Bamboo

by William Boyd

  But what made Golding’s first three novels so remarkable (and I would rate Pincher Martin as high as any) was the extent to which he managed to introduce the mythic element without threatening the tenuous equilibrium that has to exist between the specifics of history and the generalities of myth. The Inheritors captures with marvellous ability a wholly realistic sense of the Neanderthal world as well as re-enacting on the wider level the confrontation between Innocence and Experience. So too Pincher Martin is at once the story of a real man marooned on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic as well as an elaborate parody of the Creation, an illustration of man’s immense ego and his futile heroism.

  Many commentators see Golding’s first five novels as forming a homogeneous unit, but I would be inclined to mark the division after Pincher Martin. Both Free Fall and The Spire significantly tip the balance towards myth and concentrate attention rather more on the solution of what might be termed spiritual or aesthetic dilemmas. Significance is no longer tethered to fact. One is too conscious of the huge abstractions bulking beneath the narrative and its surface details. There is, at the back of the reader’s mind, an overpowering, and at times enervating, awareness of correspondence: the fact that nothing in these novels is offered for its own sake, but is there to serve the rhetoric of the mythopoeic impulse. In Free Fall and The Spire the mythical sous-texte of the novels dominates to the detriment of the fiction. There is on occasion a certain inflated, striven-for trenchancy in the prose (a failing Conrad was also prone to), as well as passages of great power. There simply isn’t enough “muddy plot” obscuring the vision. Not that the vision is ever crystal clear—Golding’s answers are never unambiguous and succinct—it is instead that one knows one should always be seeking the analogical matrix that lies beneath the prose, striving all the time to “see into the life of things.”

  The two books that followed The Spire—The Pyramid and The Scorpion God — represented a hiatus in the Golding oeuvre. The Scorpion God consisted of three novellas and The Pyramid was an untypical, Trollopian novel recrafted from some early short stories. It wasn’t until the publication of Darkness Visible last year—after a self-confessed eight-year block—that the sequence of Golding novels proper continued. To put it at its most simple, Darkness Visible is an uneven, strained attempt to reconnect the twin worlds of muddy plot and myth that had diverged since Pincher Martin. To some extent it succeeds brilliantly, as in the opening chapter dealing with the blitz and the simple hero Matty’s exposure to the pentecostal firestorm, and the later chapters treating his life and education. However there is something disconcerting about the book’s self-conscious modishness—terrorism, paedophilia—and for once Golding’s superb organizational grasp of his material seems to have deserted him almost completely. There is no doubt that the writing of the novel was something of a purgative experience—Golding has stated that he has refused to read a single review of the book—and it will come to be seen, I suspect, as something of a curiosity—an aberration in what is otherwise a career of masterly technical control and authorial self-assurance. Its, so to speak, emetic properties have clearly proved efficient, and we now have, a year later, a novel which has not only won the Booker prize but, more importantly, reaffirms a memorable return to form and the literary stature of its author.

