The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  *

  The river runs through the book, at once replete with industrial effluents and the children’s and the narrator’s longing for freedom and redemption. When the novel appeared, I was told by one of its admirers that it was, in many ways, a reworking of To Kill A Mockingbird. Certainly, there are elements in the earlier novel that seem to flow into the second one – the two children in the small town; the perilous house that belongs to the invisible ‘Boo’ Radley, reappearing in the God of Small Things as the History House; the trial of the black man accused of rape. But, to me, Roy’s novel’s counterpart and precursor lies in another work that precedes both Harper Lee’s story and the Robert Mulligan film, Charles Laughton’s disturbing and revelatory 1955 film noir, Night of the Hunter. Here are the two children again, the girl and the boy, but this time without the axis, the mooring, of Harper Lee’s universe – the father. Instead, the mother, a hanged criminal’s widow, is seduced by a malefic preacher who’s after the dead man’s money; seduced, murdered, locked in a car that’s pushed into a lake. (A strangely serene underwater scene is filmed in a way that’s remarkably akin to Roy’s narrator’s reimagining of the drowned Sophie: ‘Green weed and river grime were woven into her beautiful redbrown hair. Her sunken eyelids were raw, nibbled at by fish.’) The preacher’s provenance, however, is uncertain; to prove his creed, he has tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand the letters LOVE, and on the knuckles of the left the letters HATE; both hands are deployed in one scene to demonstrate to the children the epic struggle between the two. The children escape with the money after the mother is killed, and much of the ‘night of the hunter’ follows their plight past a river, through the nocturnal wonders of nature clearly, and paradoxically, recreated upon a set. (This knowing paradox – the natural world as strategic setting; the translation of phenomena into theatre – too is echoed by the mordant cartoonish-poetic way in which Roy makes ‘nature’ participate in the boat ride and drowning episode: ‘The deep-swimming fish covered their mouths with their fins and laughed sideways at the spectacle … A white boat-spider floated up with the river in the boat, struggled briefly and drowned.’) Finally, the children arrive at the sanctuary of the brave but ageing Rachel Cooper’s home: Cooper will hold off the preacher with a shotgun, returning the story from nightmare into deep, reassuring, child-like promise.

  The father vanishes from Roy’s novel early on, but never entirely. His absence, and then his covert, shadowy pursuit of the children, gives the tale its particular disquiet. The father returns in various troubling and cunning and unflagging guises: as the LemondrinkOrangedrink seller, who sexually abuses Estha in the cinema hall; as EMS Namboodiripad, the ur-Marxist; as the local Marxist functionary, Pillai; as the police, the state itself. Finally, the father is the law; and the law is opaque. The father, as law, enters the language, making it, occasionally, bombastic and directive-like, and sometimes incoherent. When the comedy is at its most obvious, the capital letters take on their own life and significance, as in the sign on ‘the red and blue board’:

  P olitness

  O bedience

  L oyalty

  I ntelligence

  C ourtesy

  E fficiency

  At other times, words are truncated into syllables and fragments, made meaningless but still portentous; thus, the loaded term ‘later’, broken up into ‘lay’ and ‘ter’, not a Joycean incantation, but a disconcerting and minatory message. Here, the law – the father – operates insidiously through language, and Rahel’s phonetic imagination both echoes and records it as an obscure childish anxiety. In the brilliantly composed chapter ‘Work is struggle’, where, between themselves, Chacko and Comrade Pillai (his social inferior but his lordly petitionee) discuss, among other things, the untouchable Velutha’s fate, the children who are being fashioned by law and its language are brought literally centre-stage. Latha, a ‘combative-looking young girl of about twelve or thirteen’, Comrade Pillai’s niece, who won the ‘First Prize for Elocution at the youth Festival in Trivandrum last week’, is ordered to recite ‘Lochinvar’.

  It was rendered at remarkable speed.

  ‘O, young Lochin varhas scum out of the vest,

  Through wall the vide Border his teed was the bes;

  Tand savissgood broadsod heweapon sadnun,

  Nhe rod all unarmed, and he rod all lalone.’

