BOOK REVIEW

 

A crisis of confidence (2008)

The Believers by Zoë Heller

Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal won wide publicity and was deservedly praised for its depiction of female malice and the unhappiness that fosters it. Her present novel is so markedly different that it might have been written by another hand. This is no mean feat, but the effect is disconcerting. To begin with, it is completely Americanised, not only in its setting but in its locution, so that the reader must constantly adjust to different idioms, different references. This too is no mean feat, but somewhat alienating, as are the characters, who are universally charm less. The title is only one indication of their unreliability: they have beliefs which turn out to be misplaced and which have little connection with their behaviour. This behaviour, outwardly worthy, is at war with such beliefs as they publicly flaunt. They are in fact cheats, and there may be a wider point here: that most creeds should be accepted at face value, not least when they are used to divert attention to the in eradicable flaws of basic temperament. Although the novel antedates the current debate, it can be no coincidence that all roads seem to converge on Darwin.

The story begins in London, where Audrey (no surname) is rapidly seduced by Joel Litvinoff, a charismatic lawyer some years her senior. The scene shifts to New York, where the lawyer is famous for his espousal of radical causes. Audrey, now a foul-mouthed termagant, is the mother of two daughters, Karla and Rosa, and stepmother of Lenny. Both daughters are social-workers, one in a hospital, the other in an outreach educational programme. Lenny, meanwhile, is a drug-taking layabout. When the lawyer has a stroke and goes into a coma, he is effectively removed from the story. The family, momentarily brought together, rapidly falls apart. The high ideals initially espoused are eventually abandoned. It is not clear how their initial worthiness has become so easily compromised

The daughters are both flawed. Karla is overweight and infertile, unhappily enrolled in an adoption programme. But this pales to insignificance in comparison with Rosa’s defection, which amounts to an alarming adherence to the practices of Orthodox Judaism, which are described at some length. Audrey, meanwhile, deteriorates almost complacently, absolved, as it were, by the incursion of a woman who claims to be the lawyer’s mistress and the mother of his child. One might assume that the lawyer, the original patron of union activists and political progressives, is indeed well out of it.

There is little pleasure to be derived from this spectacle, although the point is well made: beliefs should not be left untested. But this is not a thesis; this is a novel, and an unhappy one. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the characters are unlikeable, with few redeeming features. Secondly, the language they use is unlovely, graphic in the worst sense, and in Audrey’s case based on the assumption that it is better to get one’s insults in first. This becomes wearisome, particularly because at heart this is a story about a dysfunctional family with little faith in anything, betrayed in fact by an adherence to noble causes which has proved baseless. Blame is divided between the unworthiness of the characters and the unsustainability of their beliefs. In other hands some sort of resolution might have been attempted, but then that would have been a different novel.

Insistently contemporary, The Believers concerns itself with the Iraq war, as with imponderables such as acts of faith. It is impossible not to feel a sneaking sympathy with Audrey, who, when asked by her newly pious daughter what she would do if she were faced with the truth, replies, ‘I’d reject it!’. And it is true that worried submission is not the answer, any more than raucous protests. Solutions must be negotiated on an ad hoc basis. This all the characters contrive, more or less, to do.

For sheer readability the novel cannot be faulted, but the author’s disillusioned stance comes to be shared by the reader, disheartened by the fallibility displayed. Whether this was the original intention is hard to discern, but this is the overall result. Zoë Heller may have done her work too well, leaving us wanting not more but less.

 

 

A far cry from Paradise (2008)

The Gate of Air: A Ghost Story, by James Buchan

This strange novel is described as a ghost story, although it reads like a nervous breakdown in which both writer and reader are embedded. So constricted is the narrative that the central figure, Jim Smith, delivers no opinion of his own, although his past life appears to have been full of incident: extensive travel, a business career, apparently successful, in London, a certain level of worldly experience which has vanished, leaving him without attachments or points of reference. He has, for no apparent reason, bought a house, Paradise Farm, in an unspecified part of the country, and proposes to live there without company, devoting himself to farming his land and tending his animals, his only help that of an almost silent handyman and a cleaner, both of them taciturn and incurious, when not actively hostile.

From time to time he has the sensation of a female presence which he identifies as belonging to a character in a portrait glimpsed in a neighbour’s house. These few facts emerge from a context that is strangely immaterial and also markedly unreal. He is invited to a dinner party, at which the only question he is asked is whether he is in favour of fox hunting. The company is so unsympathetic that at one point he stands up, convinced that he is on the point of death. He then goes back to his house and spends the rest of the night disentangling three dead lambs from their mother. This is how he spends most nights, and how he prefers to spend them. He is no slouch when it comes to working his acres, though these are strangely deserted. There are references to a disco and a supermarket, but these are in a neighbouring village in which he has no interest. Yet in a brisk burst of description he remembers the London he once knew but which he has abandoned without regret. As he describes his life it is a mere chronicle of human labour, worthless and solitary. He purports to feel comfortable with this, rather more so than does the reader

