Tongue-Tied Linguist
Malcolm Bradbury, the author of ''Rates of
Exchange,'' has always been concerned with defining the value of language. He
once wrote that the novel ''may resemble the real world in many respects and
may appeal to a common recognition of society, reality, humanity; but it is a
world made of language .'' In his very first novel,
''Eating People Is Wrong'' (1959), an unprepossessing professor is attacked by
a difficult student about the precise meaning of a word. '' 'Well, it's really
no use our talking in the way we have been doing if the words we use mean
something different to each of us . . and nothing,'
(the student) added with a wet grin, 'to some of us. It's all very well using
these coins, as long as we know what their value is, and agree on it. But do
we?' ''
A British academic who has taught English at various
universities since the 1950's, with a period in the United States, Mr. Bradbury
is not known for production-line fiction, having published just three other
novels in 24 years. Although he has always used campus life and campus
characters for his fictional world, he has never been what one might describe
as an intellectual writer. His favored weapon has been the traditionally
English sword of irony and satire, though his technique merges often (and very
successfully) into the broader strokes of comedy and even farce. He simply
loves language, using it with sharpness and energy. ''Stepping Westward,'' his second book, made hilarious fun of an Anglo-American
professional exchange. His last novel, ''The History Man'' (1975), was
celebrated in England as an indictment of the excesses of the academic
revolution of the 1960's. Its celebrity grew after it was adapted into a
popular television serial.
''Rates of Exchange,'' which was a finalist in the prestigious
Booker Prize competition in Britain this year, is a very different sort of
book. Suddenly, here the professor of English is the theorist. This densely
written book, in which dialogue appears on the page in unparagraphed
chunks, is a novel about an idea. It is an astonishing tour de force. Mr.
Bradbury has invented an entire country, essentially mythic although Eastern
European in origin, to sustain a proposition laid out
before us in various forms in the course of the book.
''What, after all, is our life,'' the author asks near the
start, ''but a great dance in which we are all trying to fix the best going
rate of exchange, using our minds and our sex, our taste and our clothes?''
Trust nothing, he tells us, nothing is fixed, nothing is what it seems; ''trust
only the novelists, those deeper bankers who spend time trying to turn pieces
of printed paper into value, but never pretend that the result is anything more
than a useful fiction.'' This leads us to the most essential and most
misleading ''rate of exchange'' - that in language.
Although the story line is simple, the novel designed to
convey these ideas is frequently tough going. In the summer of 1981, Dr. Angus Petworth, a professor of linguistics in the same doubting,
dull and unspirited mold as the academics in Mr.
Bradbury's early novels, goes on a British Council-organized lecture tour to Slaka, an Eastern European country, where he is looked
after by a local guide, Marisja Lubijova.
In the course of his visit, he meets various other locals, none of whom are
quite what they seem. These include an academic, Dr. Plitpov,
who on occasion claims to have had a friendship with Petworth
in Cambridge and more particularly with his wife. There is the ''the brilliant,
batik-clad magical realist novelist'' Katya Princip, who tells him a mysterious folk tale about a
prince called Stupid and generously shares her shower and bed with him. There
are more professors and officials, who all share the same profound aura of
unreality for Petworth.
A professor of linguistics, expert in phonemes and vowel
shifts, he finds himself in a country where he cannot understand one word,
where even this language he cannot understand but can see written about him on
signs and billboards is about to undergo political reformation. His one English
contact, Felix Steadiman, a second secretary in the
embassy, proves to have a stutter so bad his efforts at communication can
hardly be described as successful. Steadiman's wife,
moreover, is only interested in the language of the body. By the time Petworth is shoveled onto the plane home, with Slaka quite possibly on the edge of revolution, there is no
Slakian conclusion that hasn't proved unfounded.
''Rates of Exchange'' is a novel by a supremely confident
writer. This is both its strength and weakness. Mr. Bradbury dares to create a
dominant author's voice and does this in an age when most novelists seem to
want a cloak of invisibility. This voice, setting out the theme of the novel,
leads us through the first 60-odd pages. Petworth,
the protagonist, is hardly allowed a thought, although he is gradually being
moved - very gradually, with many a backward, not to say, sideways, glance - from England to Slaka via
airport, airplane and then airport again. The level of writing is excellent,
and yet, in the light of the whole novel, this part appears a self-indulgence
that Mr. Bradbury should have written, perhaps, for his own use and then put
away. The novel, though substantial, should not have to bear what is in effect
a long introduction.
His confidence shows again, appropriately so, in his use of
the spoken word. Whatever their theme, how many writers would dare to put most
of their dialogue in a Slakian kind of nonsense
English? Sometimes, of course, the result is amusing - ''Petworth''
becomes ''Pervert,'' ''book'' becomes ''bog,'' ''time'' ''timi,''
''joke'' ''yoke'' - but it does not make for fluid reading. As with the opening
pages, one admires and yet reserves commitment.
MR. BRADBURY is essentially a comic writer, a man gifted with
the power to produce laughter. So comedy is possibly the clue to a final
judgment on the book's success or failure. There are many funny jokes based on
wordplay and puns and a few extremely funny scenes in ''Rates of Exchange.''
However, in general, the tone is too bleak for laughter, the author's grip too
tight on the reader's neck. Even the characters, brilliantly inventive though
they are, seem too much under the thumb of their master for any heartbreaking
moment of truth.
This intellectualizing may be Mr. Bradbury's purist reaction
to the popularity of ''The History Man.'' The clever writer is seldom satisfied
by what he has already achieved. Indeed, the excitement of reading such writers
arises from just such brave exploration. While ''Rates of Exchange'' may not be
an altogether successful work, it is nevertheless one of the most exciting,
original and worthwhile novels to appear in Britain recently.
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© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Bárbara Gasquet Carrera
Universitat de Valčncia Press
Creada: 06/110/2008
Última Actualización: 06/11/2008