The Virtues of Service
CURLEY, DANIEL
The Virtues of Service THE WHITE FATHER By Julian Mitchell Farrar, Straus & Giroux 332 pp. $4.95. LATE CALL By Angus Wilson Viking. 316 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by DANIEL CURLEY Author, "A Stone...
...His protagonist retires after a long career as a hotel manageress and goes to live with her son in a New Town where the stresses of the new England are very much in the open...
...Britain and Africa are alike in being colonized and exploited in Conrad's pattern, and the continuing factor of savagery and moral darkness runs out of history into the present...
...Edward feels that he has been put into an impossible position by his education...
...The rest of Late Call is exactly as dull as Carshall...
...She has been nothing for 50 years, but she is so conditioned that she believes she has become nothing on her retirement...
...Brach himself and the world of popular music are low burlesque, reminiscent of early Waugh, and the endless puns on Free are just plain silly, Fortunately, the rest of the book can carry this easily...
...Although both books try to discover the way to a meaningful life in contemporary England and both reject the same aspects of the new culture, they make in the end very different statements...
...He can find nothing worth doing, and fools around with a jazz band (cool) and with dreams of a fortune through music (pop), but he cannot accept his friends' belief that there is ultimately nothing worth doing, that "all that service and duty" is over...
...Nothin...
...In The White Father Julian Mitchell assembles the same elements, but there is a profound difference in the way he uses them...
...It isn't every day that we come upon such a clear confrontation of the ancient antinomies of Justification by Works and Justification by Faith...
...The continuing factor is the withdrawal of established order and authority...
...Angus Wilson answers it literally...
...He persists, and he finds Shrieve...
...Education," he says, "encourages us to have high standards, to do what's right and good and so on...
...Shrieve goes to London to do what he can by way of propaganda and appeal to make sure that sufficient safeguards for his people are written into the new constitution...
...Rome is represented by an a dig in Berkshire, and the Africa we see is one in which the British are withdrawing from a colony on the eve of independence...
...She says, "I was a manageress, but I'm nothing now...
...Edward thus serves as the focal point for varied satirical comments on English decadence...
...Not so fortunate is Angus Wilson's Late Call, in which the balance tips the other way, and excellent parts are overcome by a general dullness...
...In Mitchell's pattern, the colonial empires are in decay...
...Rather, he has added to his British sense of duty a Ngulu sense of love...
...The book proper begins more than 50 years later when Sylvia Calvert is retiring...
...While in England, Shrieve meets Edward Gilchrist, a young man about to take his degree at Oxford...
...She is obliged by circumstances to live with her son Harold, who is headmaster of the modern secondary school at Carshall, a New Town on the edge of the Midlands...
...Still, Edward himself is far from representative of this decadence...
...The result is a deep commitment, which is shared neither by the defenseless Stone Age tribe nor by the insecure British, recoiling upon themselves as their empire crumbles...
...For 200 pages the reader is left to wonder whether or not Sylvia is the oldest Tuffield...
...He persists in looking, however, and discards the cool of the musician, the inhuman detachment of the professional anthropologist, and the equally Inhuman political orientation of the professional anti-Communist...
...He is to be sure disaffected, as are his friends...
...The White Father advocates the virtues of service and duty, and Late Call insists that precisely these concepts destroy the individual...
...Hugh Shrieve, District Officer to the Ngulu, has gone native, but he has not gone savage like Mr...
...On a lovely summer afternoon this girl steals away from her household duties to wander in the fields and to become, if possible, herself, someone very special...
...You wanted to be different...
...Conrad's Rome was in its expansive period, as was the colonialism of 19th-century Europe...
...Almost the first thing he says to his mother is "We shall make use of you," and this seems only right to all of them...
...Harold is devoted to the good works idealism of suburban collectivism, to strict rationality, and to the sentimental memory of his recently dead wife...
...His well founded fear is that the dominant Luagubu, powerful and sophisticated, will gobble up his Ngulu with a smack of their enormous wooden lips once the British deterrent is withdrawn...
...There is nothing to connect the woman with the girl, and the prologue could have been intended to be typical rather than specific, Sylvia does in fact turn out to be the Tuffield girl, and more than that, she has spent her life working for others...
...The book is, however, of considerable interest, both in itself and, especially, in connection with The White Father, Both books deal with the same problem: what to make of the diminished England of the present...
...Well, you're nothin...
...However, a chance meeting with a little girl in a meadow on a summer's afternoon takes Sylvia back to 1911 for another chance at becoming herself, someone very special...
...Reviewed by DANIEL CURLEY Author, "A Stone Man, Yes," "How Many Angels...
...In pursuit of his commitment...
...Julian Mitchell puts the question metaphorically: "What did people do when they retired, when the house was pulled down and they had to go away...
...It concerns a day in the life of a 12-year-old girl identified only as the oldest Tuffield...
...Only there isn't any right or good, so we're always looking for something that's not there, and we feel guilty at not finding it...
...In "The Heart of Darkness" Conrad uses both a vision of Britain at the time of the Roman occupation and a picture of the savage heart of Africa to make a comment on the moral state of European civilization...
...The Roman villa being excavated was destroyed by fire and violence at some time after the Roman evacuation of Britain, and it is the moral responsibility of an enlightened British civil servant to do everything in his power to make sure that the coming of independence does not let loose murder and violence among the people he has watched over for so long...
...A minor weakness of the book is the part devoted to the Brach Enterprises, which include custom-produced singing stars and dance fads and a soft drink called Free...
...Kurtz...
...As a result of her expedition, she is given a terrible beating and reminded of her irrevocable destiny: "God put [you] here to work for others...
...And you always will be...
...The first section of Late Call is a prologue dated 1911...
...The two summer sections are the best parts of the book...
Vol. 48 • February 1965 • No. 4
