For Newby's artistic development the placing of the trilogy [consisting of The Picnic at Sakkara (1955), Revolution and Roses (1957), and A Guest and His Going (1959)] is important. It follows immediately his attempt to come to terms with his memories of World War II in A Step to Silence (1952) and The Retreat (1953), novels in which the imagination becomes circumscribed, myth fragments, connections falter, and sanctuary is reached (if at all) only after violence, death, and mental peril. The comic trilogy provides a form of catharsis from the terrible new knowledge. Though its vision of the contemporary condition is essentially that of the war novels, the tone shifts radically. The comic, of course, is not a completely new departure for Newby; even his most serious novels contain an undercurrent of humor that threatens to subvert the tragic potential with what is now fashionably called dark comedy. But as a dominant tone the comic allows him to continue, without the stark conclusions of the war novels, his exploration of substantially the same political question: how does the individual, locked in his own private fantasies, relate to events in an outer world that has gone mad? In a tragic reference he is driven to despair, insanity, or death. But the virtue of the comic answer is that it holds out the hope of survival. Freed from the desperate urgency to give his characters answers where answers may no longer be possible, Newby contents himself with exposing the complexity of illusion. None of the present novels is "pure" comedy: the laughter is both satiric and cathartic. (pp. 3-4)
[Satiric] comedy eliminates the demands on the hero. Set the hero on a desperate quest for identity in a hostile or in-different universe and the outcome is the personal encounter with darkness and death of Agents and Witnesses and The Retreat. The hero is constrained to find salvation in terms of the novel, and either the novel contains that norm (as The Retreat very perilously does) or does not contain it (as in Agents and Witnesses), but in either case we search for the answer somewhere in the mysterious universe that the novelist has summoned up. But in Newby's trilogy, where there are no heroes, the norm lies outside the novel. It devolves upon the audience to supply it in an imaginative response broad enough to recognize the illusion and to extend charity to the comic characters.
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