  Many reviewers of Rites of Passage have qualified their praise, ranking it with The Pyramid, seeing it as something of a perfect minor work. It is far more than this: rather it’s a return to tried and tested techniques; in many ways a look back at what has come before and a summary of the preceding novels’ achievements. Golding’s best novels take place in a confined world: the island in Lord of the Flies, the rock in Pincher Martin, language in The Inheritors — further confined by the characters’ vastly limited conceptual boundaries. Similarly, Rites of Passage takes place on an ageing man-of-war, en route with a party of emigrants for Australia, at some point towards the end of the Napoleonic wars. The main burden of the narrative is taken up by a privileged young passenger called Edmund Talbot, who is recording the events of the passage in a journal for the benefit and amusement of his aristocratic patron. This journal in itself is a superb example of literary mimicry on Golding’s part, a feat of imaginative sympathy with the early nineteenth century that comes close to the intellectual efforts required to render Neanderthalers’ world-view in The Inheritors. Talbot is contemptuous and sneering about his fellow passengers, particularly an impoverished clergyman named Colley, who somehow manages to attract the disdain of just about everyone else on board. Talbot’s voyage and journal proceed with their unremarkable catalogue of seasickness, minor tiffs, a brief flirtation and sex-bout with a meretricious female passenger, and a tour of the bowels of the ship. Talbot has little out-of-the-ordinary to report until the Reverend Colley, in the course of delivering a sermon to the huddled masses in steerage, gets drunk on navy rum and makes an exhibition of himself capering about the deck semi-nude and finally pissing up against a mast in full view of the other passengers. Colley’s reaction to this inebriated display is, however, extreme. He lies face down on his bed in a kind of catatonic trance for four days before finally dying of shame. On going through Colley’s room, Talbot discovers a long letter that Colley had been writing to his sister and he duly transcribes it into his journal. The narrative point of view shifts and the events of the voyage are retold by Colley. This change in perspective completely alters our conception of events as Talbot has thus far related to us. Colley has been the victim of callous persecution at the hands of the officers of the ship and the captain himself. He has been humiliated in front of the ship’s company during the traditional crossing-of-the-equator ceremony. Colley’s idea of his own nature and his standing in the eyes of his fellow passengers is revealed as hopelessly and tragically inaccurate. Talbot’s journal and narrative have also to be reassessed and he sees himself as being unwittingly responsible for Colley’s bizarre demise. This sudden, final change of viewpoint causing a reanalysis of all that has passed before is a feature that occurs in all of Golding’s first three novels. Here it is handled with great skill and deftness, used not only as an instrument of humorous irony and a subversive literary technique (as remarkable as Conrad’s similar exercise in Under Western Eyes — a writer to whom Golding comes to bear more and more resemblance) but also as a means of focusing on the themes of guilt, persecution and delusion which were only intermittently apparent in Talbot’s self-opinionated journal. Now Talbot is able, with the aid of Colley’s letter and the impromptu inquest held after his death, to fill in the gaps in his own defective and subjective account of what has been going on in the ship. The hidden and unknown act which brought about Colley’s insupportable shame and eventual death is suddenly made clear.

  Rites of Passage and Pincher Martin are the only two Golding novels where a revelation of what takes place at the end will completely ruin the reader’s enjoyment of the book—a sufficient testimony to the renewed status of muddy plot. However, Rites of Passage contains greater riches than pure narrative entertainment. Riches which, on the basis of only two readings so far, I can only hint at. Like Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors and Pincher Martin, Rites of Passage has “at its back” another text. (For the preceding three, they are, respectively, The Coral Island, Wells’s Outline of History and Robinson Crusoe). In this case it is Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” One comparison will have to suffice. Just before the Mariner is freed of his albatross he looks over the side of the ship:

  Beyond the shadow of the ship

  I watched the water snakes …

  Within the shadow of attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black

  They coiled and swam; and every track

  Was a flash of golden fire.

  O happy living things! no tongue

  Their beauty might declare:

  A spring of love gusht from my heart,

  And I blest them unaware!…

  The self-same moment I could pray;

 
And from my neck so free

  The Albatross fell off, and sank

  Like lead into the sea

  Colley, just before his final ordeal, looks over the side of the ship:

  I gazed down into the water, the blue, the green, the purple, the snowy, sliding foam! I saw with a new feeling of security the long green weed that wavers under the water from our wooden sides … It seemed to me then—it still seems so—that I was and am consumed by a great love of all things …

