Bare Survival

SOMETHING TO ANSWER FOR by P. H. Newby. 285 pages. J. 8. Lippincott. $5.95.

What tortures a P. H. Newby hero goes through! In real life Newby is the gentlemanly chief of the BBC's gentlemanly Third Programme; in his fiction he is committed to the notion that a novelist's job is to beat the truth out of his characters. With an author like him, a novel has no need of villains.

Something to Answer For finds Newby at his often brilliant but racking best. If the reader does not mind getting his lumps, he will also come in for a fair share of illumination--along with Townrow, Newby's latest punching bag.

Townrow is not undeserving of his fate. A failed theological student, a failed husband, he wears the dank, damned look of a Graham Greene reject. His main achievement in 35 years has been to embezzle money from a charity fund dedicated to the memory of drowned Boy Scouts. With modest accuracy, he describes himself as given to "spasms of dishonesty, lechery and disloyalty."

It is the spasm of dishonesty that brings him back to Egypt, where he had served as a soldier in World War II. Officially, Townrow is there to help arrange the affairs of an elderly widow, assuming an altruistic role as the dead husband's best friend. But being Townrow, he keeps a twitching eye out for a piece of the estate.

At that point, Newby and his brass knuckles take over. He has thoughtfully managed Townrow's arrival to coincide with the Suez crisis of 1956. His first night in Port Said, Townrow is robbed of all his clothes, beaten up and left in the desert. After that he moves in a "neverending daze," not much surer of who he is than everybody else.

The Egyptians suspect Townrow of being a British agent, and at times he wonders what's up himself. A love affair with a Jewess named Leah only further confuses him--Newby is not about to leave him so easy an out. Townrow is shot at, charged by a mob and jailed. In between disasters he is plagued by bad dreams and a virus with a 102DEG fever.

What is Newby up to with this trial by ordeal? Alone in an alien and hostile land, Townrow is stripped naked, first physically, then spiritually. Eventually, he runs out of roles to play. Peeled of all his masks, Townrow is destroyed in order that he may come to life.

Rebirth with Newby is no hallelujah experience. It means confronting and finally answering the question that one's particular destiny has been asking from the beginning. At the end, Townrow lives out the dream that has haunted him from the opening page. Like a saintly pilgrim, he sets off across Port Said harbor in a small boat, ferrying the coffin of the dead man whose estate he came to plunder, and then moves out to sea in search of an absolute emptiness in which to find himself.

Tough-minded as a Greek tragedian, Newby hits a poor anti-hero with every thunderbolt from Olympus. What keeps him from really being a literary sadist is the confidence he conveys to the reader that Townrow, like men generally, has what it takes for bare survival.

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