After the Rain by John Bowen (1958)

 This one confirms some conclusions about Bowen that I had come to after reading his first from two years earlier. He's a great ideas-man, but shows a few faultlines in terms of execution. That earlier one had transplanted a historical situation of the 1700s into 1950s Scotland, and if the melding was a little awkward, well, the result was fascinating. This one posits the end of the current world in flood, has a group of survivors aboard a raft who are fairly typical middle-class English types of the time, has a little fun with that, but awkwardly. It has the feel of a slightly stiff black and white film starring John Mills, Shirley Eaton and Kenneth More. But it's intriguing all the same. The eight survivors cope broadly well to begin with, but dark patches begin to appear as time goes by. When they are becalmed for an extended period, the sun beating down on their raft and no discernible movement, they start to go a bit doolally. It ends up with their 'leader' Arthur declaring himself a god and withdrawing to the one bedroom aboard. Most of the group fall in with the plan in their sense of exposedness and uncertainty. The parallels with Lord of the Flies and its like are obvious - were Faber, the publishers of both, looking for another Golding? We are clearly expected to come to the conclusion that Arthur has got bored with his divinity when he declares that he's not the god, rather the high priest of the god, and comes out to interact with everyone again - it's a neat sleight. They get moving again finally after several months, encountering strange atmospheres of the sea and movements of its animals. Finally, after a terrifying encounter with a giant squid, Arthur declares that the animal was an incarnation of their god. His jumped-at next step is an "expiation" - revealed only to John, the main character - they will secretly sacrifice the as yet unborn baby of Sonya, one of the group. John believes it to be his child, and is enjoined by Arthur to take part in the coming sacrifice as punishment for his consistent questioning of Arthur's status. John spills the plan out on the deck to the bodybuilder Tony, who is a simple working class man who's kept out of most of the middle-class delusional shenanigans, as they are now confirmed to be. His ground-level morality is outraged and he engages Arthur in a fight to both their deaths overboard. The following morning the remainder of the group finally spot an island - as though there had been a pattern of lockedness which the death of Arthur has symbolically broken. The blurb mentions that Angus Wilson had called this "a satire of the first order". I have to say I'm not quite sure that's true. If it does have targets, they feel momentary and isolated, coming in minor cuts. The rest is more directly adventuresome. But it is limpid and bold, if a little silly. Funny combination, which phrase sums up Bowen for me at the moment. 

The Truth Will Not Help Us by John Bowen (1956)

 This is an unusual book - not from the point of view of style, which is probably the more common peculiarity, but instead in the much rarer oddness of content. Bowen was one of those authors who debuted in the 1950s and seemed to be of the coming generation of notable writers in the 1960s, but who then dwindled, for lack of a better term. This was the debut. Its basis is the true story of the unfounded accusation of a ship's crew in Leith in 1704 of piracy. Just before the act of union, with tensions very high on both sides of the border, the English crew of the Worcester were falsely accused of piracy, a sham investigation was instituted, and three of them (including the captain) were hanged as a result. They were soon after discovered to be innocent (as they had all along claimed) with the discovery of two sailors from the pirated ship in London, who had been hitherto assumed dead, murdered in far-off lands. These sailors had no knowledge of the Worcester, and had never heard of Captain Green. Bowen utilizes this scenario to flesh out his main target, which is the House Un-American Activities Committee, its falsehoods and poor process. But, in the undertaking of melding one scheme into the other for allegorical purposes, he makes a strange decision: 1950s Leith, with its televisions, buses and suburban living, takes on a 1704 mantle. Fully rigged sailing ships come into the harbour as they would have done two and a half centuries before. 1950s-in-almost-every-other-respect Scotland is independent, and an ally of England in a long-running war, with a lot of tension between the two all the same, echoing the first decade of the eighteenth century. It's an odd amalgam, but somehow, I guess because the whole thing is pointedly conceptual, and the writing feels quite airy and free, it works within its curious frame. The matter-of-fact explication dives off into case histories of the crew, a maladjusted local merchant who owned the vessel which had been lost, presumed pirated, various locals who take impounded crew members in, or lambast them with prejudice. He also plays with the para-legal 'investigation' concept, and how it was used on one hand to abjure strict legality ("this is NOT a trial") and on the other to condemn the sailors with pitifully inadequate evidence, with much fuddling and double-talk, which is where the HUAC target is sighted. The 'investigation' is perhaps a little too hampered by unbelievability - shoe-horning 250-year-old process, and modern American paranoia, into 1950s Scotland is a push. Some of these addled nonsenses would not have been tolerated in that context. But the fun he has with the darkness possible in ordinary suburban worlds is entertaining, if not as subtle as it could have been.