The facts that emerge from a mist of obfuscation are startling and largely incoherent. For instance, an agricultural show features ‘woollens from Ecuador and onyx birdbaths from Baluchistan’. The haunting, to which he constantly refers, is the work of Jean, a model from the Sixties, who was the sitter for that iconic portrait. The action, such as it is, takes place in Brightwell, which boasts an abbey, a lighthouse, a saltmarsh, and a 1,000-acre common. These are the only details available and they must be extracted with some difficulty. The Gate of Air of the title refers to the passage from life to death, a grand concept completely at odds with the effectless tedium of Jim’s daily existence. At times the book reads like an obscure translation from an unfamiliar language, and lays a burden of unease on those looking for sequence, linearity, or merely cause and effect. There is no resolution. Events — the death of a friend, the acquisition of a fortune, a conviction of love — are referred to hastily and in snatches. The past intrudes as the present recedes. There appears to be no future, and this it seems is as both protagonist and author prefer it.

It is clear, if anything is clear, that the writer’s purpose is at odds with the reader’s curiosity; indeed curiosity is thwarted by certain dreamlike intentions, which cannot be shared. The effect is hallucinogenic, and to anyone not similarly affected infinitely disturbing. The quite genuine inscrutability inspires frustration and a certain wry respect.

James Buchan is the grandson of John Buchan. He has been praised for previous novels which have won prestigious awards and been widely translated. Why he wrote this one is puzzling. His publisher hails it as ‘a fireside spine-chiller of Victorian rigour and an exploration of disturbed modernity’. It is perhaps more easily understood as a fugue, one which retains its disturbing aura, but, like all fugues, remains enigmatic.

 

 

Not going to London to visit the Queen (2008)

Remembering the Bones, by Frances Itani.

It is a pleasure to encounter a new writer, particularly if that writer is modest, competent, and above all unheralded. Frances Itani is Canadian and recognisably from the same background as Alice Munro, although lacking Munro’s wistfulness and emotional delicacy. She is unknown in this country, although the author of a previous novel. On the strength of Remembering the Bones she has it in her to reach a wider audience.

Her story is simple. Her protagonist, Georgina Danforth Witley, has been invited to Buckingham Palace, one of a handful of Commonwealth citizens who share their birthday with that of the Queen. Her house is locked up, her suitcase is in the car, and she is on her way to the airport when she collides with another car and is knocked over a cliff into a ravine into which few passers-by will venture. The car, its door open, stays on the road, and since she is seriously disabled, remains out of reach. She registers that she has a broken arm, a broken leg, and is likely to die unnoticed. She is also nearly 80 years old, and although stubbornly clinging to the hope that someone will rescue her is without illusions on that score.

It is memory that keeps her alive, that and the careful rehearsing of the names of the bones which she learned from her grandfather’s copy of Gray’s Anatomy. This mantra accompanies her thoughts as she lives through hours and days which she is unable to quantify. She remembers her modest beginnings in rural Ontario — and here the comparison with Munro is unavoidable — without a trace of bitterness or regret, the dry-goods store in which her father worked, her powerful grandmother, her parents, her husband, her daughter. All this is recounted fluently, although interspersed with frightening spasms of the consciousness of her present predicament. Whether one would remain as lucid in similar circumstances is open to question; here though is evidence of the benefits of a robust temperament, which Georgina possesses in enviable quantities.

We know, or are familiar with, her background. Wilna Creek is very like Alice Munro’s Walley, and growing up there was without incident. The memory is benign, as is her survey of her more recent past. She married, had a much loved daughter whom she knows she is unlikely to see again, and reminds herself that she must write to the Queen apologising for her absence. The end is all too predictable, but the preceding interval is something of a state of grace, and here the virtues of the writer and her style are most pronounced. This is a novel without pretensions, likely to appeal to any reader who values calm and plausibility — values too often lacking in contemporary fiction, with its reliance on novelty or the wilder shores of dysfunction. Its accent on memory and the names of the bones articulate a story which might so easily have become morbid, but which remains on the side of sanity throughout — no mean feat, as the accent on approaching death is unavoidable.

Her story, which fills the main body of the narrative, is essentially a tragic one but is recounted without sentimentality. Her husband developed polio on their honeymoon, and her attempts to drag him to the bus depot and thence home are truly frightening. A baby son died at five months. And yet love somehow survived, although her husband remained secretive and partly disabled. His own story is equally tragic: an orphan, sent from England to Canada, a virtual slave labourer on a farm, he is the true victim. Georgina herself refuses victimhood. Throughout, she remains an ordinary woman, with an ordinary woman’s perceptions. And yet the story is not ordinary; far from it. What is remarkable about it is the uninflected realism with which it is recounted, that and the stoic resignation that informs it.

This is presumably a woman’s book, unlikely to appeal to a male readership. But its appeal to women is unmistakable, not only in its domestic detail but in its recognisable familiarity. Even the most emancipated of readers will appreciate its old-fashioned seemliness, its avoidance of gross emotional and sexual explicitness, its aversion to offensive language. In this respect it remains true to a recognisable tradition, without in any way making claims or citing precedents — no small accomplishment in an age of loud and discordant voices.