  This is language as law: irrefutable, near-incomprehensible. It and the other instances I’ve mentioned have greater affinities with the LOVE and HATE inscribed on the preacher’s knuckles, letters that separately cease to mean what they add up to but are eerily united in a message of power, an admonition, than with the wordplay of modernism, or with Rushdie’s hybrid melange, or even Foster’s comic ‘Esmiss Esmoor’.

  There is something else I’m reminded of in this profusion of capital letters, full stops, and half-sentences. It is a mode of dissenting criticism. I am thinking, specifically, of D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, of especially Lawrence’s hectoring style in his essays, a vehicle, often, for the most acute analysis, coming out of, Tom Paulin suggests, a vernacular tradition of protest – namely, Protestant oratory. One can’t view this language without, at once, admiration and ambivalence. Here are the opening sentences of Lawrence’s celebratory ‘Whitman’, where he begins, however, by taking apart the American poet:

  Post-mortem effects?

  But what of Walt Whitman?

  The ‘good grey poet’.

  Was he a ghost, with all his physicality?

  Post-mortem effects. Ghosts.

  Then, moving swiftly, mocking Whitman:

  DEMOCRACY! THESE STATES! EIDOLONS! LOVERS, ENDLESS LOVERS!

  ONE IDENTITY!

  ONE IDENTITY!

  Lawrence is poking fun at Whitman’s optimistic humanism here. The other influential poet-critic who resorts to bullying, urgent, telegraphic critical language, largely in order to advance the cause of the avant-garde, is Pound; Lawrence and Pound are in many respects different, but they’re both deriders of humanism – for Pound, as we know, this had disastrous consequences. Roy’s politics are irreproachably liberal and humane; but her style at once critiques power – among other things, through spectacle and self-indulgent typography – and mimics some of its tonal characteristics, especially in the essays, with their mixture of orphan-like exhibitionism (a survival skill) and lofty prophetic rage and unappeasability. As an activist, she’s a humanist; but, in the novel, she’s constantly flouting (as Lawrence does) the humanist, Flaubertian bases of the crystalline artwork – by being over the top, unsettled and unsettling, demonstrative. The language of the novel represents a curious, petulant, critical – even competitive – relationship with the law.

  The clearest metaphors for dissent and freedom running through the novel are, surprisingly, tropes from Indian devotional poetry: the river; drowning; and taboo love. Two anecdotes come to mind concerning the late nineteenth-century Bengali mystic Ramakrishna Paramahansa, who, through his bourgeois devotee and mediator, Swami Vivekananda, became an object of profound interest for the rationality-worshipping Calcutta middle class. One is probably apocryphal, and is about his rather cruel tutelage of a pupil who asked Ramakrishna if he too could see the goddess Kali, as the mystic claimed to have; they were standing on the banks of the Ganga when this conversation occurred, and, suddenly dunking the questioner’s head into water by force, Ramakrishna held it there, releasing it only when the interlocutor had begun to thrash around desperately. ‘When you long to see Kali with the intensity with which you longed for air, you will be able to see her,’ Ramakrishna is reported to have said. The other anecdote is a homily, but an odd and telling one: ‘You must pine for God as a woman pines for her paramour’ – not for her husband, mind you. We know that almost all of bhakti or Hindu devotional poetry is constructed around an illegitimate relationship: the married Radha’s obsessive trysts with Krishna. Ramakrishna’s advice is, syntactically, frankly scandalous; he sets up an analogy in which the t
wo halves come together poetically, but are also separated and then juxtaposed in an unnerving, discomfiting proximity – ‘you must pine for God’/ ‘a woman pines for her paramour’.

  Let me add to these a third episode, to do with Vivekananda – still, then, the philosophy graduate Narendranath Datta – and his first meeting with Ramakrishna. Upon seeing Narendranath, Ramakrishna apparently went into a samadhi: a sort of spiritual rigor mortis, a divinely ordained epileptic fit. Vivekananda’s first response was the normal bhadralok middle-class one: embarrassment. (Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a far more inflexible and faithful product of the enlightenment than Vivekananda, also records, in his autobiography, the embarrassment he’d feel upon witnessing the religious ecstasies of Vaishnav devotees.)

