonard...

...What we have done is to set Radicalism afloat again by raising real and important issues: first of all, the issue of peace and war, secondly, the issue, which is really an educational one, of producing an egalitarian society, and thirdly the issue of morality...

...atheistical clergymen not even aware that they had no God...

...Reviewed by John P. C. Matthews Former head, Free Europe Press, Germany CONSTANTINE FITZGIBBON is a bit of a cynic—and well he might be...

...As the story begins, a huge "ban-the-bomb" rally is meeting in Trafalgar Square...

...What we are forced to look at through this fractured device is the picture of England as a whole, England blind and caught in the closing vise of the cold war...

...He had seen this as long ago as the Suez fiasco when the Tories behaved as though they possessed a power that no longer existed...

...The ruthlessness with which he rises to the top, deals secretly with the Russians and puts down opposition in his own country stems solely from his own conviction that he can "outwit them all" and is therefore destined to rule...

...One wishes the book had not been writ ten in such a rush (July-October 1959) ; there might have been more good writing, fewer technical errors and fewer glaring flaws...

...And Felix Seligman, a Jew turned Roman Catholic whose ancestors left a village near Minsk many generations ago to migrate via Frankfurt to England, turns out to be the most loyal and courageous English man of the lot...

...Perhaps the chief one is that it depicts a future so close at hand that the reader himself can reach it on the power of his own imagination...

...an un assuming, maimed veteran of the Korean War who has traded on his obscure Irish title to achieve status in the London advertising world, finds himself catapulted into the role of hero, spy and assassin against all his sense of moderation and breeding...

...We, too, must be made to stop and read the fine print on this first significant signpost of the 1960s...

...There are no heroes, only a few characters for whom the author appears to have varying degrees of sympathy...

...His war was inordinately long—lasting from 1939, when he quit Oxford to join the British Army, until long after his actual discharge from General Omar Bradley's staff in the U.S...

...And there is the villain of the piece, the young politician Rupert Page-Gorman, who claims he isn't "any sort of -ist...

...The focus is sharp, but the reader's emotional involvement can scarcely survive the intervening jolts of the kaleidoscope...

...Fitz Gibbon has since translated over half a dozen war novels and memoirs from the German, the latest being Rudolf Hoess' Commandant of Auschwitz...

...But I defy anyone to say so with assurance after reading this book...

...but the conclusion must not be drawn that this antidotal flavor reveals a mere political tract in fancy dress...

...As a novel for our time it is far superior in intellectual depth and artistic feeling to Nevil Shute's shallow, prophylactic On the Beach...

...We are allowed to see only small chunks of life on the personal level, sudden close-ups of reality, which assure us self-centered life is going on...

...It was evident in the private lives of almost everyone he knew—adulterers who not only talked about but actually believed in the sanctity of marriage...

...No matter that the book does not achieve the artistic level of its stylistic model, Point Counter Point, nor that of that "masterpiece" (the description is Edmund Wilson's) on moral disintegration in England, Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust...

...Exploited in part by Communists, but chiefly by ambitious, opportunistic politicians, the anti-A-bomb movement precipitates the fall of the Conservative Government and a national election in which Labor, riding on the anti-A-bomb slogan, comes in on a landslide...

...And through it all runs the author's point: that England is in an advanced stage of moral disintegration, that it is too late for even the best and most responsible of her citizens to undo the mistakes and prevent the coming catastrophe...

...And Jack Beaulieu (another un-English name) despite lower-class origins and crass materialism turns out to be the most sophisticated and unhesitatingly patriotic of those who wish to forestall the deteriorating situation...

...It has, however, a far sharper point projecting through the contrapuntally presented plot than Aldous Huxley ever man aged or attempted...

...Preposterous...

...semi-illiterate corner boys accepted as leaders of culture by highly literate critics...

...But if cynicism were all he had to offer, his latest novel, When the Kissing Had to Stop, could hardly be accorded the place it obviously de serves among the first rank of books of 1960...

...millionaire socialists...

...Shallow and self-centered, Nora still betrays a guilty conscience about her husband's decency and kindness...

...Except a pragmatist and per haps an empiricist...

...There is no time...

...Not even these three, however, can hold our sympathy for long...

...Maybe...

...I, for one, find it difficult to believe the British four years from now (and only three years after the bloody suppression of "the Polish uprising") could fall such easy prey to demagoguery, or that they would so passively accept the Mobile Guard (an obvious Gallic import) or the muzzling of their press and police...

...Army at the war's end—for he was picked by the War Department to chronicle the practices of the German General Staff and soon after wrote a definitive account of the anti-Hitler conspiracy of high German officers in July 1944...

...The scene is England about four years hence...

...But who can deny that the sustained pressure of imminent danger can erode national characteristics and force mutations...

...Actually, he is simply an opportunist...

...It would be unfair to the author's care and skill to attempt to summarize the sequence of events which bring so unthinkable an end to pass...

...The fact that the book is addressed primarily to British readers in no way detracts from its importance to us in America...

...despite the disintegration of its implausibly accelerated ending, it has an uncanny relevance to the present international situation following the summit debacle...

...Page-Gorman has no sympathy with Communism...

...and this leads to in evitable conflicts...

...Anti-Americanism and pacifism are stronger than ever...

...Foreigners might regard it as hypocrisy, but Page-Gorman had long ago recognized this malady for what it was: loss of will...

...Our predecessors in the movement fought to abolish poverty...

...Others engage our interest, if not our sympathy...

...They talked and satisfied their appetites, and left others to make the decisions...

...Fitz Gibbon is a writer and not only does he deftly build suspense, he is a skillful master of symbols and satire who manages to get in a few passages of really superb writing as well...

...And the result of this was that they ceased to be subjects and became objects, that they found them selves, inevitably, in false positions, performing actions that were out of character for interests that either did not exist or were irrelevant...

...expatriate patriots...

...drunken teetotalers...

...Nor was it only in politics...

...we are fighting for a more ambitious program: for the abolition of death, the inferiority complex, and sin...

...In structure, the book is a modern Point Counter Point...

...It deserves to be at least as widely read...

...Like all fantasies projecting present evils into the future, When the Kissing Had to Stop has its measure of flaws...

...Both Americans and Russians figure prominently, the latter represented by such as Khrushchev's successor, Kornoloff, and General Niti-kin, who had played the key role "in crushing the abortive Polish uprising after the assassination of Gomulka three years ago...

...There is Felix' beautiful actress-wife, Nora, who is also Patrick Clonard's mistress...

...Educated in France, Germany and Britain between the wars, this American-born writer witnessed first-hand the moral decay, compromise and appeasement which accompanied the rise of fascism and spread of Communism in the Europe of the 1930s...

...He thus has few illusions about the human race at mid-20th century or about the ideologies which ripped apart the between-the-wars world into which he was born...