 

 

Vagabonds in Paris  (2008)

Dans le Café de la Jeunnesse Perdue, by Patrick Modiano

Patrick Modiano is a nostalgic novelist who has consistently shown courage in investigating the boundaries between duty and loyalty. This ambiguity has featured in all his novels and seems to have had its roots in the character of his own father, whose activities in the troubled era of wartime and post-war Paris have left their mark on his writing. Conscious of his flawed moral inheritance, Modiano has applied himself to testing the limits of his own freedom and has found that shame is not so easily dispersed. It is a quality that inhabits all his elegantly written novels and is equally present in Dans le Café de la Jeunesse Perdue which reverts to the same troubled era as its predecessors and occupies a doubtful position on the periphery of the natural order. He finds even less reassurance in the role of hapless investigator of another’s misdemeanours, thus compromising his own conscience, apparently without relief.

The present novel purports to be about a group of young people who frequent Le Condé, in the Odéon district, at a hazy time, probably the early Fifties, and in particular a girl, nicknamed Louki, who appears in their midst without introducing herself or divulging any details about her life and activities. As is usual in Mondiano no questions are asked; direct exchanges are scrupulously avoided. Yet Louki is an object of fascination to the other habitués, who, true to type, are without distinguishing characteristics. Even their real names are not known. Their encounters take place at odd hours of the day or night and it seems a matter of honour to eschew identities and rely only on appearances.

Except that ‘rely’ is not a concept that is held in much regard. These people remain strangers to each other, and this applies in particular to the narrator, who, some time later, introduces himself as a private investigator whose task it is to probe the mystery of a woman who has left her husband and whose present whereabouts are unknown. The missing wife is Jacqueline Delanque, whom the reader knows as Louki.

The voice now shifts to that of Louki herself who divulges a few details of her life preceding her appearance at the Condé. She is the daughter of a woman who works at the Moulin Rouge and who is thus out of the house between 9 p.m. and 2 a.m., during which time Louki virtually goes missing, drifting from café to café, linking up with strangers, solitaries like herself. This forms the connection between the narrator/investigator, who may or may not be called Roland Caisely, although we are warned that this is not his real name. At some point they become lovers. And when Louki drifts into marriage, and drifts out again, Caisely is called in on the case, though he is equally unreliable and refuses to convey what he knows.

The point of this novel, or memoir, or episode is the wandering, vagabond life of Roland and Louki, who spend days and nights crossing and recrossing Paris and ending up in one small hotel after another. The reader of Modiano’s previous novels will now find himself on familiar territory, as walks are manically chronicled, street names and metro stations itemised, times of day noted, a whole alternative world of unattached activity meticulously charted. On one of their walks they discover that the Condé has become a luxury boutique selling crocodile handbags. This presumably signifies the end of their youth, their jeunesse perdue. Whether this will do for the reader is another matter.

This is an opaque and troubled novel which casts an uneasy spell and is imbued not only with regret for lost youth but equally regrettably with something like lost nerve.

The discount offers on books in this section remain open for three months from date of publication.

 

 

Linked by an oblique sadness (2007)

Cheating at Canasta, by William Trevor

Connoisseurs of the short story will welcome this new collection by William Trevor, his first since 2004. Trevor has been compared with Chekhov, not without justification. He works by indirection, avoiding judgment, his sense of tragedy well concealed by a partiality for unfulfilled lives left free to exist on the page without the author’s intervention. Here destinies may be thwarted but the process will be a reflective one, mercifully free of irony. It is the absence of irony that gives these stories their pre- as opposed to post-modern stamp, and the scrupulous neutrality that refuses to pander to the reader’s expectations. Certainly his characters lack ardour, but that is the price one sometimes pays for dignity and even a sort of wisdom.

The cast will be familiar from earlier stories, divided in the main between provincial Irish and metropolitan adulterers on their lunch break. None of these people goes in for full disclosure. They speak in lowered voices, or not at all, like the young man in ‘The Dressmaker’s Child’ who has witnessed something incriminating and who is stalked by an onlooker to whom he will be forced to return. Or Katherine, in ‘The Room’, who sleeps with a man she hardly knows because the burden of keeping silent about one particular past action is too difficult to bear. These people do all they can to avoid explaining themselves, yet it is not guilt that inhibits them but rather knowledge. To give voice to this knowledge would destroy the impassivity they have cultivated and put them at far greater risk. The writing, too, is impassive, as it must be when dealing with matters to which there is no resolution. There is a sense of things better left unsaid, a discretion which paradoxically creates that unease which Trevor never fails to impart.

The stories are plotless, in the sense that nothing can happen to alter the circumstances in which the characters find themselves. Conclusions are both concise and open-ended. A widower in Venice, paying an unwanted visit at his late wife’s behest, overhears a couple on the verge of an argument and offers a few pleasantries as they pass his table in the restaurant, although wanting to warn them not to waste time. This is almost too open-ended, the setting almost too familiar, for the Italian interlude, with its close attention to works of art, is as much part of Trevor’s repertoire as the idioms in ‘Men of Ireland’, a rebarbative story of an elderly priest preyed upon by a tramp. They know each other, but the connection is not made; solipsism rules. This, too, is familiar from earlier collections, and is in itself somewhat rebarbative. Above all, those scrupulously neutral endings, with their severe absence of judgment, are curiously chilling. One reads on, hoping for more tension, more purposefulness, less melancholy, all the while becalmed into the same fatalism by Trevor’s famously accessible prose.

