Volume 4, Number 3 · March 11, 1965
New Novels
By Bernard Bergonzi
The Jealous God
by John Braine
Houghton Mifflin, 287 pp., $4.95
One Day
by Wright Morris
Atheneum, 433 pp., $5.95
Full Fathom Five
by John Stewart Carter
Houghton Mifflin, 246 pp., $4.95
It was not a good sign when John Braine's last novel turned out to be a sequel to Room at the Top. If it suggested that Mr. Braine had a commendable faith in the possibilities of his character Joe Lampton, it also implied that his novelistic talents, which had never struck one as particularly fertile, were being forced into the sad and dangerous course of self-imitation. His new novel, however, sweeps away any suggestion of failing inventiveness. The milieu is still what Mr. Braine knows best and what we have come to expect from him: middle-class life in and around a small, fairly scruffy Yorkshire town. But in this novel he adds a dimension that seemed to have been deliberately left out of his earlier books. Though Mr. Braine is by birth and upbringing a Yorkshire Catholic, it seemed significant that there was no mention at all of Catholicism in his novels, which in other respects drew heavily and obviously on the environments which had moulded him. One of the most interesting things, initially, about The Jealous God is that it is a study of life inside the English Catholic community by someone who grew up in it; usually novels about English Catholics are written by converts. In Mr. Braine's novel the Catholics of Charbury are mostly of second or third generation Irish origin, who still sardonically refer to themselves as 'Micks' and who occasionally frequent, in a rather embarrassed way, a decaying institution called the Hibernian Club, with its portraits of the Pope, De Valera, and James Connolly. The surrounding streets, which once housed poor Irish families, have now been taken over by Pakistanis.
Review, 1746 words
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