Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  Mathematicians have a small, but distinguished corpus of fiction (e.g. Edward Abbott’s Flatland, J. B. S. Haldane’s Daedalus, Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’ books), none more so, or more substantial, than Vernor Vinge’s. He wrote his first published short story in 1966 for the ‘hard SF’ magazine, Analog. ‘Bookworm, Run!’ has a plot similar to that of Daniel Keyes’s better known Flowers for Algernon (1959). But whereas in Keyes’s short story it is surgery which enhances the mouse Algernon’s mental powers to super-rodent levels, in Vinge’s story it is computer-database linkage which makes the chimp Norman a super-simian, or ‘simborg’. Like everything Vinge writes, the theme of the story is both witty and scientifically timely. Chimps were, in the late 1960s, being shot into space in rockets – going boldly where no chimp had gone before. Vinge’s subsequent work coincided with such communication-science developments (which he was lecturing on) as the formation of ARPANET (the military precursor of the internet), the World Wide Web and, in the 1990s, its universal domestic connectivity.

  His SF revolves around two major paradoxes. One is that as the machines become smarter, the human beings that operate them necessarily become dumber. A broadly educated person could, for example, change a typewriter ribbon, but might well be at a loss as how to replace a motherboard in their desktop – which they were using for the same purposes as their old manual typewriter. The second paradox is that cyber-connection is both a weapon of liberation and equally a tool of state oppression. Does the rapidly evolving computer portend the end of tyranny, or its future perfection? Will it create McLuhan’s harmonious ‘global village’ or Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’ (the basis of the nineteenth-century British jail system, in which the prisoner is under constant, all-seeing, surveillance). Who knows? We are, in Vinge’s pungent metaphor, speeding far ahead of our headlights. All we have as a map is SF – speculative fiction.

  Vinge established himself as a genre leader with his novella, True Names (1981). It was, he recalls, ‘the first story I ever wrote with a word processor – a Heathkit LSI 11/03’. The story is set in 2014 and takes as its premise Arthur C. Clarke’s paradox that, at its most extreme development, technology is indistinguishable from magic. It opens:

  In the once upon a time days of the First Age of Magic, the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued possession but also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for – the stories go – once an enemy, even a weak unskilled enemy, learned the sorcerer’s true name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful. As times passed, and we graduated to the Age of Reason and thence to the first and second industrial revolutions, such notions were discredited. Now it seems that the Wheel has turned full circle (even if there never really was a First Age) and we are back to worrying about true names again.

  As the narrative continues, a ‘coven’ of ‘warlocks’ – effectively anarchist hackers – are at war with the ‘Great Adversary’, the American government. Their protection (their magic cloak, in Hogwartian terms) is their pseudonymity. The state cannot find out who they are. Enter a third player in the cybergame, ‘the Mailman’. He, it emerges, is an AI construct. Once he has, vampire-like, sucked in every computer avatar on the web, he – the machine – will rule. Exit humanity.

  Vinge achieved fame, outside the SF village, with his Hugo-winning 1992 novel, A Fire Upon the Deep. (If you don’t know who the ‘Hugo’ is named after, incidentally, SF is not for you). He won the award again for A Deepness in the Sky (1999), for the novella Fast Times at Fairmont High (2001), and for Rainbows End (2007).

  His later work is more cosmic in its scenarios. He creates a new cyber-universe, defined by the architectures of information. A Fire Upon the Deep is, for example, set in the frictional areas between the ‘Zones of Thought’ and chronicles a battle over a data archive. The tenor of Vinge’s vision, as it has been expressed over the decades, is pessimistic. He foresees thought-capable technologies which are no more comprehensible to the human (or SF-writing) mind than Jehovah – they move in mysterious ways. Human consciousness, whose offspring they are, can react to them, but will never understand them any more than a Pekinese can understand quantum mechanics.

  This future catastrophe (for us, not for the thoughtful machines) Vinge terms the ‘Singularity’. He outlined it in detail in a much-cited article in 1993. ‘Within thirty years,’ Vinge predicted, ‘we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions must be investigated.’ They are investigated in his dozen or so novels. His vision of digito-apocalypse was popularised in The Terminator’s ‘Skynet’. What happens when machines ‘wake up’? Very bad things for their inventors – and no Arnie to help us.