The thread that links both the stories and the characters, whatever the setting, is an oblique sadness, as if at the unalterability of circumstances. Lovers, always mismatched, offer no explanations for their disaffection. A profound reticence is observed. This may occasionally fail, since acceptance is too easily achieved. It can also be willed, so that all bring about their own defeat, and death, when it comes, as it does in ‘The Children’, seems more honourable than a return to life.

These stories are, needless to say, formally perfect. They are also troubling: the good manners, the side-stepping of emotion can be felt as restriction, constraint rather than restraint. But as with Chekhov — and the comparison is almost inevitable — they leave space for the reader to ruminate and in that way achieve their aim, which is to underline the solitary nature, almost the impermeability, of individual experience.

 

 

What Henry knew (2007)

Henry James Goes to Paris by Peter Brooks

In October 1875 Henry James moved to Paris to advance his nascent career as a man of letters, specifically as a novelist. This was not his first visit: his enlightened family encouraged travel, but the desire to take up residence was intimately connected with his ambitions: Paris, after all, was the epi- centre of forward looking artistic endeavour. He was funded by his father and also by the reviews and articles he wrote for various American magazines, notably Tribune and the Atlantic Monthly. He was 32 years old, and therefore not so very young, but his impressionability and a certain innocence that was to mark him for life caused him to marvel at everything he saw and heard, even when an inner resistance turned every reaction into a matter for further study, as if it could be understood only after a long period of maturation. It is this element that gives his novels their weight and scrutiny, as if too brutal an interpretation might falsify the subject addressed and as if only long study, and a certain blamelessness, were the foundations of character and a true reflection of the author’s integrity.

It is interesting to note that at this stage of his career James had a sense of the limitations of art, although he was to become associated with the oceanic nature of his own style, and thus a modernist with whom time has not altogether kept up. In Paris in 1875 and 1876 he was uneasy in the company of Flaubert, found Zola’s novels ‘dirty’, resented the French custom of mutual admiration and preferred the straightforwardness of Balzac and George Eliot. He thought it a poor thing to baffle and torment the reader, and believed that art should be verifiable above all else. This was a view to which he adhered all his life, even when under the cover of what he called the madness of art. In many ways it obscured his understanding of certain phenomena, notably the aims of the Impressionists, the major artistic manifestation of the 1870s. Understanding came to him slowly: the excellence and fearlessness of Manet met a certain doubt. In later life he expressed admiration for Monet. Cézanne, however, was another matter, a case perhaps of one anxiety encountering another.

In 1875 James was hardly young in the accepted sense of the word. He was not rash or impulsive, but bien élevé in the American rather than the French style, well-intentioned, affectionate, and apt to misunderstand his own feelings, notably his feelings for young men. The idealised friendships into which he drafted younger men throughout his life first came to light in Paris, and his attachment to a young Russian was the template for later enthusiasms, in which he figures simultaneously as boyhood friend and rueful elder. At the age of 32 he was not yet ready to recognise loneliness, although in later years he was to describe it as ‘the port from which I set out’. In Paris he was comfortable and made welcome; only a certain obdurate scruple redressed the balance, and this scruple worked its way into his novels and contributed to their peculiar sensibility and to a moral perspective which is essentially tragic.

By 1876 he was expressing distaste for the literary establishment and a certain disappointment with Paris in general. By December he was established in London and feeling much more appreciated. Despite his disenchantment with Paris and with French writers he came to admire their abilities but to condemn their practices. The major fault of Flaubert in particular was his determinism, most notably in Madame Bovary; this denied the character her liberty. In life, and in his own novels, characters act on their own volition, even if this is not understood by those around them. They are subject to various misreadings: no amount of good advice can save them. And this is refracted through different mentalities, so that what is usually perceived as hesitation is in fact indirection. Isabel Archer will make her own mistakes: others — Mme Merle — will have understood them long before Isabel herself does. Thus the mature novels eschew romance, accountability, and above all authorial control

That there was control, of a most punishing kind, will be apparent to the reader, but it will not be the control of, say, Balzac. Flaubert, James came to see, was ‘condemned by irony’. He himself preferred the liberty of the subject, surely a greater challenge than Emma Bovary’s planned descent. London was broader, more accomodating than Paris, yet seen from a comfortable distance Paris becomes more prominent. In that underrated novel, The Tragic Muse, James contrasts French theatricality with English prudence, to the latter’s disadvantage. In seeming to abnegate authorial responsibility for his characters James will perfect his technique, to such an extent that the impatient reader will long for someone to tell the characters what is going on and what to do about it. Thus James’s Parisian encounters merely taught him to refine his own innate method, arrived at almost by opposition to what was currently admired. Negative capability has never been so amply demonstrated.

