Spineless Reviews

Piano forte

The Quiet American, by Graham Greene

£6.99, Vintage (2004)

Fowler is a correspondent in Saigon, occasionally making trips into the heart of the Indo-Chinese war. But insofar a coherent country called Greeneland might ever be said to exist, he’s in it. Whether in the city or in the middle of other people’s fighting, he finds himself on the fault line between the personal and political, as Pyle, arousing suspicions as a visiting American without clear portfolio, arouses passions too in Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress Phuong. As Fowler grapples, lonely and godless, with a conscience that cannot tell one wrong from another, innocent people start to die as terrorists plant makeshift bombs throughout the city: Fowler knows who may really have caused their deaths.

Greene is able to squeeze moral good from his villains by a subtle twisting of typical Manicheanisms. Here he flips over the (once topical) dichotomy set up by the self-proclaimed heroes, America. Communism, for all its faults, shares those faults with so-called democracies; meanwhile its almost theological observances sneak in a note of ascetic virtue. Both ideologies prop up evil acts, as Greene shows, but at least Communism means it. It’s an interesting take on the politics, the product of a hyperrealism that can only be bred out of war and the logical extreme of cultural tourism: you feel he’d never get away with The Quiet Vietnamese.

More personally, even if he were to win back Phuong, Fowler would have to make his decisions alone, without consultation or prayer. This is life without spiritual community, life for the atheist who, unlike his estranged and undivorceable wife, cannot confess, cannot confide. He must instead deaden his existential pain with a poppy-pipe and the love of Phuong, more a muffling, resolute tolerance than affection.

In the course of the novel Greene drags Fowler, as he has done to so many of his other protagonists, through intrusive social closeness and abject spiritual loneliness. The distance between Fowler and his actions, bridged by thin threads of reason and humanism, is sometimes too great to be plausible. The matter-of-factness of the climax, itself practically a denouement, leaves one dazed and full of unanswered, unanswerable questions. Nonetheless its tense thrillerisms pull The Quiet American back from the brink of a reflexive reductio ad absurdum. They wrap it up, disguise it, deliver it with little fuss into the hands of the reader, who receives it and takes it to his heart, a quiet book about a quiet man, each as innocuous and explosive as a home-made bomb.

posted at: 20:24 | path: / g / greene_graham | permanent link to this entry

This farce: so good

Ronald Fish loves Sue Brown. Hugh Carmody loves Millicent Threepwood. Ronald Fish thinks Sue Brown loves Hugh Carmody, but Percy Pilbeam is the real threat. Lord Galahad Threepwood is writing his memoirs, the mere prospect of which sends Lady Constance into spasms. Speaking of spasms, if Baxter doesn’t return to the position of personal secretary at Blandings Hall, which Carmody has filled since the unfortunate flowerpot incident, her ladyship will have one, or at any rate wish one upon Emsworth, lord of the hall. But Baxter is too busy stealing that manuscript, while Carmody steals his lordship’s prize pig; or did Sir Gregory steal the animal, to distract from Pilbeam, under his employ, finding those damn memoirs that he too wants destroyed? Well, over all this nonsense presides the woolgathering Lord Emsworth; or at least he would, if Lady Constance didn’t try to do it for him. Besides, everyone knows Beach the butler is really in charge. But now, suddenly, he’s hiding the pig and saving the manuscript and matchmaking the couple and fixing the drinks: something has to give.

Being spontaneously farcical is easy, as almost every character in Summer Lighting proves to him or herself sooner or later. Composing and executing the perfect farce as a writer, however, takes skill, effort and an innate recognition of the perfect balance of all your characters’ desires and detractions against each other. The result of Wodehouse’s hard work whizzes round at breakneck pace like a crazed fairground ride, out of control and with the glorious, whirring machinery just visible as it pirouettes its way down the hillside into the lake. The stored energy is released in a rush, and what could have been a foolish throwaway holiday read is both that and a complicated, enjoyable firework display.

The novel is eventually, easily, discarded. Of course: that’s the point. But the short stories accompanying the novel, bound together in an out-of-print Heron edition, are a little too easily forgotten. The series, based around Lord Emsworth and his wayward son Freddie, disappoints. Each one’s brevity reduces the possibility of complexity and energy that makes Wodehouse worth reading. You don’t see the three chapters of winding up and clicking pieces in place; then any unwinding happens all too quickly and the pace is all wrong. Still, Wodehouse’s writing still bangs a gong for a genre often condemned for its shallowness and silliness. Or was that Beach, calling us in for another course?

posted at: 20:21 | path: / w / wodehouse_pelham_grenville | permanent link to this entry

Non-stop press

Urgent Copy, by Anthony Burgess

OOP, Penguin (1973)

To review reviews might be said to be compounding the mistakes that someone else made perfectly well for themselves. But Urgent Copy is worth reading, and arguably worth writing about. Burgess wrote for many reasons. He wrote for fun; he wrote for profit. He wrote to settle scores, and he wrote with the urgency of a man condemned by doctors to die. Most importantly and proverbially, though, he wrote and wrote and wrote. It must have been easy to skim off the cream and package it as this volume.

Burgess proceeds from his fields of expertise and deep interest (Nabokov, Beckett) through standard literary-rag fare (Shakespeare, Milton) arriving quite happily and breezily in landscapes he himself is clearly only just discovering (the brothers Grimm and Walter Bagehot—there: a review of a review of reviews). Not to worry, though: like Bertrand Russell, Burgess will happily cover acres of ground that we could never cover for ourselves; as with Russell, we must inevitably discover the hidden snares for ourselves.

What stands out are his reviews of stinkers. As he says in his preface, he is always willing to give his fellow trench-diggers the benefit of the doubt. So when Williams’ Modern Tragedy “makes tragedy a very tragic business”, the understatement (which elsewhere seems a little overindulgent) is as damning as a personal slur. But above all Burgess’ writing shines with a rhetorical and intellectual clarity, that some mistake for a pretence to rigid, studious integrity. Despite the huge body of work he has left behind in the field of criticism and analysis—only a slice of it exhumed in Urgent Copy—he was above all a complicated mix of author and journalist. At his worst, he is eminently readable. At his best, he’s a joy.

posted at: 19:47 | path: / b / bl-bu / burgess_anthony | permanent link to this entry