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The new British novelists, though seldom adventurous in form, are insistently complex in content. In The Seahorse (Atheneum) by Anthony Masters, 24, progressive education in England gets a gruesome going-over. Masters' headmaster participates in creative play with his assistant's wife, the kiddies express themselves by plotting blackmail and even murder, and a member of the staff releases inhibitions by decapitating cats. Masters too often manufactures sensations instead of making sense, but he can summon remarkable talents for projecting character and transmitting an atmosphere of educational gothic.
The best first novel out of Britain is Beggars on Horseback (Atlantic-Little, Brown) by James Mossman, 39. A tall, blond and handsome TV personality who was once a British foreign-service staffer, Mossman has written a satire on colonial debacle that is almost as savagely hilarious as Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief. Mossman sets his scene in a mythical Middle Eastern kingdom on which the British are losing their traditional grip. The incumbent king is a corpulent pederast who splashes in a gold-plated bathtub while his people eat mice and provide entertainment for the sadistic secret police. His army and his oilfields are controlled by the British, but the British legate is a bumfembedded chargé, and his aides are tired old faggots and redbrick rejects. The Russians infiltrate, the colonels plot, the inevitable coup transpires in a scarlet smear of violence. The story falters in its final pages, but Mossman never relents his graceful ridicule ("The Russian delegation in their square-rigged tunics and striped trousers arrived at the palace, looking like a band that has lost its instruments"). Nor does he abate his unseemly aptitude for discovering bacteria in the milk of human kindness.
Mossman excepted, the most talented first novelists are American. About half of them are trying hard to write a new kind of fiction: the Pop Novel. Most of them acknowledge their debt to J. D. Salinger, Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon, but they ultimately derive the strength through Joyce—their narrative source is the scream of consciousness.
The new pop novelists write mostly in the first person, and that person speaks comic-strip American: jive jabber, Al Capptions, sportsese. What he says is ironic, defensive, cool, often comical. In all of these novels, the tone of the talk matters more than the shape of the plot. The new pops derive from the traditional novel of sensibility, but their sensibility is fresh and American. Their anti-heroes are the self and abstract of the lonely crowd, the Jonah wandering lost in the modern Leviathan.