They Don't Do

It For Laughs

After reading three of the latest novels in Heinemann’s Blue Passport Series—a series of translations of “novels of contemporary life by lead ing foreign authors”—you feel like taking a refresher course in P. G.

Wodehouse to see if you can still laugh.

ALL three novels are uniformly humourless, stark and grim.

Two of them — The Dark Room of Damocles and The Pursuer —are about the war. The other— The Month in Paris —is about an Italian girl, who, as the blurb puts it, gets mixed up with “a group of Italian students in Paris who exchange food, bedfellows and insults with the same weariness and nonchalance”.

The Dark Room of Damocles, by Dutch author W. F. Hermans, con cerns a pale, hairless Dutch tobac conist called Osewoudt who gets drawn into the Resistance movement during the war by a mysterious officer called Dorbeck who closely resembles him.

The author vividly describes all the nervous horrors of life as a member of the Resistance —the disguises, fake idenity cards, secret assignations with unknown people, murders, betrayals, etc. But in Osewoudt’s case it all leads to a bloody end, for after the war he is arrested as a traitor, and Dorbeck, the only man who could prove that he wasn’t one, cannot be found.

Moral: War is a mess.

The Pursuer, by a German author Gunther Weisenborn, concerns a German Resistance worker, Daniel Brendel, who, after the war, tries to bring a former friend to justice who betrayed him and many others to the Gestapo. The only trouble is all the documentary evidence is destroyed and the only person who could give evidence —a woman — refuses to do so, believing that the war claimed victims enough.

So Brendel decides to take “justice” into his own hands by running his former friend down with a car. At the last moment, aware that he is about to commit murder, he swerves the car, and decides to have another go at achieving justice by legal means.

Moral: War is a mess, only less SO.

The moral of The Month in Paris, by Italian author, Manlio Cancogni, is that the war has left the morals of young Italians in a mess. RL.

(The Dark Room Of Damocles

31/- The Pursuer. 22/6; The Month

IN PARIS. 22/6. All published by Heinemann.)