In reading Peter Brooks’s summaries of the later novels, in particular What Maisie Knew, one might experience a pang of notalgia for Flaubertian tyranny. In fact the author of this worthy addition to the Henry James canon has strayed far from his original undertaking, which was to examine the influence on the novelist of that early year in Paris. He establishes without much difficulty James’s initial reactions to what constituted the modern movement, but the desire to immerse himself in the Jamesian universe is too strong to resist. The result is a slight loss of sympathy with a subject that too easily becomes purely academic. What began as an account of a fledgling writer’s enthusiasms and resistances turns one’s attention back to Paris and the amazing developments in painting and literature which James in effect condemned. His own stealthy evolution is a radical departure from the prevailing ethos, and as such a different form of modernism, whether backward looking or progressive is difficult to say. What he was to call the figure in the carpet had in fact been there from the start.

 

 

Misfortunes of the rich (2007)

Were it not for her tragic end at Auschwitz and the novel she was in the process of writing before she knew her death was inevitable, Irène Némirovsky would be largely, if not entirely forgotten. Yet she was a published novelist in Paris, her adopted home, in the 1930s. Nothing in her life or work could have prefigured the immense acclaim she was to receive for the long delayed publication of what was to be her major work, Suite Française, retrieved and transcribed by her daughter from the two sections and the notes which were all that remained of what was to be a witness statement of the exodus from Paris in 1942.

She was not alive to celebrate her success, but the appalled fascination with which the work was greeted is, ironically, the tribute paid to a heroic attempt to rise above her circumstances and to continue her writerly task to the end. Few possess the equipment to remain sane and professional in those last weeks, and to write a novel which is far from tragic, which has indeed its moments of satire, as the author abandons her disguise as an established and assimilated Parisienne and reverts to her original status as a Jewish immigrant in what was arguably a divided society, one in which prejudice of a certain sort seems to have survived undiminished since the days of the Dreyfus Affair.

Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 to a family with pretensions to rank: her father, a banker, was received at the imperial court. She became French after the family fled on the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917. This displacement was not a conscious element in her make-up; arguably she was the right age to be able to ignore it. This was no longer the case after 1938, as she began to realise. She kept her nerve, however, as she was to demonstrate in Suite Française, with its fairly acid portraits of her fellow exiles. It is entirely due to the worldwide success of that novel that an early work, David Golder, is now reissued after a gap of 77 years. As a literary event this is perhaps a curiosity rather than anything more serious. Although critics have reached for extravagant comparisons — Balzac, Dostoevsky — David Golder is a strange but acceptable novel which bears witness to the immigrant experience, however radically she sought to discount it.

Fortunately or unfortunately what remains of a writer is words and it is on words and the use made of them, that judgment must be based. The reissue of this early novel was opportunistic, but also an attempt to read something of the author’s own enigmatic character, and to discover, if possible, whether her singularity can be estimated over and above the fate she was forced to undergo and which has forever marked her out as a victim. In this context Némirovsky appears to be a writer who does not suffer fools gladly, victimhood notwithstanding.

David Golder is a competent but surprisingly harsh novel about a Jewish financier, a formidable dealer in oil and gold shares, who has risen from penurious beginnings to princely affluence. The luxuriously furnished apartment in Paris, the villa in Biarritz to which his vain and stupid wife invites her friends, cannot offset the knowledge that his former partner has committed suicide, that he has no friends, and that he suffers chest pains which he knows will kill him. His beloved daughter, Joyce, is flippant and flighty, and, like her mother, sees Golder simply as a useful source of money

These unpleasing stereotypes — playing, as it were, into the hands of the enemy — are established, without much sympathy, in the early chapters. They give the lie to Némirovsky’s assumed Frenchness and almost prepare the way for her final status as an outsider. She mentions ‘the Jewish fear of death’ with reference to her main character rather than to herself. This is one of the many ironies in which Némirovsky’s work abounds and which she was almost certainly able to appreciate.

In a world of grasping cheats Golder achieves a certain integrity, but it is an integrity grounded in shame. Némirovsky casts a cold eye on the fortunes of the rich, but her greater success lies in her depiction of illness. This is truly alarming, as is Golder’s bitter recognition that he cannot afford to die. In such passages Némirovsky accedes to truly writerly status, but this is not secure. Doubt will always remain as to the significance of her gifts, which are more masculine than feminine, the issue clouded by her abrupt and uncompromising style.

In Paris, in 1930, this novel must have seemed indescribably alien. Even today it is hard to overcome a slight resistance when reading it, a resistance made up of embarrassment and pity. Its flaws arise from an absence of tact as much as of anything else. And yet she is a genuine writer, as she was to demonstrate in Suite Française. Strangely I find this early novel more authentic. It manifests a sympathy for an old, sick, lonely traveller which is more sorrowful than her wry take on those Parisians fleeing from the Germans in 1942. This is what it is like, she seems to say, without yet knowing how much worse it could become.

