The quill is mightier than the sword
The Porcupine, by Julian Barnes
£5.99, Picador (1993)
Every Julian Barnes book is different from the rest. Nonetheless, there is a particular method he returns to in order to drive the plot. He lets each character play out a rich, complex internal life in front of the reader to inform their often otherwise often inexplicable actions. It is this which lends a humanity to Barnes’ least human—and, in some stories, non-human—protagonists. In The Porcupine, a short story about the trial of fictional, deposed, Soviet-satellite leader Stoyo Petkanov, he uses this method to achieve the impossible: to make liberals fall in love with a communist Alf Garnett.
Petkanov is a totalitarian boor, a lost soul, a Kurtz that cannot be brought back from the darkness. Yet, as Martin Amis accomplishes in Time’s Arrow, Barnes forces us to examine our own morality through its mad inverted twin, which permeates Petkanov’s tirades against the running-dog upstarts who dare to question his rule. His world has fallen apart but he remains together—although not for long—and we feel the visceral heat of his coherent outrage. As Peter Solinsky, chief prosecutor under the new regime, tries to find a foothold for the intended public prosecution of the old dictator, the reader must face the imperfections of post-Soviet societies stripped of their capitalist rhetoric, and wince at the bitterness that Petkanov feels, when he remembers the chance he had had to rejuvenate and perhaps even save communism. Gorbachev, fucking Gorbachev, supposed hero of the cold war, broke his promise to Petkanov, Petkanov’s country, all of the Soviet Union and communism itself. Well, didn’t he, Petkanov demands?
If Arthur Koestler had had a more jesterly sense of humour, we would have had from him The Porcupine instead of Darkness at Noon. Koestler’s moral ambiguity stems from Rubashov’s own admission of his guilt, as part of a system immoral both as a whole and as its constituent individuals, and his later attempts to live, briefly, with himself; Barnes plays on the sympathy one feels, sitting outside this irredeemable old man. It’s a sympathy born of pity—he’s a pathetic figure, twisted in the absence of his moral compass—but the feeling itself stands as a testament to man’s eventual humanity to man.
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It’s good to talk
Talking it Over, by Julian Barnes
£6.99, Picador (1992)
Whose opinion do you trust, when three friendships become a ménage à trois that disintegrates catastrophically? Who is the victim and who is the perpetrator? Is there an innocent bystander, an unsuspecting accomplice, or a selfish socipath in their midst? Can any one character ever be described in such extremes, when everyone might be guilty or blameless to some degree? Julian Barnes attempts to answer, or at any rate pose, these questions in Talking it Over. His three narrators all speak in the first person, discussing their own versions of events, their reactions and calculations, and their readings of each other’s experiences: the last, with varying degrees of accuracy.
It’s an an illuminating portrayal of three incomplete personalities which, while forming a whole that’s just a little too big for the comfort of its component parts, would be unstable with any piece missing. But this method of contrasting first-hand accounts, while illuminating, has its own risks. Lengthy internal monologues have difficulties retaining emotional ambiguity. James Joyce and Mark Haddon both triumphed over the internal monologue’s literalization and crystallization of emotion: the one by sly, ungrammatical undercurrents of id; the other by the transformation of an emotional dysfunction into emotional tension. But while Barnes effortlessly causes the reader’s sympathy to move from one character to the next, by revealing some event or motivation that was never suspected, he nonetheless pins the sympathy in place after each move. We are in no doubt, on any given page, about who we should be rooting for, exactly how they are feeling and who is at fault; when the scene rearranges it quickly clears once more.
The characters, for all their development and internal coherence, often feel like two-tiered constructs, their structure designed specifically to illuminate the difference between how their outer surfaces are perceived and how their inner selves suffer. And there’s much that Barnes doesn’t address here that Beckett’s Endgame covers admirably, even if Barnes is far more accessible. Still, Talking it Over is written with Barnes’ typical and accomplished skill for characters and dialogue, and an attention to detail that serves him well as—almost as editor of these three personal accounts—he juxtaposes opinion with opinion so as to try to approach the truth. Whatever that might be.
posted at: 12:28 |
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The kitsching of the prevalent
The Pedant in the Kitchen, by Julian Barnes
£7.99, Atlantic (2004)
Cookery columns are cool. Just ask Alex Kapranos of art-indie band Franz Ferdinand, who wrote a number of articles for the Guardian about what he ate while touring. Fellow reluctant Guardian foodie (and much more besides) Julian Barnes wrote a series of similar pieces, with the theme of how the reluctant, easily confused newcomer deals with existing books on cookery, the specifics of ingredients and utensils, and the general hilarity which a fool and a pan can invoke. The resulting collection, novella-length, is gently and rather casually written, like the writings of James Fenton (another Guardianista) who Barnes cites. There are quasi-subversive references to the Big Mac and the Martha Stewart, and the now obligatory debunking of the myth of Mrs Beeton. Generally, though, Barnes’ confusion and wide-eyed amateurish fear is almost entirely sympathetic, and really quite funny. The book has a warm humour and an unthreatening charm that makes you wonder just how far Barnes has moved from the axis of Amis and Swift he once happily and edgily sat upon.
An illuminating if unexpected companion piece to The Pedant would probably be one of Jeremy Clarkson’s recent bound diatribes. Both authors have a unique tone and a recalcitrant fanbase who are more than happy to read anything written in the genre. Both authors write as prisoners of powerful, ubiquitous systems, the political views of which are anathema to the writers themselves: Clarkson sees wet liberals everywhere in society, restricting the freedoms of honest white male car-owning well-off folk; Barnes’ kitchen library is full of passive-aggressive authoritarian Tories, keen to maintain a Victorian culinary status quo and refusing to provide him with information precise enough to liberate him from the bondage of novicehood. Both then proceed to rail against these systems: Clarkson in his witless, anti-intellectual “common-sense” bombast, Barnes in an overanalytical, weedy, self-undermining whine.
And both, ultimately, are unwilling to resort to any action that might bring about the revolutions for which they seem to be longing. Both are happy to complain, berate, hold up for mockery and generally work themselves into emotional froths, so long as it gains them the audiences they crave. Their personal bêtes noires are also their vaches de cash, and to actually slay them would be financial and—if you like—artistic folly. Instead, they happily perpetuate the systems with which they have vitriolic, dysfunctional but ultimately lucrative relationships. Still, that’s life. Or, more pedantically, that’s entertainment.
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