New Left Review I/2, March-April 1960

Keith Sagar

Nelly and the Bitch Goddess

The Vodi. John Braine Eyre & Spottiswoode. 18/-.

for the first hundred pages or so of The Vodi we are carried along by the same strengths we admired in Room at the Top—the regional evocations, glimpses of the industrial landscape with its back streets, cobbles, tramlines and pervasive dreariness; the humour; the refreshing frankness, especially in the treatment of sex; the rich overtones of brand names; all this in a distinctive prose which is concrete, direct, vital. And, investing everything with a deeper moral significance, is the presence, on the periphery of every scene (scuttling into the shadows just before the scene comes into focus), of the Vodi, a gang of ferrety little men, who work for Nelly, and whose job it is to reward the selfish, the brutal and the vicious, and to persecute sadistically the good, the kind and the weak. Though visually peripheral, the Vodi are structurally central. They are more than Dick Corvey’s childish fantasy whereby he evades the problem of suffering and his own responsibilities. The novel itself takes its bearings from them. What Nelly loves, ruthlessness and exploitation, we take as the novel’s negatives; and what she hates, the “look of unguarded tenderness”, the “moment of warmth”, real human contact and giving, we take as its positives.

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