 

Prize-winning novels from France (2006)

The Prix Goncourt was awarded, as of right, to Jonathan Littell for Les Bienveillantes (Galli- mard). Les Bienveillantes, the Kindly Ones, is the name usually given to the Furies. The narrator of this masterly novel, Max Aue, the director of a lace factory, is writing his account of the second world war, in which he served on the wrong, i.e. German side. Notable for his sane and reasonable tone of voice the narrator divulges, without much compunction, that he is a former Nazi, an SS officer who was present in all the main theatres of war, initially in Lithuania and the Ukraine, and latterly in a devastated Berlin.

He is also notable for his imperturbable sense of right and wrong, or rather his conviction that these terms are implausible. The gas chambers? On whom do we lay the blame? On the guard who releases the gas or the railwayman who switches the points so that the train travels in one direction rather than another? In the end no one is responsible. Thus Nazi Germany presents as a case of mass psychosis in which everyone was, or thought himself to be, innocent of wrongdoing.

This opinion, or delusion, is conveyed to the reader through 900 pages of close print, supplemented by a sizeable glossary of acronyms and abbreviations. The narrator, on leave as it were from his doctoral thesis, advances the theory that in similar circumstances all would behave in the same way. The novel is diabolically (and I use the word advisedly) clever. It is also impressive, not merely as an act of impersonation but perhaps above all for the fiendish diligence with which it is carried out.

Les Bienveillantes has been compared with War and Peace, except that there is no plot and few personal histories to alleviate its toll on the reader. The tone is unemotional, almost a business report. The prevailing situation, says Aue, was one of confusion in which only the most wily saw their advantage. The rationalisations, such as they are, are offered in the first section of the book, in which the narrator morally shrugs his shoulders. The following 800-odd pages concern his long and detailed war and presuppose formidable research on the part of the author, who is American, educated in France and writing fluent, idiomatic and purposeful French. The narrator constantly equivocates: all, he reasons, are subject to Necessity, and even the most brutal may be family-loving husbands and sons. Herein lies the brilliance of the novel, the way in which it delineates the breakdown of judgment, the almost persuasive justifications. For instance if all are united in the concept of the Volk, and if Hitler is seen as the embodiment of the Volk, there can be no dereliction. In these circumstances normal codes of behaviour collapse into acquiescence.

The narrator’s war is inordinately complex. It is true that from time to time he feels a distant pity, as when he sees a Jewish child searching for her mother. But nothing less than total ethnic cleansing is envisaged. At one point he describes detainees, Jews, a few gypsies and homosexuals — ‘des mangeurs inutiles’ — being directed to three tables. On the first they are told to deposit their papers, on the second their valuables and house keys, and on the third their shoes and the clothes they stand up in. Then they are shot. The narrator starts to vomit after eating, a vexatious habit that persists into his comfortable postwar life, as if certain scenes have proved difficult to digest. The reader too may find the book difficult to digest, not least when Aue, under direct orders from Eichmann, oversees manoeuvres in Poland and later Hungary. These are tantamount to the successes of the war. It had been thought that there could be no failures.

When order finally breaks down it involves Aue in a vague torment which he cannot evaluate. He is overtaken by inanition, by dreams, fantasies, bouts of fever. He is only hazily aware that the direction of the war has changed, that the Russians are advancing. After apparently insurmountable hesitation he joins the retreat. The conclusion, which is not a conclusion, finds him separated from his former companions, isolated, and surrounded by the animals of a wrecked zoo. As he watches the creatures dying one by one he arrives at his ultimate realisation: ‘Les Bienveillantes m’ont trouvé.’

This tour de force, which not everyone will welcome, outclasses all other fictions and will continue to do so for some time to come. No summary can do it justice. It is worth mentioning that the author, who is the son of the novelist Robert Littell, was born in New York in 1967 and that this is his first published work. Independently of the Goncourt the novel was also awarded the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française.

In any other company this year’s novels would have received respectable, even respectful attention. As it was their authors acquitted themselves honourably if not memorably. The Prix Renaudot went to Alain Mabanckou for Mémoires de porc-epic (Seuil) which I have not read, having put my money on Michel Schneider’s Marilyn, dernières séances (Grasset), a thorough, perhaps too thorough investigation into the troubled life and troubling death of Marilyn Monroe, focusing on her relations with her analyst Ralph Greenson. The verdict of suicide was always thought to be unsafe, although almost certainly correct. The case was closed abruptly, owing perhaps to the implication of the Kennedys. Greenson’s testimony was inconclusive

In fact according to the author Greenson was the agent of her downfall, although she was always unstable, infantile and paranoid. Greenson, whom she saw seven days a week, sometimes twice in one day, attempted to rehabilitate her by welcoming her into his family. He was her only friend; she in turn became increasingly dependent, bringing no insight into the situation. He could see how she would end, an opinion he confided to Anna Freud. Many reputations had to be revised after she was found dead in bed, apparently from an overdose. Even at a distance of 40 years this is disturbing.

Since the few documents that exist are embargoed Schneider has had to rely on secondary sources and a great deal of imagination. He has made a thorough job of it, bringing into sharp relief the weakness of Greenson, his pity, his desire to protect and console, and thus his gross professional misconduct. This was a true folie à deux: even his actions on the night of her death are called into question. The matter remains unfinished. Monroe’s habitually transgressive behaviour called forth varying responses and may have induced transgression in others. Schneider’s account is both affecting and effective, an imaginative leap which leaves neither reputation intact.

