Mervyn Jones

Start Free Trial

Plastic People

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

The struggle referred to in [Today the Struggle] is, broadly speaking, the struggle to enlarge, or even merely to preserve, political decency in a world perpetually besieged by barbarism. The actual struggle fought out in its pages is to use the classical resources of the novel to examine what Mr Jones takes to be key episodes in recent history. I don't think he succeeds. Nor do I think anyone else could. It is not a matter of talent, or vision, or research, or noble intentions. It is simply that the dynamics of our scientific-technological culture can no longer be exposed by exploring the interaction of fictitious individuals….

Today the Struggle certainly tries. It is an ambitious work of five hundred tightly-packed pages and is divided into three main sections. These concern the Spanish Civil War, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and what, lacking an official title, one might designate the Present Struggle for Economic Survival. Marginal treatment is accorded other contemporary campaigns, the women's movement, black liberation etc. In Mr Jones's view, these are, of course, all facets of the same, unending struggle. His book concludes with a reminiscence of a brave lady called Marie Durand who, at the time of the Huguenot persecutions in France, spent forty years in a cell rather than renege her faith. In that cell one can still read the inscription: résister.

And most of Mr Jones's characters, throughout most of the book, are honourably engaged in resisting…. The trouble is that they are not free simply to resist and fade into history. Their fictional life must endure the length of the book. Thus while a few of them perish the rest get caught up in the most extraordinary web of coincidence. Selected initially to provide representative figures of the mid-twentieth century—idealistic working class, decaying aristocracy, culture-oriented bourgeoisie—they can only be penned into the same narrative by cavalier manipulation of the laws of probability. Thus, if one of them has a minor car crash in the South of France, the other driver will inevitably turn out to be an old acquaintance….

But apart from the coincidence-logged lives, necessary to preserve the appearance of unity in a work essentially devoid of it, the characters are pathetic. Not because of their innate nature—at least as conceived, if rarely achieved, by the author—but because they are swamped by History. We perceive them as castaways, glimpsed through smoke and flame, clinging to spars of reason, huddled together on life-rafts of sanity, as the battle thunders about them. At least, the intention is that it should thunder. In melancholy fact, Mr Jones's bland journalese thunders as little as it sings….

There are, in fact, two distinct sets of characters in the book: the fictitious and the real. These are juxtaposed but hardly ever interact, other than by report…. Had Mr Jones endowed his real characters with a fictitious life within the novel then, presumably, they would have been forced onto the same plane of reality as the fictitious characters and might indeed have enhanced the verisimilitude of the book. But by merely seeding his text with their names, the author stresses the huge disparity between say, a real, and great, man called Bertrand Russell and the docile figments of his imagination.

Here and there, Mr Jones achieves an artistic evocation of scene and character. Strangely enough, he is more successful with women than men. There is a convincing and touching account of the revulsion, fused with the martyr's suppressed exaltation, felt by a girl demonstrator as she is manhandled by bullies. And by far the most striking passage in the whole book describes the rape of a sensitive schoolgirl by a gang of school toughs. Here, briefly, the prose rises to the occasion and we smell the rotting house and endure the horror felt by the victim. But, in terms of his obsessive theme, of what value is this episode to the author? Can poor Francesca's struggle be considered a province of the struggle? Since it is involuntary, clearly not. And so Mr Jones hastily returns us to the world of the great causes and the plastic people.

Paul Ableman, "Plastic People," in The Spectator (© 1978 by The Spectator; reprinted by permission of The Spectator), February 18, 1978, p. 24.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Keep the Red Flag Flying Here

Loading...