Novels

 My recent fiction reading has been something of a rollercoaster ride. Reeling from the impact of the horrific Lord Jim at Home, I took refuge in P.G. Wodehouse, whose works are a sovran balm for most of life's ills. I read and enjoyed Service with a Smile (1961), a Blandings novel in which the eternally youthful Uncle Fred sorts out a range of knotty problems presented by various combinations of misunderstandings, impostures, disapproving aunts and crossed wires, all to universal satisfaction – service with a smile indeed. I laughed several times in every chapter – what more could you ask? With my spirits restored, I next took from the shelf a volume I had been meaning to read for some while – Peter de Vries's The Blood of the Lamb. A long time ago – it would have been in the late Seventies and early Eighties – I was a huge fan of Peter de Vries's comic novels, reading them voraciously, and I know that at some point I did read The Blood of the Lamb, but I cannot remember how I responded, nor had I remembered anything about the book itself. I think now that, at the time, it simply bounced off me: I was too young.
  The fine line between comedy and tragedy has often been remarked upon, and it's commonly said that the best comedy comes edged with something dark, even tragic (which clearly does not apply to P.G. Wodehouse). It's certainly true that few writers can write equally convincingly in the comic and the tragic mode, especially in the course of a single work – yet that is what De Vries does in The Blood of the Lamb, which is, for much of its length, an essentially comic novel, but one in which tragedy strikes again and again: I can't recall another modern novel in which so many leading characters die (most of them, in this case, of a single affliction – TB). The narrator is one Don Wanderhope, raised in a strict Dutch Reformed household in Chicago, and his voice is much like that of any other Peter De Vries narrator, except that while telling his tale he is engaged in an epic argument, a battle even, with God, the God who could allow all these cruel deaths to happen. For about the first two thirds of the book, the comedy somehow remains dominant, despite all that is going on, but the rest of the novel is something else, something utterly heartbreaking, at times almost unbearably so. A reviewer in the TLS wrote that 'those who have laughed with De Vries in the past and during this book will not begrudge him their tears'. And I did not begrudge him mine, but once again I was left shaken and in need of a fictional calmative. 
  Happily I found just the thing on the shelves of my favourite charity bookshop – a Barbara Pym that I hadn't read, The Sweet Dove Died. I'm about two thirds of the way through, and loving it. I'll probably have more to say about it soon...