The Prix Femina was awarded to Nancy Huston for Lignes de faille (Actes Sud), a clever, quirky novel for four voices, working backwards from American Sol in 2004 to his great-grandmother Krystina in 1948, and thus encompassing the history of the 20th century. Its novelty consists in the fact that all four protagonists are six years old: their accounts are thus both tragic and comic, imparting a much needed innocence to what is a fundamentally sombre history.

The Prix Médicis was awarded to Sorj Chalandon for Une promesse (Grasset), a strange and ultimately haunting novel in which seven friends pay homage to a couple from whom they received kindness at a critical point in their lives. Their commitment consists of paying regular visits to the couple’s house, for which each has a key. The house is empty, the owners are dead; in turn the seven friends draw the curtains, change the sheets, and leave a note for the next visitor. Sadness rises from these admittedly awkward pages, as apparently random objects reveal their associations. An unusual but justified award.

All in all a good year, with one outstanding contribution. Les Bienveillantes will be published in English next year. My sympathies go to the translator.

 

 

This side of the truth (2006)

The View From Castle Rock by Alice Munro

In the Foreword she writes to her new book Alice Munro, Canada’s best known and most admired short story writer, states that some 10 or 12 years ago she began to study the history of her family and envisaged a memoir, unlike the fictions which have engaged her all her working life. She was thorough in her researches and unearthed a great deal of material, almost all of it in the Selkirk and Galashiels public libraries. She even spent some months in Scotland, where the Laidlaw branch of her family had its roots. She then attacked the subject but discovered that she was not merely the legatee of her own family but Alice Munro, writer of fiction, whose stories exist in their own right and appear to owe nothing to her ancestry.

In other words in trying to write fact she found that she was writing fiction; each imaginative excursion had its origins in some authentic family detail, and the result is a hybrid of the two genres. More than anything else it is an autobiography of sorts, perhaps the only one she will ever write. The depth of her feelings ensures that she pays loving attention to people she never knew, those hill farmers who sailed for the New World in the early 19th century and of whom little is known, their names being almost their only record.

It has to be said that other people’s remote ancestors, rather like other people’s dreams, are hard to get a grip on, and Munro runs the risk of coming across as merely sentimental. This is in sharp contrast to the delicacy she has always brought to her studies of attachments and misalliances. But, with her reputation assured, she no doubt felt free to indulge her own vagaries, and was perhaps happy to attack one sort of fiction rather than another. Certainly her family forms the basis of such reconstructions as she permits herself, but the material proves insubstantial in comparison with the families she has shaped in her own pages. This is fiction’s advantage over fact: true creativity owes nothing to one’s bloodline but exists in its own right, with its own demands. Influences may play their part but have no bearing on what is in essence an inalienable gift.

There is a marked change of register between the first half of the book, which is entitled ‘No Advantages’, referring to the inhospitable soil of Selkirk parish, and the second, which is simply called ‘Home’. When the chronicle moves forward to the 1940s and 1950s and to Munro’s real memories we rediscover the apparently effortless prose writer we know from earlier stories, as well as many familiar themes: her father’s fox farm, her mother’s illness, those friends of her youth who furnished her with an apt title for one of her collections. It is fashionable now to express nostalgia for the 1950s, which says more about the present day than about that remote time. Certainly the decade appears innocent, as do Munro’s memories. Untoward attitudes were corrected or concealed, poverty was endured, school was appreciated. No great disappointment resulted from any of this. Thwarted in her choice of companions she found her lovers in books, dark ferocious sardonic men totally unlike any she had ever known. No harm resulted from this tendency either

This argues the persistence, the primacy of her own memory, very different in character from the diligent attention she brings to bear on those patient hardy 19th- century Laidlaws, who in fact leave little trace on her own work, unlike those immediate relatives whose presence is evoked time and time again. This loyalty to her own experiences is of a different order from knowledge gleaned in careful research. She lays claim to those ancestors, but her own trajectory is different, rooted in her early home but taking shape in ways that could not have been foreseen. There is a kind of fidelity in this, one that transcends mere repetition, and that fidelity is perhaps her outstanding characteristic as a writer.

One notes a growing distance between what she knows and what she remembers, and that distance, which is also somehow a memory, sends her travelling once again in search of the graves of those members of her family who died in Canada. And this, we are given to understand, is also home, the past having become the future, and the time in between almost irrelevant. This is no longer fiction; this is the insight time brings to bear on the whole enterprise, and her engagement with it is entirely admirable.

 

 

The eyes have it (2006)

The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing by T. J. Clark

Early in January 2000 the art historian T. J. Clark arrived in Los Angeles for a six-month stint at the Getty Research Institute. He was fortunate to see, in the Getty Museum, two great pictures by Poussin, the Getty’s ‘Landscape with a Calm’ and the National Gallery’s ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’, on loan from London. Over a period of weeks Clark visited the pictures almost every day and was able to register the tiny but memorable changes brought about not only by the process of intense contemplation but the traces left in memory and dream fragments which could only be clarified by more looking.

