D.A.N. Jones

Buchi Emecheta’s novel is dedicated to her 1981 students at the University of Calabar. Double Yoke is a tale of student life at that university and evidently the teacher has learned a great deal from her pupils, pulling out passages from their essays and exercises to make her own point about their lives and ideas. This is not an English-style comedy of university life, like Chukwuemeka Ike’s Toads for Supper: it belongs to another genre of Nigerian fiction – the self-confidently didactic style of S. L. Aluko, the engineer who wrote One Man, One Wife and One Man, One Matchet, informing the outside world about Nigeria and telling Nigerians how to behave: two burdens, perhaps, a double yoke.

It was surprising to see the resemblances between Her Victory and This Earth of Mankind. Alan Sillitoe’s new novel is about 50-year-old Britons feeling rootless. Pramoedya Ananta Toer is concerned with young people of the Dutch East Indies in the 1890s, almost choked with different roots – religions, races, cultures, classes – all sprouting wildly. The resemblances struck me when I started reading the Indonesian novel as an invigorating respite, after the slow melancholy of Sillitoe’s first chapters, ‘Making a Break’ and ‘Home from the Sea’: the first of these is about Pam, a bored, friendless housewife in Nottingham, trying to get away from her husband; the second is about Tom, a bored, friendless Merchant Navy officer making his way to the flat of his dismal maiden aunt. In the third chapter, ‘Meeting’, Tom finds Pam in a dreary North Kensington flat, trying to gas herself with an unlit fire, and dutifully slaps her to life. He is a man of duty, thus described: ‘The system of forethought by which he lived made sure that on the next watch, or by the morning after, he would find all necessary items for life and duty laid out in perfect navy order. Such drill, when working with a thoroughness too ordinary for him to admire, made existence easy, for sufficient preparation meant less to think about when the moment of necessity came, though he didn’t doubt that if assailed by an unexpected happening his training and intuition would channel him into the right actions. There was no other way of doing things.’ It will be recognised that Sillitoe’s paragraphs need to be read slowly.

Thrice has Anthony Burgess begun a novel in bed, with intimations of impropriety and guilt. Getting out of the dreadful thing was the problem posed for the bold bigamist of Beds in the East, the third volume in his Malayan trilogy: ‘Either side of the bed was the wrong side. True it was possible to get out of it by inching slowly forward, on one’s fat brown rump, to the foot; but that, for some reason, often woke both of them … ’ Syed Omar, we find, is tight-wedged between his sleeping wives – ‘most irregular, uncleanly, contrary to the strict Islamic custom’.

Aliza Shevrin has served her apprenticeship as one of the dutiful translators of Isaac Bashevis Singer, along with Ruth Schachner Finkel, Rosanna Gerber, Dorothea Straus et al. She seems no less expert with the Yiddish of an older master, Sholom Aleichem, best-known to English readers as the chronicler of the Jewish poor in the shtetl of the 1880s, the low-life, high-thinking world of Fiddler on the Roof. The world of Marienbad, in 1911, is more classy and farcical: plenty of high life and low thinking. The Bohemian holiday town is thronged with merry Jewish ladies from Warsaw, reluctantly let off the leash by their merchant husbands, slaving away in Nalewki Street. Marienbad is felt to be as dangerous to marital fidelity as Bath and Scarborough were for Restoration playwrights.

Darlington is not like Bermondsey: it has not been ruined yet. In Bermondsey you could see the local community industry, the dockland, turned into a building-site – with the traditional community leaders and politicians quarrelling fiercely over the future of this land: older and younger members or ex-members of the Labour Movement were at each others’ throats in an extreme local version, a microcosm, of the national split. You could see the blocks of council flats – many of which have housed the families of young dockworkers quite happily – boarded up, scorned and despised: for the young men and women have moved away. You could see older small houses, once workmen’s cottages, now extremely desirable for young professional people. In came a bright young professional man as candidate for the Social Democratic Party, cutting between the quarrelling ‘socialist’ factions, and boosted by the London media-men (conveniently near at hand and poised to foment and exploit the Labour quarrel). This candidate scooped the pool, assisted by the votes and abstentions of elderly Bermondsey people bewildered by the ruin and general beastliness, not sure why good old Bob Mellish was being so rude to nice young Peter Tatchell. The vicious graffiti about Tatchell were gleefully reported: not so the more libellous graffiti about Mellish.–