Thud and Blunder
BURWELL, BASIL
Thud and Blunder LIKE ANY OTHER MAN By Patrick Boyle Grove Press. 332 pp. 55.95. Reviewed b\ BASIL BURWELL Author, "A Fool in the Forest" In a time when some well-publicized and best-selling...
...Jim Simpson is no more a carbon copy of Gulley Jimson, however, than he is of J. P. Donleavy's Ginger Man...
...and there'll be a new girl tending bar...
...I began by saying that it reaches out toward tragedy...
...Somehow I had become fond of Jim Simpson, though I would detest him in real life, and I did not want him to have to face his doom alone...
...There were moments when it hurt almost unbearably, but if I put it down I was compelled to come back to it...
...it is about a common man whose all too human weaknesses involve him in acts that lead him with gathering momentum toward a climactic scene of violence and horror...
...He might even go wild like that Lenny in Of Mice and Men, or maybe like that scared Negro in Native Son, and do the girl in...
...He won't be able to stand the sight of himself without it...
...Digging around in his Bible one day, Boyle seems to have come quite unexpectedly upon the boisterous and grim folk tale of Samson that found its way inexplicably into the Sacred Book...
...She'll cut it off out of mischief when he's asleep or dead drunk...
...Delia will have to cut off his hair...
...H'm," he apparently said, "what have we here...
...Simpson will be in for a few jars of Jameson Number Ten...
...Think about it he did, and write it he did, filling it full of Irish talk and ways and laughter...
...Well, we'll just have to see about that...
...That's how they'll meet...
...I'll make him the manager of a provincial bank [Boyle is the manager of a provincial bank], and she'll be a barmaid...
...Patrick Boyle has produced an Irish novel that has all the sex and violence we have learned to expect from contemporary writers, but reaches out in the direction of high tragedy...
...Two looks and he'll challenge all comers to a weight lifting contest which he'll win, though the eyes almost pop out of his head...
...The book is powerful, exciting, and often painful...
...Now what about the hair...
...that will be the start of his blindness...
...Suppose, now just suppose, the two of them were living today in Ireland...
...While the book may begin in Plautus, if not Aristophanes, it ends in Seneca, if not Sophocles...
...You can see Boyle sitting there with the Book poised on his knee: "I'll call him Simpson and her Delia...
...Three looks and he'll give Delia a bang on the beach with the assistant bank manager on a sand dune looking down at them...
...Reviewed bBASIL BURWELL Author, "A Fool in the Forest" In a time when some well-publicized and best-selling novelists are going in for novelized nonfic-tion...
...They only drink their Jameson's in the same kind of pub...
...Poor Jim...
...The weight lifting and the banging will burst a blood vessel in his eye...
...Maybe I'll have to find a surer way to bring on the blindness...
...Poor all of us...
...It will have to do with his image of himself as a tine broth of a boy, and he middle-aged and having to comb a rattail of hair over his bald spot to give the illusion he's good as he ever was...
...I'll think about that, too...
...Something like that...
...Like Any Other Man is not about the downfall of a king...
...It does...
...One look at her and he'll tear a deck of cards in half...
...But you can't put over that old malarkcy about him losing his strength when she cuts the hair off...
...It may also occur to you that perhaps an echo of Gulley Jimson helped suggest Simpson, and that Simpson's first name is Jim...
...There is a bit too much thud and blunder in the character of Boyle's modern Samson for great tragedy?but so is there in most of us...
...He couldn't very well pull a building down on lop of himself and the evildoers, but he could pull a wardrobe over on top of himself or something of that sort...
...Out of the Samson and Delilah idea, which might have been trivial and embarrassing, Boyle has created a splendid novel...
...Samson and Delilah...
...And what shall I have him do when he's blind...
...There are times when the name Joyce bubbles up in a reader's mind like the froth on a pint, although it may not be James Joyce you are thinking of but that other Irishman, Joyce Cary, who wrote The Horse's Mouth...
Vol. 52 • January 1969 • No. 1
