(2 of 6)
But those tales are generally somber, despite their lyrical intensity. Hanley's novels, which have enjoyed a considerable reputation in England since the 1930s, exude a chill that corresponds to the spare, cramped lives of his characters: a bardic policeman who becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a tramp from his village, a spinster who lives with her father on a remote farm. It is a landscape out of Hardy, but with none of Hardy's ruminative asides; a master of idiom and intonation, Hanley relies on dialogue to disclose character. His prose reads like a play.
A Kingdom relates the tense encounter between two sisters on the occasion of their father's death. One had chosen a total allegiance to the old man, the other a marriage that enabled her to escape the family's terrible isolation. Hanley's suggestive style evokes by its very reticence the buried motives and subtle emotions that impose themselves on every human act. "I like to work out in my mind how far a word will go, how deep, or how high it can climb," meditates one of his characters. In Hanley's luminous novels, words travel about as far as they can go in the direction of music.
NEGLECTED LIVES by Stephen Alter Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 179 pages; $8.95
Haifa century ago, E.M. Forster raised questions about British colonialism in A Passage to India. Novelists have been answering ever since. One of the most unusual replies is this brief visit to a colony of Anglo-Indians in Debrakot, a forgotten hill town where the conflict of blood and tradition provides new wounds every day.
Brigadier Theodore Augden recalls his years of military service: "The few of us who were called Eurasians first and officers afterwards were looked on by _ the Brits as upstarts. The Indians called us snobs." Strangers in their own skins, exiles in their own country, the half-castes yearn for some homeland that does not exist. Enter " Lionel, 20, banished from Lucknow because of an affair with a Hindu girl. The young bachelor withdraws into lofty isolation. "He was laughing at us for our old ways, our old clothes, our games, our silly picnics, and our drunkenness," thinks Natalie, Augden's wife, as she watches Lionel keeping his distance. But Lionel is the one who confronts the pains of mixed heritage. "It's the world of alleys and narrow lanes I'm scared of," he confesses, "anything outside the garden wall." In time he comes to sympathize with the vision of India's lost generation: "We are all refugees escaping from our tradition and yet, at the same time, carrying it on our backs."
Occasionally, Alter grows so sensitive that he is practically inaudible, and some of his insights are a bit unripe. But his cast is indelible and his command of narrative assured. The handful of flaws can be easily overlooked. For the author, who grew up in India, the son of American missionaries, is all of 22. His first novel marks the debut of an artist worth reading and watching closely.
BLACK CAMELOT by Duncan Kyle St. Martin's Press; 277pages; $8.95