  There are many other obvious echoes. Just as Golding challenges the dogmas of his literary starting points in his first three novels so he “deconstructs” Coleridge in Rites of Passage. To put it at its most brief, Colley is at once Mariner and Albatross, and the purgatorial sufferings which lead to redemption in the poem are pointedly, and with wicked irony, eschewed here. In the poem the Mariner confers his blessing on the water snakes and is freed from the albatross by his unselfish act. Colley, re-enacting the Mariner’s part with a more literal accuracy, goes on from this point to assume an albatross which leads to his squalid end. His geographical passage across the equator, his physical move over the white line painted on the deck to separate “gentlemen” from “people,” symbolizes his own transit from the factitious world of civilized appearance to the darker realms of the unconscious, which ultimately brings about his doom. This is a multi-layered and marvellously intelligent novel with endless subtle allusions and reverberations and effortlessly marshalled cross-references. It is also a witty and solidly realistic account of life on a sailing ship at the beginning of the last century. There is an exuberance and confidence about the book that signals the author’s own awareness of his return to former strengths. The balance is triumphantly right.

  1981

  Philip Roth

  (Review of Zuckerman Unbound)

  Philip Roth’s last book, The Ghost Writer, featured an unknown novelist called Nathan Zuckerman and dealt with the visit he paid to the home of a literary giant. In Zuckerman Unbound Zuckerman is now a celebrated and notorious author, whose novel, Carnovsky, has brought him overnight fame. Zuckerman Unbound details his inept attempts at coping with being a celebrity and, more seriously, considers the connections that exist between a writer’s life and his art.

  The Zuckerman/Carnovsky link seems parallel to that between Roth and Portnoy’s Complaint. Carnovsky is a graphic account of the sex life of its eponymous hero and the simple equation that exists in the minds of its readers is that Zuckerman and the fictional Carnovsky are, in actual fact, interchangeable. There’s a lot of amusing detail about the pressures of living with fame, reminiscent in parts of Woody Allen’s film Stardust Memories. Allen’s paranoia is also echoed in Zuckerman’s fears that he will end up the victim of some deranged fan. Zuckerman finds himself pestered by the usual collection of cranks and weirdos, but is dogged more persistently by one Alvin Pepler, a contemporary who hails from the same town—Newark, New Jersey. Pepler had achieved a short span of fame as winner on a nationwide quiz show, a success brought to him by virtue of his photographic memory. But the quiz show was rigged (a genuine scandal in the fifties) and Pepler was “defeated” by another contestant and condemned to return to the obscurity from which he’d briefly emerged.

  Pepler’s obsessions and his grandiose ambitions (he wants Zuckerman to help promote his book) are irritating, but later Zuckerman becomes more intrigued with this extraordinary character. For a while he contemplates writing Pepler and his life into a novel and begins to make transcriptions of everything he says. This illustration of a writer engaged in the process of turning life’s raw materials into art bears on the book’s wider theme, namely the persistent identification the public makes of the artist with his creation. Or, as Zuckerman cogently puts it, confusing the “dictating ventriloquist with the demonic dummy.”

  The most serious consequences of this sort of identification are experienced by members of the artist’s family, especially if—as in the Roth/Zuckerman case—characters, such as parents, play a large part in the fiction. It’s in his relationships with members of his family that Zuckerman sees the genuine damage that his fame has caused. The incomprehension of his parents and brother, the sense of betrayal that they feel, have opened up an unbridgeable gap between them. The novel ends with Zuckerman returning to his native Newark, the setting for Carnovsky. It has all changed, to such an extent that it is almost unrecognizable. Roth seems to be leaving us with a symbolic reminder of the difference between life and art, a warning not to mistake the illusion for the illusionist.

