Books in Brief

The Jealous God, by John Braine (Houghton, $4.50). Mr. Braine’s fourth novel is pale melodrama about the snakes slithering around in the garden of a middle-class Irish Catholic family in northern England. Vincent Dungarvan, master of history at St. Theodoric’s Grammar School, is at thirty an undernourished hothouse bloom, nurtured by a megalosaurian mother who has placed one son in the law and another in the wool trade and has only to see Vincent into the Church to complete her design. (The mark of Momma’s skill is less that she has been able to convince poor dear Vincent that he may be denying a vocation than that she has so long blinded him to the nastiness of her incessant interfering.) The librarian Laura leads Dungarvan to see that his throbbing concern for matters of the world and the flesh may impede his progress towards the priesthood and, to illuminate this insight, Braine brings a tractor into the Beckfield garden to reveal all sorts of serpents: Dungarvan’s seductive sister-in-law who may be pregnant by him, Laura’s firm Protestantism and her recent divorce from a salesman who may be a homosexual (or worse), a philandering father, and a (possibly) impotent brother. The author is a skillful gardener, however, and he has a patch bright and neat enough for the cover of the Sunday rotogravure before he is done. The tradition here is from the excursions of Ford Madox Ford and Graham Greene into the complexities of sex and religion in the Catholic sensibility. Braine, who never quite succeeds in avoiding the tenor of the television domestic serial, adds little of value to the perceptions of those masters.

R. BEMIS

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The Jealous God, by John Braine (Houghton, $4.50). Mr. Braine’s fourth novel is pale melodrama about the snakes slithering around in the garden of a middle-class Irish Catholic family in northern England. Vincent Dungarvan, master of history at St. Theodoric’s Grammar School, is at thirty an undernourished hothouse bloom, nurtured by a megalosaurian mother who has placed one son in the law and another in the wool trade and has only to see Vincent into the Church to complete her design. (The mark of Momma’s skill is less that she has been able to convince poor dear Vincent that he may be denying a vocation than that she has so long blinded him to the nastiness of her incessant interfering.) The librarian Laura leads Dungarvan to see that his throbbing concern for matters of the world and the flesh may impede his progress towards the priesthood and, to illuminate this insight, Braine brings a tractor into the Beckfield garden to reveal all sorts of serpents: Dungarvan’s seductive sister-in-law who may be pregnant by him, Laura’s firm Protestantism and her recent divorce from a salesman who may be a homosexual (or worse), a philandering father, and a (possibly) impotent brother. The author is a skillful gardener, however, and he has a patch bright and neat enough for the cover of the Sunday rotogravure before he is done. The tradition here is from the excursions of Ford Madox Ford and Graham Greene into the complexities of sex and religion in the Catholic sensibility. Braine, who never quite succeeds in avoiding the tenor of the television domestic serial, adds little of value to the perceptions of those masters.

R. BEMIS