The Women Aren't Brash

In a combined operation that sounds like a prescription for a pill and a potion, publishers Macmillan and Penguin have sent out Scenes from Married Life and Scenes from Provincial Life, both by William Cooper, as a package-deal.

A covering letter says that they feel that, for maximum enjoy ment, the books “should be taken together”.

1T is hard to tell the real result of this gambit because, by the time you have ploughed through Provincial Life and embarked on Married Life, you are naturally in two minds as to whether the whole thing is growing on you; or whether the latter is really a better book than the former.

Both are the continuing story of Joe Lunn, in first person, written (and published) 10 years apart.

Thus, in Provincial Life, we find a young Joe in 1939, a Science Master in a Provincial grammar school — which appears to be the lowest type of British secondary education: while in 1949, at the time of Married Life, he has weathered the war in London as a Civil Servant, while producing several not-bestselling novels.

He is now not so young—in fact, 10 years older—but his extra-curricular activities are the same—to wit, the pursuit of sex.

In 1939, Joe liked to sleep with his girl, Myrtle, but he was deter mined not to marry her. That was the fashion of the time and fair enough; but 10 years later, at 39, when marriage had again become the done thing, Joe was stuck in a rut in that although he still liked to sleep with his girl—by this time, Sybil—the thought of marriage, per manent and respectable, made him as jittery as a pedigreed race horse.

Even when he met Elspeth and said This is for Me, he went through the old routine of having her along to sleep only at week ends, while poor Elspeth palpitated visibly with anticipation of the question being put.

Author Cooper’s women are pain fully made all in the same mould; Not a brash one amongst the lot to demand to be made an honest woman of; and, although ardently desiring matrimony, they deliver

rhat Joe wants at weekly inter als, or more frequently as required, rhile waiting patiently for his for lal proposal.

This quiescence may, of course, be tie outcome of living in a society rhere there are five women to every iur men, although it probably r on’t strike any observant Anti odean as an accurate judgment of tie character of the Englishwoman.

When Joe finally worked himself p to the point of matrimony he nd his Elspeth were deliciously appy in a union based on the same rinciples as their former liaison— 3X.

Tables—No Diagrams

According to C, P. Snow, eminent ritic of the Sunday Times, Wiliam boper is “hilariouly funny”— hich, if true, simply means that [r. Snow and I are working with Liferent dictionaries.

There are numerous grins and a ;w chuckles in these novels, but ot hilarious, rolling-in-the-aisles, elly laughs. They both are, in their ay, quite excellent examples of hat we believe is the English ilent for understatement; and both re mixed with quiet satire.

They may, however, miss their tark in “poking fun at English iboos of class”—at least in Colonial >ciety. Joe had a modest family ackground—a father who was a [ethodist parson and a mother who sed up a tiny legacy to send him ) Cambridge. This sort of set-up is jgarded in England, amongst those ho matter, as distinctly Non-U. i our society, of course, a Metho ist parson may not only be quite and a community leader in his vn right, but could turn out, as ell, to be a coast-to-coast TV srsonality—and to dizzier heights 0 one could hope to aspire.

Nor is its sex likely (as the jacket tys) to shock anyone who has be >me used to contemporary Ameri tn novels where sex is given the ill treatment short of coloured dia rams.

It’s a sort of Upper Civil Servant nd of sex, even when poor Joe, aunted by the newly-married lestion of how often, gets out of 3d to consult a table in the manual 1 Sexual Behaviour in the Adult uman Male and, for his appro bate age of 40, comes up with the aswer of 2.3 per week.

And the gentle reader may well )are him a tear for his predica ient, when, having persuaded Els 3th to go to bed with him for le first time, he lies there in a anic and a sweat wondering if, for ice, his mind hasn’t made an ap lintment that his body can’t keep.

(Scenes From Provincial Life,

spublished by Penguin. Australian

•Ice, 5/-. Scenes From Married

:FE. Published by Macmillan. Australian ice, 20/-.)