Attempts to translate these experiences stimulated but never dogmatically proposed a new form of art historical writing. In previous scholarly works — on Courbet and Manet — Clark was rightly insistent on the political and sociological contexts in which these painters worked. Now he goes further. For the question here is not ‘what does this picture mean?’ but ‘how do I see it?’ Or rather, ‘receive it?’ ‘How does time alter the spectator, and, in changing light, the picture itself?’ His reflections are written as diary entries, and if these become modified in real time that is part of the process. ‘I want to write a reaction … not a theory,’ he writes. Part of this is a revolt against the present-day dominance of the moving image, and partly a rebuke to the so-called elitism of pure contemplation. The result is wonderfully dynamic, and, as he concentrates more and more on ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’, relevant in ways that could not have been foreseen.

The picture is easily read. On a canvas which Clark remembered as far wider than it actually is something terrible has taken place. In a temperate landscape a male figure in the foreground has died in the coils of a python. To the right, and on another plane, a man with an outstretched arm registers horror; to the left of centre and on yet another plane a woman who has retrieved a bundle of laundry from a river registers even more horror. Subsequent visits will disclose further figures, some minuscule, on either bank of the stream, which contains a boat with fishermen. The ever-receding planes reveal classical buildings, with, in the far distance, mountains. The time will be registered as dawn or daybreak, with the sun illuminating the distant buildings, themselves, perhaps, memories of Giorgione.

Poussin scholarship is dominated by Anthony Blunt, whose monograph on the painter was published in 1966. It spoke to an orderly society in which objectivity was valued. This, although still desirable, is perhaps no longer possible. It has been replaced by a certain existential anxiety in which all are implicated. Whether ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’ contains a hidden meaning only Poussin could tell. What it contains for Clark is both simpler and more difficult: unease, even dread. And this was not the sight of death, as the book’s title would have it, but rather fear of the unanticipated, the ultimate accident. Thus the date on which the picture was completed, 1648, was perhaps less relevant than the date on which Clark was making his notes: 2001. This was quite unexpected. The diary format is therefore the only one that mirrors the bewildering changes in Clark’s ‘… reaction … not a theory’.

The classical term for the description of a work of art is ekphrasis, or transliteration. In the 17th and 18th centuries this was considered almost a work of art in its own right: ut pictura poesis erit. This is no longer suitable. Each impression now necessitates further agitated sightings, and in the process Clark’s writing also seems to lose its materiality. And yet he sees perfection (in the old sense) in the impermeability of the classical city, to which the eye progresses from the dark foreground, seen before sunrise, in a manner which Clark rightly understands to be ethical. Above all he is as far removed from comfortable connoisseurship, with its usual signifiers, as it is possible to be, yet what is internalised and noted is rigorously true to what the painter intended the viewer to apprehend. All the stages of recognition are available, are legible: the important components are light and shadow, what they reveal, what they fail to conceal. But none of this is the affair of a moment. Clark asked a bored child in the gallery’s education section what was going on in the picture. ‘Nothing is going on,’ was the reply. Clark had a momentary flash of fellow feeling before he returned to his ferocious scrutiny. One of the features of the painting is its stealthy but continuous disclosure of further detail, evidence, in fact, of further activity which one would like not to intrude. Only the buildings are uninhabited.

By 11 September 2001 Clark was elsewhere, so there are no neat parallels to be drawn. But he kept returning to the picture when he and it were back in London, only to find that the imponderables, the direction of the stream for example, remained imponderable, that there was an expansion, almost a vaporisation, of what was once seen as concrete and unassailable. In a beautiful entry for 17 March he had noted certain dissatisfactions with traditional art history, found its mapping of sources ‘too cheery and efficient’. He suggests that pure speculation, of the most rudimentary kind, might be more helpful. To illustrate this he permits himself a speculation that is right outside the canon. ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’, he says, is about the Fall. The serpent has triumphed. Eve is obliged to take in washing. Adam makes some sort of a living from the river. ‘The boys grow up.’ But in these ‘death-haunted times’ one thing is constant: hence the male figure’s arm raised as if to ward off the threat. And the spectator is with him in this gesture, which may, but only may, have been the painter’s intention.

What this investigation demonstrates is that anything can be broken down but not necessarily put together again. It also demonstrates that Poussin, so often lazily categorised as a ‘peintre-philosophe’, is also a pure maker (look, for example, at the painting of the male figure’s mouth). What it proves — and this is entirely acceptable — is that the best antidote to reading is looking. I paid a further visit to ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’. I did not see one half of what Clark saw. I was conscious that the paint had sunk and the varnish darkened. But I also noticed, with pure pleasure, something about Poussin’s language, or marks, that I had not remarked before. This may have been nothing more than Clark’s influence, but it was proof, if proof were needed, of the validity of this sort of exercise. Forget blockbuster exhibitions: this is the way to see pictures.

 

Anita Brookner have published 33 articles more in the “Spectator” magazine.

 

http://www.spectator.co.uk/search/author/?searchString=Anita%20Brookner

 

 

 

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