Shock of the new that isn't, exactly

North

by Brian Martin

Macmillan New Writing, 247pp, 12.99

THIS IS THE FIRST NOVEL to be published in the Macmillan New Writing series, an unusual venture, dubbed "the Ryanair of publishing" when it was first announced because it seemed a cut-frills operation with authors required to pay some of the costs, including editing. Whether this was an accurate report I don't know, but North is certainly a handsome volume, nicely printed on good paper with wide margins.

As an example of "new writing" it is however somewhat odd, and not only because the author is 68. It's his first novel, certainly, but he has written and edited academic books, and is an experienced reviewer of contemporary fiction.

What is odd is that as "new writing" it is quite remarkably old-fashioned. It is written in a mandarin style, is rich in literary references, and is about as far removed from contemporary demotic as is imaginable. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, of course, but it is not difficult to suppose that the manuscript might have received short shrift if submitted by an editor to the judgment of the marketing department in one of today's publishing conglomerates.

In short, "Ryanair of publishing" or not, this first of the Macmillan New Writing series gives us a novel which, one suspects, would not in the normal course of things have been published. Which is in itself justification for the project.

The novel offers an intricate dance of love, or lovers, somewhat in the manner of Shakespearean comedy. All is orchestrated by a beautiful 17-year-old boy - the North of the title, though whether North is surname or first name is never stated. North is, perhaps, a fallen angel, as the narrator suggests - and references to Paradise Lost, North's favourite reading, run through the novel. At other times he seems more like Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream - "Lord, what fools these mortals be"; and more often still he appears to have escaped from a Simon Raven novel, one of the last preposterous, but still engaging, ones that made up the First Born of Egypt sequence. In the course of the book North contrives to seduce two of his teachers, one male, the other female, and mastermind an affair between the male one, a muscular Christian who is head of physics, and the school's headmaster.

The narrator, a rich dilettante who teaches at the school (while not off at Cornell University to lecture on C S Lewis or visiting Paris to meet his French publisher) is fascinated by North, who makes him his confidant. Nor is he apparently in the last fazed by the boy's intrigues.

"It was dangerous talk. Here was an 18-year-old" - 17 going on 18, we've been told earlier - "proposing to me the homosexual seduction of one of his teachers. What was I doing? I should have been scandalised; but I was not. The discussion and the suggestion that a seduction might be possible at all seemed to spring quite naturally from the position we found ourselves in. There was no surprise."

So that's all right then. It should be said that the book is written with old-fashioned restraint. There are no graphic descriptions of the sexual act. The narrator himself never receives more than a chaste embrace from North, though he is very clearly besotted with the boy, while at the same time coming to distrust him. "Perhaps, like Satan, he was essentially bad, though glorious to behold. I remembered that it was this sort of powerful evil that Milton particularly warned against."

Of course it is all unbelievable, and some of the exchanges between North and the narrator are not only improbable but, one would think, unspeakable. Nevertheless there is a certain style to the book, and if you suspend your disbelief it is agreeable and amusing. North himself exists only as a fantasy figure, in the manner of Wilde's Dorian Gray, but he certainly makes things happen. Someone described the experience of reading Simon Raven's late novels as being "like eating your way through a cake which is made of chestnuts, covered with layers of cream and treacle". You might say the same of North.