DYLAN THOMAS wrote REBECCA’S DAUGHTERS (Little, Brown, $4.50) to be filmed, and it has been published with no tinkering beyond the removal of a few camera directions. It is a pity that the script never was filmed, for it is an amusing costume romance derived from nineteenthcentury Welsh history. In the 1840s, there was uproar in Wales over the proliferation of tollgates without any corresponding improvement in the roads, and this affair gave Thomas an excuse for disguises, night riders, arson, riot, a masked ball, and a hero who is pure Scarlet Pimpernel, even to the betraying signet ring. The whole thing is witty and mischievously tongue-incheek (Thomas wanted money from the movie business — he had no intention of reforming it), and it is also an interesting demonstration of how to tell a story purely in terms what can be seen and heard. Rebecca’s Daughters is definitely a story, and a good one, and moreover, it contains one fine baroque creation — a drunken old country squire who goes everywhere accompanied by his equally drunken cat.
CHANTEMESLE (Braziller, $4.00), by ROBIN FEDDEN, is at bottom, I believe, a tribute to the author’s parents, although neither of them gets more than a page of direct attention in the course of the book. is certainly a tribute to the house Chantemesle and its surroundings. The English Feddens lived in a small village on the Seine, and the boy Robin was free to come and go as he pleased about the French countryside, which was beautiful and also offered remarkable variety within small area. The high grain country, the chalk cliffs with caves, the blue-green mist of the river valley, the abandoned vineyards were all within a child’s walking distance. Unmolested by studies or parental discipline, young Mr. Fedden devoted himself to minute observation of his delightful world, each year ranging a bit farther afield, growing up as easily as the seasons changed, accepting enemies, friends, and first love as things to be expected, like rain, and enjoyed, like butterflies.
Mr. Fedden’s descriptions of the district around Chantemesle combine precision of detail with a delicate glitter of magic. He is determined to make the reader see and love the place as he does, and he succeeds. If in retrospect the tale seems a bit too gentle and innocent to be true, there is no question of its power to command belief in the reading.
EVAN S. CONNELL, JR., also commands belief in his novel THE DIARY OF RAPIST (Simon and Schuster, $4.95). ft is an extremely clever piece of work, and the protagonist himself is distressingly plausible. Unfortunately, the diary form proves to be not over-realistic, but rather, over-reasonable. Obviously, rapists, in the nature of things, cannot confide in their friends, and a novelist who undertakes to portray the mind of such a man must resort either to the pose of omniscient author or to first-person narrative by the specimen. Mr. Connell has chosen the second way out, hence the diary, which condemns the reader to steady association with a cowardly, whining, henpecked, self-conscious, dirty-minded little twerp who eventually relieves his miseries by attacking a harmless girl under the delusion that she is a naughty trollop. As presented by Mr. Connell, the fellow is entirely convincing; he is also a terrible bore.
GALWAY KINNELL’S BLACK LIGHT (Houghton Mifflin, $3.95) is another short novel set in strange, though not imaginary places — Shiraz and Isfahan. Jamshid the carpet mender, a prim and pious man, commits murder in misguided defense of his daughter’s honor and goes on the run. This is a standard excuse for a picaresque novel, but Mr. Kinnell makes his hero’s journeying moral as well as physical. Perhaps immoral would be a better word, for despite long desert rides and mad adventure, the real story is in the stripping away of all Jamshid’s fragile, self-righteous little virtues. Mr. Kinnell offers no conclusions and no explanations. Jamshid’s misdeeds simply appear, as colors appear in a dull rock under black light, although this may not be what the author intended by his title. Regardless of its ambiguity, the book holds one’s interest, for the writing is condensed, austere, and effective, and Mr. Kinnell’s Iran is described out of actual experience in the country.