  FN

  Vernor Steffen Vinge

  MRT

  True Names

  Biog

  Interview with Vinge (Mike Godwin, interviewer), reason.com/archives/2007/05/04/superhuman-imagination

  282. Julian Barnes 1946 –

  Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well alone?

  It’s easier to know a dead novelist than a living novelist. Fences fall on death – the libel lawyer’s sabre turns to putty, trespassers will no longer be prosecuted. But with all this access there is a loss of living contact. One’s in communication with a naked corpse. Of all the living novelists of his generation, Julian Barnes has privileged his readers with the kind of insight that usually only the Jamesian post-mortem exploiter can turn up. It is to be found in his book-length meditation on death, Nothing to be Frightened of (2008). The tone is Schopenhauerian. Why live, asked that philosopher – answering himself with the observation that the will would not concur with what the mind rationally resolved on the matter. Schopenhauer, however, is the wrong reference here. Since his university years Barnes has been a disciple of the French sceptic Montaigne. He could take as his motto the title of the Frenchman’s essay, ‘That to philosophize is to learn to die’, with the slight change: ‘to write novels is to learn how to die’. Let us get used to it, says Montaigne. Or, as the other Frenchman Gustave Flaubert puts it, ‘People like us should have the religion of despair … gazing down into the black pit at one’s feet, one remains calm.’

  The outline of Barnes’s life (but very little of his private life) is on record. He was born the son, and grandson, of school teachers – which meant, as he drily puts it, books, chalk and bourgeois decencies in the house. That his father taught French was manifestly influential. He was born in Leicester – lifelong support of whose football team is the only legacy (it is, he likes to point out, a very middling Midland club – no metropolitan flash). Until his father’s retirement, Barnes’s upbringing was London inner suburban: thereafter London outer suburban. He grew up under the shadow of an elder brother, Jonathan, justly regarded as brilliant, whereas he, Julian, was credited with being a good all-rounder. His sense of fraternal inferiority is a main element in Nothing to be Frightened of, and is given wry expression in the book’s opening sentences:

  I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him. That’s what I say when the question is put. I asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own. He replied with a single word: ‘Soppy.’

  Some philosophers, one recalls, say the same thing about novels. Are his dozen volumes of fiction merely a ‘trivial response to mortality’? Barnes asks himself.

  At school he was not outstanding in the classroom, but stood out on the sports field. His lifelong love of sport keeps him, he says, in touch with his inner athlete, his ‘macho’ self. The word is ironically inflected. He confesses to having masturbated heroically in adolescence. The absence of any divine mark of disapproval pushed him towards his lifelong agnosticism. He offers a snapshot of his early literary le
anings at the same time of life:

  When I was fourteen or fifteen I was just beginning to read in French, but the first time I read Madame Bovary it was certainly in English … At the time we were obliged once a week to put on army uniform and play at soldiers in something called the Combined Cadet Force. I have a vivid memory of pulling out Crime and Punishment along with my sandwiches on a field day; it felt properly subversive.

  The City of London School does well by even its less than highest flying pupils and Barnes was accepted to read modern languages at Oxford. Modern French, he found, was taught there as a ‘dead language’: unmodern French. He changed course, briefly, in his second year to philosophy but discovered all those genes had gone to his brother, Jonathan. If he wanted answers, he would have to find them in literature. He ruefully recalls Oxford’s judgement on him:

  When I had a viva for my finals one of the examiners … said to me – looking at my papers – What do you want to do after you’ve got your degree? and I said, Well, I thought I might become one of you. I said that partly because my brother had got a first and had gone on to become a philosophy don … [The examiner] toyed with my papers again and said, Have you thought about journalism?

  Oxford was the loser and English fiction (not to mention higher journalism) the gainer. Eventually, one must add, he did not fly from the starting blocks. On graduating, Barnes worked as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary, researching etymologies in the C–G letter range. ‘I doubt it shows through in my fiction,’ he says, but his Flaubertian addiction to lists and categories suggests otherwise. He left OUP to read for the bar, which brought him to London where he began, as the dons had advised, to drift into journalism. His TV reviews were particularly brilliant.

  He did not venture on writing fiction until his mid-twenties. After encouragement by the publisher Jonathan Cape, and delays induced by his own ‘doubt and demoralisation’, Julian Barnes finally published his first work, Metroland (1980), at the age of thirty-four. Few career-making novels can have been nursed in a spirit of such carefully fermented inadequacy: ‘I didn’t see that I had any right to be a novelist’, he recalls. Metroland, he later pronounced ‘was about defeat’ and he wrote it in a defeated spirit. It remains, none the less, the only autobiographical novel Julian Barnes can be said to have written and even if it weren’t a strikingly good piece of work, it would be readable for that reason alone. The narrative is divided into three sections: One, Metroland (1963); Two, Paris (1968); Three, Metroland II (1977). The narrative circuit is familiar from Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying: both novels record a young Englishman’s failure to escape the gravitational pull of bourgeois mores; his ‘past’ denies any future. Barnes’s hero vainly attempts to come up for air, but his handicaps are too great. He is suburban, English and non-Jewish – and anyway his heart isn’t in it. Finally, mellowed, he accepts his destiny: j’habite Metroland.

  Metroland is itself a symbol of England’s failed leap into Europe. An old stager whiles away the commuter’s tedium by instructing Barnes’s hero on the Metropolitan line’s grand design:

  Fifty miles from Verney Junction to Baker Street; what a line. Can you imagine – they were planning to join up with Northampton and Birmingham. Have a great link through from Yorkshire and Lancashire, through Quainton Road, through London, joining up with the old South Eastern, then through a Channel Tunnel to the Continent. What a line.

  Metroland never made it. It became a dormitory: ‘you lived there because it was an area easy to get out of.’ Neither does young Christopher make it. He goes to Paris in 1968, but he misses the events; he and they didn’t seem made for each other. Christopher also fails in his liaison with his exciting French partner, Annick, and lapses into marriage with the sensible English girl, Marion. And, in the last significant episode of the novel, a Metrolander once more, he doesn’t commit adultery. At the end, he has become what he once tried to escape: stuffy, English and indomitably decent. Defeated. It is one of the ironies of Barnes’s later career that he, the author, did make it. He is England’s most honoured novelist in France.

  Metroland and its successor, Before She Met Me, two years later, a study of retroactive jealousy (can one feel cuckolded by one’s partner’s former lovers?) enjoyed critical success but barely break-even hardback sales. Barnes’s subdued voice was drowned out by louder practitioners of the day: he was out-Martined, out Salmaned, out-Ianed (all of whom would become companions in fiction). His career took on new force with his marriage to the gifted literary agent Pat Kavanagh in 1979 and it was with his third novel, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) – and with Kavanagh’s assistance, one suspects – that he made his breakthrough. As the title proclaims, it is ostensibly homage to the French novelist through incidentals: a stuffed parrot (a flock of dubious contenders survive to stimulate the idle mind), a recycled public statue (the Nazis dismantled the original for war scrap), the books Flaubert never got round to writing. The narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, is a late-middle-aged Normandy landing veteran, a widowed doctor with an unhappy marriage behind him, only fragments of which surface in chinks between his obsessive, bordering on manic, cogitations on his beloved Gustave. Although the ostensible subject is the most constructive novelist of the nineteenth century, the form is that of the Montaigne essay – ‘loose sallies of the mind’. Lists, catalogues and reverse shots abound. There are expostulations against Oxford dons, critics, the bourgeois reader, life, death, everything. The one constant feature is that the author is not writing ‘the kind of book I knew I did not want to write’. It is a novel constantly in denial about itself.

  Barnes had low expectations for this resolutely eccentric work (one should, however, beware the traps in his chronic self-deprecations): ‘I suspected that Flaubert’s Parrot might interest a few Flaubertians, and perhaps a smaller number of psittacophiles.’ The novel in fact did very well – although arguably not as supremely well as it should have done. As is often the case with Barnes’s fiction, it was, in a sense, too good for its own good. Time will confirm it as a high point in twentieth-century literature.

  No novelist – whilst politely communicative in interview – maintains a more dignified silence than Julian Barnes about private things. He declines to comment on his (childless) marriage, for example, and a mid-1980s breakdown in his relationship with Kavanagh. The third party, a woman novelist as famous as Barnes, went public. The furious quarrel with Martin Amis ten years later, on his leaving Kavanagh’s firm for a sexier American agent, is known entirely from Amis’s engagingly indiscreet account in his memoir, Experience (2000). In Barnes’s memoir (dedicated to ‘P’), the uninformed reader would not know that Barnes is married. Success, on the scale of Flaubert’s Parrot, might have been expected to lay down future patterns. But if there is one thing Barnes dislikes as a novelist it is the rut, or furrow. He declined to follow up with ‘Tolstoy’s Gerbil’, or ‘Turgenev’s Tortoise.’ He did, however, write a novel called The Porcupine (1992), which came out in the euphoric aftermath of the fall of the Evil Empire when all the talk was of the end of history and peace dividends. The Porcupine surveys this supposed turning point in world history with styptic Montaignean scepticism. A thinly veiled roman-à-clef (his first in that genre), based on the trial of the Bulgarian leader, Todor Zhivkov, it is a subtler version of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (Barnes and Kavanagh were both admirers of Koestler). Neither sympathetic nor hostile, the novel expresses Barnes’s belief that fiction is elegant lies with a ‘hard core of truth at its centre’. In this case, the hard truth is that there is nothing clean-cut about the fall of empires. The Porcupine carries the most unusual dust-jacket recommendation in the annals of English literature from Zhivkov’s actual prosecutor (a principal character, under thin disguise, in the narrative).

  Barnes did not get any similar endorsement from Rupert Murdoch for his satire on Robert Maxwell in his ‘condition of England novel’, England, England (1998). His country’s condition, he sternly implies, is not
healthy – reduced as it is to a theme-park husk of what it once was. The most simply entertaining of Barnes’s works from this productive, and profoundly sceptical, phase of his career is The History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989). It opens with a jaundiced history of Noah, the flood, the ark and the new covenant from the revisionist point of view of a stowaway woodworm. The next chapter leaps forward to a modern cruise liner, hijacked on the seas. The TV celebrity lecturer on history, recruited to entertain the passengers, finds himself – as do the passengers – in history as the hijackers throw passengers overboard, ‘two by two’. It is a painful experience. So the chapters go on, subverting received ideas on every page. The novel (if that is what it can be called) was reprinted eight times in hardback in its first year.

  Flaubert is Barnes’s God – no question about that. But one can detect another less expected link with Kingsley Amis, the modern avatar of John Bullism. ‘One evening in 1983’, Barnes recalls, ‘I was having a drink with Kingsley Amis. He made the mistake of asking me what I was working on. I made the mistake of telling him … My account would have involved words such as ‘Flaubert and ‘parrot’ … As I was nearing the end of my preliminary outline – still with some way to go – I glanced up, and was confronted with an expression poised between belligerent outrage and apoplectic boredom.’ Barnes duly sent a complimentary copy of the book to Amis who informed him, without compliment, that he gave up at Chapter 3, ‘though he might have considered plodding on a bit further if only one of the two chaps there had pulled out a gun and shot the other chap’. The amusingly recounted episode suggests a gulf as wide as the English Channel between England’s arch-Tory and its most ‘Europeanised’ novelist. In fact, entirely the opposite may be argued. Kingsley Amis loved trying his hand at genre literature: whether James Bond (Colonel Sun), the cosy 1930s crime novel (The Riverside Villas Murder), the ghost story (The Green Man), or science fiction (The Alteration). Barnes is as fascinated by the possibilities of genre, if less skittish. In 1980 he began putting out a series of Soho based crime novels under the pseudonym ‘Dan Kavanagh’, featuring a series hero, ‘Duffy’, a bisexual, sleazy, soccer-loving, private eye. Duffy came, said Barnes, ‘from a different part of my brain.’ No mystery as to where ‘Kavanagh’ came from.