Magill book review: 'A Singer at the Wedding' by Bruce Arnold

Jennifer Johnson reviews 'A Singer at the Wedding' by Bruce Arnold. Hamish Hamilton. £4.95

BRUCE ARNOLD'S novel, A Singer at the Wedding, has many of the elements of excellence, but unfortunately, for me at any rate, it fails to make the grade. I have been trying in my mind to work out where the author has gone wrong and have come to the conclusion, for what it's worth, that he has, for reasons of his awn, told us the wrong story. The story he does tell us - in a surprisingly old-fashioned way - is moving and charming, but disappointingly insubbstantial compared to what we have been promised in the somewhat floral, or should I say florid, prologue.

Here the author gives us an intriguing indication of what the book is to be about, the search of the narrator for a father whom he had known and loved but never understood '. . . so I have gone back, and gathered up certain episodes from that time in my childhood when, so I thought, he and I were happy together; when our two lives were bound up as one; and when I first discovered that such a bond was not indissoluble. It is a voyage of discovery, itself prompted by the steadily growing conviction, throughout those relentless summer days, that all the many feelings and beliefs that I had held during his life, and my life with him, were by no means as I thought, and that the nature of life itself might just be made a bit more understandable if I could unlock the secret of his own unhappiness.'

That seems reasonably straightforrward to me; we are faced at the end of the prologue with three ghost-like charracters and a narrator who has sensitivity and a way with words, who has virtually promised us that he is going to unravel a human mystery in front of our eyes. Unfortunately, Mr. Arnold instantly rushes us off into a maze. We follow him with confidence as he dashes ahead of us, for all the world like the White Rabbit. But all too soon he abandons us, and we are left to wander through the bewildering paths, anxiously wondering if we will ever make our way out. I never did, and was left at the end still wanndering and wondering how I had managed to miss those intriguing people there in the maze with me.

But I think I am doing that unforgiveeable thing, reviewing the book that wasn't written, rather than the one that was. The singer-narrator is an adolescent boy with a distressingly disturbed backkground. He lives mainly at a school in Oxfordshire for boys with similar probblems, and most, but not all, his holidays are spent with George, his alcoholic father, who moves as circumstances force him to, from job to job, furnished room to furnished room and woman to woman. The boy, nameless (I think I'm right in this, I have searched for his name without success) not only has great concern in protecting himself against too much pain, but also in prootecting his father. He feels, for both their sakes, that George would be better off married to a somewhat mysterious, but good woman called Alice, on whom the man constantly relies not only for money, but also a certain emotional security. George does not agree: 'Yes my son. I'm afraid it is true. She is good, so very good, and so,' he paused, 'so totally, infinitely, terrifyingly boring.' His eyes roved to other ladies and because of this, the boy meets a girl at a wedding for- whom he develops an adolescent passion.

The story that Mr. Arnold has preesented us with is that of the birth, growth and death of this brief relationship. It all happens in post-war England, the time of ration books and austerity, Take It From Here and' Noel Coward's Brief Encounter. The characters themselves though, seem to be set further back in time. There is a somewhat old-fashioned formality about them, their attitudes seem to lack the post-war abrasiveness that I remember when I was growing up.

Apart from the character of George, the book is like a dream; there is an unreality about it that I do not believe the author intended. Be this as it may, it is an intriguing book, well worth wandering through and wondering about.