Liar's Landscape:
Collected Writing from a
Storyteller's Life
When Malcolm Bradbury invented the term
"history man", he can't have anticipated how it would take off - or
come to be used. In his 1975 novel of that title (still a terrific read), the history
man is the Zapata-moustached sociologist Howard Kirk,
a figure made famous by Antony Sher in a BBC dramatisation in the 1980s, and one whose ruthless
Machiavellianism Bradbury deplored. And yet the novel's hustling,
dialogue-crammed, page-long paragraphs betray an underlying admiration for
Kirk's energy - as though the author were of the devil's party without knowing
it. To that extent, and because the novel is a classic, it's apt that the label
"history man" should have stuck to Bradbury himself.
It's
apt in other ways, too. Bradbury made his own contribution to history by
setting up the MA creative writing programme at the
University of East Anglia, the first in the UK. From the 1950s on, he also
helped give us a sense of our own history with a series of comic novels, each
set within a university yet alert to broader social changes. The crisis of
liberalism, Anglo-American relations, the sexual revolution, Thatcherism, eastern Europe, the rise of the media: between Eating People
Is Wrong (1959) and Doctor Criminale (1992), Bradbury
encompassed them all. No novelist of the late 20th century was more attuned to
the zeitgeist. And genial and supportive of other authors as he was, none has
been more missed since his death in the autumn of 2000.
Five
and a bit years on from that, Malcolm Bradbury's literary leftovers have been
gathered by his son Dominic in a collection that takes its title from the novel
he was planning as a continuation of To the Hermitage, the last book he
published in his lifetime. In the draft typescript of the novel (70 pages of
which are reproduced here), Bradbury applies the phrase Liar's Landscape
to the cartography of French 18th-century explorers of America, who
deliberately falsified maps so as "to keep other nations, especially the
English, in ignorance". The Liar's Landscape is also, of course,
the terrain of the novelist who, as Bradbury liked to emphasise
in the prefaces to his novels, is a wicked fabricator. But Bradbury also has a
third landscape in mind: Bungay, on the river Waveney, which he knew well and where - bizarrely - the
hero of his unfinished novel, the soldier, statesman, traveller
and notoriously unreliable autobiographer François-Rene de Chateaubriand, once
stayed and fell in love with the rector's daughter. Chateaubriand faced a
dilemma: whether to join "the grand revolutionary world of history, amid
destiny, adventure and risk", or to live in Bungay, "chasing a pheasant or two, forgetting history
and political obligations". Much the same dilemma used to face Bradbury,
whose home was Norfolk but who felt the pull to the wider world.
As
David Lodge says in an afterword, the typescript is too incomplete for us to
know how the novel might have developed. But what's fascinating is to hear the
constant toll of the word "history". It's not just that, at the end
of his life, Bradbury had become a more overtly historical novelist. There's
also the sense of his anticipating the moment when he, too, will become
history. In the Chateaubriand extract, he adopts the voice of a man speaking
from beyond the grave, and offering his millennial sentiments, "my
corrections, reconstructions, reappraisals and deconstructions", to a
postmodern audience. Bradbury's own voice is less pontifical. But he's immersed
in the same process. Nearly all the journalistic pieces included here date from
the last years of his life, and though he doesn't mention illness and death -
and, according to his son, shied away from discussing them with his family -
it's impossible to miss their presence as he looks back and takes stock of his
achievements.
One
piece recalls being sent to live with his grandparents in Macclesfield
during the war, an experience that disturbed him in part because it seemed like
going backwards into the past, his father (a railway clerk) having made the
opposite journey to suburban southern comfort. Another commemorates his shy and
willowy mother, who lived to be 95. A third speaks in praise of grammar
schools: Bradbury was an early beneficiary of the 1944 Butler Education Act, awarded
a new free place at grammar school. He was a frail child, with a heart defect,
and if the robust humour of his novels was a
compensation for that, a couple of early stories here are franker in owning up
to vulnerabilities.
"A
Week or so in Rome" describes two couples on holiday in Italy - the
worldly Fergusons and the hard-up academic Robin and his wife Jenny. At first
the story examines the awkward relationship between them but increasingly it
focuses on Robin, who despite falling ill encourages Jenny to go off to Positano with the Fergusons - leaving him alone:
"Jenny had once told him that he was simply not strong enough to be as
sensitive as he was; the remark, which had formerly appeared amusing, now
appeared simply true." We're left not knowing if Jenny
will come back. There's an equally bleak ending for the narrator of "The
Waiting Game", who, abandoned by his lover, glumly concludes that
"There is nothing left but to go into rooms where she has been, and plan a
future with no choice."
That
Bradbury abandoned the miserabilist path may owe
something to the example of Barry Spacks, who cooked
up a scheme for them to write stories together under assorted pseudonyms
(Norman Blood, Millingham Harshly, Faith
Simple). For a time in the 1950s, Spacks and Bradbury
became a writing factory, sitting at typewriters at opposite sides of a desk
and changing places whenever one of them got stuck. Few of their efforts
achieved magazine publication, but the collaboration taught Bradbury to be less
precious about his writing - to the point where he accepted almost every
commission that came his way.
Some
of his most rewarding work (at least financially) was for television: although
Christopher Hampton adapted The History Man, Bradbury was responsible for
TV-versions of Cold Comfort Farm and Porterhouse Blue, as well as writing
episodes of Inspector Morse. One major endeavour of
his that didn't make the screen was Furling the Flag,
about the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, but there's the chance to read it
here, both in the screenplay version and as an unfinished novella.
There
is no posthumous masterpiece in Liar's Landscape; the best of Bradbury
remains in his first four novels. But it's an engaging collection, lovingly put
together and with an intelligent essay by Lodge at the end. A pity, then, that
the publishers have been so half-hearted about the production: Sher's name is misspelled, and half the pages of my copy
have already come out.
Saturday February 4
2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/feb/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview10
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Creada: 06/110/2008
Última Actualización: 06/11/2008