  During the rapid advance of capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was popular culture that, besides religious extremity, at once embarrassed, offended, and challenged the middle class – especially sentimentality and melodrama. None of these discomfitures and registers (as well as, conversely, passionate endorsements) are inapposite to the reception of Roy’s success, her style, her novel’s radical language.

  This is not to say that Roy has little sense of, or love for, literary language; indeed, she has a gift for it. The buoyant, joyous preamble to the boat ride, when the children march up to Velutha’s hut; the dour, oppressive meeting between Chacko and Comrade Pillai in the latter’s house; the final passages, at once retrospective and premonitory, about Ammu’s and Velutha’s passion – all these are among the most perfectly captured and rendered, the most fiercely yet slyly observed, moments in contemporary Indian writing. But it’s in the tension between these almost self-contained pages and the author’s unspoken but palpable compulsions – to do with form, convention, experience, ambition, desire (both spiritual and material) – that the power of the novel lies. Here is a language that’s on the cusp, at the crossroads, of the declamatory and the personal, the public and the imaginary, the popular, the ecstatic, and the fake on the one hand, and the unillusioned, disabused, and authentic on the other. This cusp – between the law and its transgression; the father and the errant children – is resistant, narrow, and dangerous, and it pulses with life.

  5 Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac

  MARY HAWTHORNE

  The Life of Sisyphus

  Like a misunderstood child, who cries and cries but whose source of distress cannot be fathomed and is thus curtly dismissed by the doctor with palliatives, Anita Brookner’s books are often shunted aside in exasperation, sometimes even by those who are kindly disposed to them: the characters are tiresome and redundant in their relentless isolation, their neurotic obsession with the minutiae of their lives and elusive love objects, their maddening inability to act: we’ve heard it all before. Every year or so, since 1981, when Brookner published her first novel, the autobiographical A Start in Life, at the age of fifty-three, like Sisyphus, her soulmate, she has shouldered one stone after another to the top of the hill and watched it descend again, as shortly she begins contemplating her next battle against inexorable fate – which is to say, the cruel indifference of the gods toward the dutiful, the good, and the well-behaved. But in this struggle, as Camus tells us, we must imagine Sisyphus happy. As, indeed, Brookner proclaims herself to be, continuing to polish off volume after volume since her first, nearly all of them devoted to the solitary’s quest for simple love, which, of course, is never simple, never quite the same, and never lasting, if such a thing is ever to be found at all.

  Brookner has been compared to Barbara Pym and Jane Austen and Henry James and Jean Rhys, but she actually has little in common with any of them. If anything, she is more a blend of something like P. L. Travers, by way of the touching primness, the hauteur, the otherworldly remove, and above all the hidden pangs of longing of Travers’s famous Mary Poppins; Benjamin Constant, by way of Adolphe, his masterly dissection of the bondage of love and the speciousness of freedom; and Philip Larkin, in his spinsterish craving for sexual intimacy and his lyrical grief over having found himself largely on the wrong side of it.

  At the center of Brookner’s books is nearly always a female protagonist, living in a state of solitariness which she both thrives on and abhors. In thrall first and foremost to her own strict notion of the manly ideal, she yearns for an actual man who can meet it. Like Travers, Brookner challenges us to embrace a heroine with whom it is difficult to sympathise, let alone love, despite the strangely fascinating hold of her various eccentric incarnations: student, librarian, flâneuse; first dowdily, then beautifully, clothed, expensively scented, preoccupied with coiffure and toilette. Clothes and impeccable grooming, we learn, are not just forms of feminine allure but, more important, a means to worldly protection. Randomly, we need only examine Ingres’s stunning portrait of Mademoiselle Rivière, when she was fifteen, in her extravagant tan suede gloves, white mink stole, and perfect helmet of hair, to understand the truth of this idea (although her allure has just as much if not more to do with her own palpable confidence in her innate beauty and desirability; furthermore, as Brookner witheringly demonstrates in her novel Providence, even exquisite clothes are capable of ruthless betrayal). But in the end, after years of testimony, one is all but compelled to embrace the Brookner protagonist, so convincing is the record of suffering in the face of rectitude and sincerity, so insistent the author’s refrains of foul play at the hands of fate. This, finally, is the Brooknerian triumph, a triumph born of long struggle: what emerges is a point of view, one with profound existentialist underpinnings.