  It was T. S. Eliot who emphasized the gulf between the “man who suffers and the mind which creates.” It’s a separation that Zuckerman insists on throughout the novel too. There’s no connection, he repeats, between what happens in his novels and what’s happened in his life. Zuckerman Unbound is a very funny account of the consequences of not observing the distinction. Some consequences are easy to live with—Zuckerman’s sexual renown allows him to bed film stars—others are very sad: Zuckerman senior’s dying word to his son is “bastard.” But essentially Roth, I think, is playing an elaborate joke on the reader. In Zuckerman Unbound we constantly hear of other readers’ stupidity in taking Zuckerman for his fictional hero Carnovsky, and we sympathize with Zuckerman’s frustration. But at the same time—I’ve been doing it throughout this review myself and, I guarantee, it will occur in every notice the book receives—we identify Zuckerman with Roth and talk about Zuckerman Unbound in terms of Roth and the reception of Portnoy. Perhaps all that Roth is pointing out in laying this trap for us is simply to show how instinctive such a response is; that it’ll be made anyway, no matter what the writer tries to do. Is it an error on the reader’s part, though? Is the reader hopelessly unsophisticated? Roth doesn’t actually come out and say so, but I think that throughout the novel—especially in the way he reacts to Pepler—he drops hints that the notion of the separation of the artist from his art is, in a significant sense, something of a convenient piece of camouflage for the artist. Certainly Eliot for one—who energetically pursued this line throughout his life—was not doing it disinterestedly. Zuckerman Unbound is an elegant and amusing contribution to the debate.

  1981

  Kurt Vonnegut (1)

  (Review of Palm Sunday)

  In 1975 Kurt Vonnegut published a collection of reviews, articles and speeches under the annoying title of Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons. Now, six years later, he has done much the same in Palm Sunday. He calls the book a collage but adds that

  As I arranged those fragments in this order and then that one I saw that they formed a sort of autobiography, especially if I felt free to include some pieces not written by me. To give life to such a golem, however, I would have to write much new connective tissue. This I have done.

  The other contributions are a history of the Vonnegut family written by a cousin, a letter from his daughter and miscellaneous extracts from work by other relatives. The result is far more effective than the earlier book. Indeed were it not for the “connective tissue” Palm Sunday would be dangerously inconclusive and slight. For the plain fact of the matter is that Vonnegut hasn’t done that much reviewing or public speaking in the intervening six years. Even without the extra help provided by his family some of the pieces included here are clearly no more than padding. There can be no other reason for reprinting his short story “The Big Space Fuck” or subjecting us to a truly appalling libretto for a musical version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — which the producers quite rightly turned down. It is Vonnegut’s musings and speculations on and around the circumstances that prompted this or that address or introduction to a book that prove in the end to be far and away the most rewarding elements of Palm Sunday. They do, as he intended, form a partial autobiography—a “sort of life”—which reveals the author to us in a genial and unselfconscious way and raises hopes that this will prove to be a trial run for a fuller, longer account of his life.

  I have often suspected that a reader’s reaction to Vonneg
ut’s style depends largely on the mood he or she happens to be in at the time. It’s quite possible one day to be entertained, and the next to be irked and infuriated. This is not a result of inconsistencies in Vonnegut: his tone of voice has remained remarkably consistent through his writing career—a curious blend of faux naïveté and profanity, of innocence and deep irony. It produces, in Palm Sunday, such effects as these:

  As for literary criticism in general, I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person that has put on full armour and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.

  and

  Dog poisoning is still the most contemptible crime I can think of.

  and

  He was an abstract impressionist you see. His paintings just looked like bright weather…

  and

  The apathy of the University of Chicago is repulsive to me. They can take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooooon.

  To me this appears, respectively, to be: largely correct; fake, coy and stupid; nicely put; and childish but forceful.

  However, it’s unfair to quote Vonnegut out of context, because, such is the nature of his style, you can find examples to suit any accusation you choose. Moreover, beneath the mannerisms lies an amenable personality whose opinions are not without merit and relevance. Vonnegut’s bêtes noires are worthy and well known and include such targets as multinationals, pollution, organized religion, war and inhumanity. If a new note appears in Palm Sunday then it’s a plea to abandon the nuclear family and to return to the extended one. Vonnegut talks wistfully of Ibo tribesmen who know or are related to upward of a thousand people. Speculating on the fact that one in three Americans is or will become divorced, he offers this explanation: