Comic Crusade of a Female Fanatic:
TRACY, HONOR
Comic Crusade of a Female Fanatic The Adventures of Maud Noakes. Edited by Alan Neame. New Directions. 159 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Honor Tracy Author, "The Straight and Narrow Path," "A Number...
...There is also an interlude in Soviet Russia where the satire becomes a little jaded and obvious...
...And lastly, Neame writes like an educated man and an artist...
...It would be very wrong to disclose the nature of this last word...
...For example, one character, in describing how the family gardener would deal with their father when fighting drunk, says: "He would lift him off his feet, carry him upstairs like a sack and quieten him by a mixture of brutality and indulgence that would be hard to match outside the AngloSaxon world"—a bull's eye, surely...
...For a Maud Noakes there can be no rest until her shattering Last Word to Missionaries is safely delivered...
...Give me a double gin,' I said out of devilment [to a frugal and penurious friend], and smiled to see her hand tremble as she reluctantly fiddled with the bottle...
...Grown to womanhood, she devotes her life selflessly to the frustration of the aims and endeavors of the clergy: The very Jesuits are hunted into the forests of Inner Senegal after one of her interventions, and the Noakes Report, harmless and wellintentioned as a puff adder, lies in the desk of every administrator and responsible churchman...
...and so in the fullness of time it is, in the presence of her mother, His Grace the Dear Archbishop, Canon Fragment, the Reverend Norman Gradling and other luminaries of the Commission inquiring into the Noakes Report...
...Reviewed by Honor Tracy Author, "The Straight and Narrow Path," "A Number of Things," "The Prospects are Pleasing" It is sad indeed to think of the multitudes groaning under a missionary yoke who will never clap eyes on this "disgraceful" volume...
...Neame's comic invention flows freely, and if in manner his book has a decided flavor of Ronald Firbank (not Evelyn Waugh, as the publishers claim), his turn of mind is very much his own...
...This Report, however, is merely a peak in her campaign and not its ending...
...Maud Noakes is moved to antimissionary fanaticism in the first place by a natural filial hatred of her mother...
...It's enough to say that to this reader, anyhow, it brought as much simple heartfelt pleasure as it must have brought to Maud herself...
...There is a bite to his wit that goes delightfully with the suavity of his language...
...More power to him...
...But this objection, if objection it be, is as irrelevant as to say the book is derivative, extravagant, improbable, indecent or in frightful taste...
...These two minor points apart, it is hard to fault this brilliant first novel, once we have accepted it on its own outrageous terms...
...This lady is a member of the tribe, now mercifully dying out, who fill their houses with clergy, force their children to pray for the dear blacks and mutter "Insolent brute...
...May it not be too long before another slim deadly volume glides from his pen...
...At last, her duty to Black Africa accomplished, Miss Noakes is free to seek personal happiness and fulfilment in the deep silences and brawny arms of Noah, a sooty Romeo bestowed on her in appreciation by the chief of the tribe she had liberated from the Jesuits...
...It is sadder still to reflect that, so narrow is the range of mission-school curricula, they would hardly understand a word of it if they did...
...That is a pansy talking, not a girl...
...our decision, we sense is a matter of blithe unconcern to Alan Neame...
...To come on English like this, with the shapely sentence and the accurate use of words, is a wonderful relief after the porridges of the school at present in vogue...
...as well as a distinguished audience of the most wickedly assorted names imaginable, from Father Huddleston and Stephen Spender to Sir Bernard and Lady Docker...
...There it is, to take or leave, enjoy or detest...
...The fires of Maud's zeal are fanned next by a Terrible Experience when, as a fairly innocent little girl, she is left alone with a clergyman from the mission field...
...when a Negro addresses a kindly word to them...
...And the "I" of the story is so typically the English upper-class invert (fly, malicious, witty, devoid of scruple) that it comes as a small shock when something in the narrative reminds us that it is meant to be a woman...
...Seldom can the case for mindless pagan Africa have been argued with a greater intellectual sophistication: a sophistication which, to be frank, now and again overreaches itself somewhat and topples into perverseness...
Vol. 44 • June 1961 • No. 24