  You can read one Brookner novel without considering the lot (or most of it), but it misses the point not to, intricately interrelated thematically as all her books are. Like a diamond cutter carefully examining his facets through a loupe, Brookner has considered her heroines’ predicaments from every conceivable angle, and in the minutest increments she has revealed a little more of her authorial self over the years as well, along with her own lessons learned, which are slightly different, from book to book. Brookner has chosen the Schopenhauerian route: ‘Fundamentally it is only our own basic thoughts that possess truth and life, for only these do we really understand through and through.’ (Which isn’t to say that the truth of another Schopenhauer observation does not sometimes apply: ‘There are very many thoughts for him who thinks them, but only a few of them have the power of engaging the interest of a reader after they have been written down.’) In the process, though, like a difficult friend with whom you dine but twice a year, you suddenly realise that she’s grown more interesting, over time, through her very repetitions; you begin to examine the fixations differently, understanding that they are, finally, the point.

  For it is only over the course of time that the reader truly grasps the essential fact that the Brookner heroine (and perhaps the author herself) has actually spent a life sentence in emotional jail – in true solitary confinement – from which, by dint of complexities of temperament or moral upbringing or psychological limitation or the simple decrees of fate – or just plain faithfulness to the starkness of her own perceptions – she does not have the wherewithal to escape, try as she might. She has become devoted to this harsh sentence, by dint of having lived it out, as if it were religion itself (though she is always atheistic), because everything in her experience harkens back to the burden of isolated state, because it is the bone her mind won’t stop gnawing on. Like Freud, Brookner believes that everything begins, and to all intents and purposes ends, in childhood experience. In her 2001 novel Bay of Angels, which chronicles the death of a youngish woman’s mother, Brookner vividly evokes the kind of claustrophobia and attendant anxiety that such a life of constraint gives rise to. (Not that a life of so-called freedom, Brookner will have us know, gives rise to anything different.) After a night of troubled dreams featuring the inevitable non sequitur, in this case a flap of aberrant wallpaper covering over an opening in the wall of her dilapidated little rented room in Nice – an opening too small to enter thro
ugh or exit from – the narrator, Zoë, has a revelation:

  My business was and always had been, my mother; however much I repudiated the idea it refused to go away … My life had become a stasis I was unable to alter in any direction; that was why every other enterprise seemed beyond me, beyond even my eventual possibilities. My timid affections remained timid for that very reason; they were prevented from moving forward, for I was a prisoner in that room, and until the gap widened I could not proceed … My life was that poor room, with its enigmatic opening, the purpose of which was not to let me out but to have me contemplate it for so long that I could no longer relate to the rest of life, even though that life was my own.

  And so, like hardened criminals, Brookner’s heroines are the leopards that prove unable to change their spots. (The difference between ‘unable to’ and ‘don’t really want to’ is an interesting one to contemplate, though impossible to unravel; some would say that they are one and the same.) Eager to get their days over with, they look forward to what, eventually, becomes the almost comic ritual (though it is in truth anything but) of the evening bath and as early a bedtime as can be respectably managed. The bath represents both a cleansing, a cancelling out, of the day’s insult and injury and a preparation for descent into the unconscious; the early bedtime both a testament to the day’s unhappiness and disappointment and also a hopeful jump-start on the day ahead, when the sun will shine again, when the Sisyphean struggle will begin anew. The point is to get through the night with as much psychic pleasure and enlightenment and as little torment as possible. We all know something of this.