Roy Fuller, THE SECOND CURTAIN

Roy Fuller, THE SECOND CURTAIN, 1953, soon to be reprinted by Valancourt Books.

A few stray thoughts....

Every now and then, with reluctance, I begin to read certain novels if they are well under 200 pages long. Most I never finish, but Roy Fuller's Graham-Greenesque thriller kept me going to the end. How?

Fuller has never been one of my favourite poets. His war-time poems hold my interest by dealing with his own feelings and impressions; those written after the war seem less personal, and more preoccupied with other poets, other books.

THE SECOND CURTAIN is very much a book about a bookish life, but one that takes a hard look at its novelist hero as it dismantles him. The effect is both cruel and honest: this man, who fancies himself smarter and more insightful than most people, finds himself swamped and over his head in a crime that expands in both complexity and threat, and what is more, a crime that he has no competence to solve. Fuller shows the price paid for a life of emotional detachment and full devotion to books, art, and music at the expense of personal growth: a price too severe, a life too shallow.

The book moves rapidly, with a genuine, "pull the carpet from beneath your feet" surprise three-quarters through, an impressively-described pursuit through a crowded football stadium, a looming sense of risk. As a thriller, it functions through pacing and plot, and as a literary novel, dissects its protagonist and his delusions without mercy.

Still, from start to finish, what kept me reading was the solid British competence of the prose. Having squirmed and scowled through too many badly-written blobs, pulp and modern, I was held by Fuller's confident refusal to be "poetic" or convoluted, to sacrifice economy and clarity to market demands for bloated illiteracy. A modern writer, Stephen King or even worse, would have pumped this book into a 972-page mound of toxic waste, and made it dull, dull, dull. Fuller, to his credit and to my relief, wrote as much as the book needed, but nothing more.

As for the book's ending, I feel conflicted. The final pages are honest, which makes them perhaps grimmer than most readers would prefer. Yet as I lay in bed afterwards and thought about this ending, I realized that, from a certain perspective, it might actually seem hopeful. For the protagonist of THE SECOND CURTAIN, as for that man in a song by the Rolling Stones --

"You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well, you just might find
You get what you need."

This, too, can bring a hint of necessary change.