As late as Conrad, characters in novels paid attention to each other and, for the most part, had good ears, though they had ceased understanding each other in the time of Flaubert. The modern novel may well be remembered for its discovery that human speech is tragically inarticulate. This discovery reached the theater (the raggle-taggle of the arts in our century) just a few years ago, sprawled in the arms of Mr. Davenport, as has been said on Page 5, teaches at the University of Kentucky. Ionesco; from there, it has been taken up by, among others, Harold Pinter. Robert Shaw, actor, playwright, and novelist, has worked closely with Pinter, acting in "The Caretaker," and staging his own play, "The Man in the Glass Booth," under Pinter's direction.

 

We are not surprised to see a novel of Mr. Shaw's exploring a friendship between two aging men who are both cagily reticent and decidedly unlikely friends in the first place.

 

As if the novelist ought not to think too hard about a setting, Mr. Shaw posits his characters in Spain, two international knockabouts who might have figured somewhere in “The Sun Also Rises.” One is a loud American paid by his family to stay abroad; the other is a retired English major with nothing to do. For 40 pages the reader wonders just what keeps bringing them to the same cafe. The Englishman is embarrassed by the American, who joshes him unfairly.

 

With admirable skill, Mr. Shaw lets cat after cat out of the bag until we see that behind the apparent casualness of their relationship there is an inarticulate plea in each of them for understanding. The American, whose mask is that of a vulgar show-off, turns out to be a serious painter completely uncertain of his talent. Well he might be; his paintings are all soft-hued studies of women and children, the last subject one would deduce from his character.

 

Beneath the mild surface of the Englishman rages a sexual fire. Like his American friend, he sees a nameless dread haunting his life as old age's bill of indictment, the vague particulars of which he can read in everything he does. Their pasts are messy lists of accusations.

 

The Englishman's young wife (the existence of whom is doubtful) is his third. His obsessive plan to find her a lover ("for her sake, mind you,") is both self-destructive and yet another disguise for his sexual nature. The psychological complexities of the American become stranger page after page. Their strangeness is not So much their peculiarity as their incongruity. Tenderness struggles with brutality, sobriety with drunkenness, thrift with prodigality, male with female, love with hate. And as with his English friend, we soon learn not to believe what he reports of his life.

 

In fact, the novel before us turns out to be a fascinating surface of lies told by two men who are desperately trying (by this devious means) to reveal to each other the truth about themselves. The lying is not deliberate; it is a by-product of despair, an evasion used by men who can risk only a partial truth in the hope that it will serve as an ambiguity poised between confession and denial.

 

Mr. Shaw's two lost souls speak with two voices. One voice confides; the other hopes to be equivocal, just in case. This is why "A Card From Morocco," in its first chapters, seems to be both pointless and maddeningly dull. Then, as we begin to see the duplicity of the conversations and the anguish of the characters beneath, the novel discloses its depth and fineness.

 

Mr. Shaw offers us no resolution to the conflicts he explores; he has allowed us to see for a while the hell that lies just beneath the everyday surface of things. His book resembles the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, where much is seen and very little understood. He is a Robbe-Grillet who writes for the ear rather than the eye. The whole reality of his two characters, ambiguous as it is, is in their voices. In their voices is a world of dubious substantiality, a world of contradictory evidence with a past that may or may not be fictional.

 

The intriguing question is whether at the book's end the characters are at the end or the beginning of their lives. Are they leaving illusion for reality, or reality for illusion? Mr. Shaw's skill as a novelist is evident in his giving himself minimal advantages (two characters, a trite setting) and an elegantly closed system (two men lying to each other) with which he has nevertheless constructed a tense, sharply-controlled story. "A Card From Morocco" modifies our faith in appearances and defines our suspicion that human speech is a mysterious business indeed.

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Guy Davenport - New York Times June 15th 1969