Spineless Reviews

Earthy prowess

Earthly Powers, by Anthony Burgess

£6.99, Vintage (2004)

The Toomey family and its spouses span the two worlds of secular and spiritual entertainment: the former popular, and the latter trying to be more so under the auspices of the new pope and brother-in-law to narrator Kenneth Toomey. Over eighty years Ken tries to hold the family together, popularize highbrow writing (or more often vice versa) and hide his homosexuality from the disapproving authorities and his more disapproving relatives. Meanwhile Don Carlo barges his way through the echelons of the Roman Catholic Church. The one, blighted along many of with his comrades-in-art by what he considers to be original sin; the other, comprehending the sinner, but unwilling to denounce that doctrine which draws most criticism to him and his allies.

Captured by the novel at the end of his life, the narrator and confirmed atheist must reconcile his own beliefs with undeniable miracles performed by Carlo, whom the Roman Catholic Church would see beatified if only the testimony of a confirmed non-believer could strengthen their cause. We find Burgess in these semi-autobiographical waters, sometimes treading, sometimes swimming powerfully (against currents to which lesser writers might yield), and sometimes splashing around in a fug, making you wonder why he doesn’t towel himself off and go and do something else.

Ominously, the book starts slowly and painfully. These birth pangs lower Toomey/Burgess’ prose to the level of the amateur writer: awkward phrasing, overintellectual posturing and excessive descriptions imply a difficult time ahead. But the rambling tale quickly warms up, and after a few chapters is striding through history, directing its players like chess pieces, making inscrutable moves that plan in irony for a plot (historical or often pseudo-historical) twist some ten years distant.

The appearance of several members of the entre deux guerres literati will yield either wicked grins or pained cringes, according to taste: although most will baulk at the forced (and forcedly ironic) chumminess in calling the century’s most astonishing writer “Jim Joyce”, the dirty truth about what George Russell was really doing on Bloomsday more than compensates for such aesthetic agonies. Certainly this novel weaves a dazzling history out of disparate and unlikely materials, although one must then contend with the entanglement of fictional and apocryphal threads in the weft.

Ultimately the story suffers from its length (a thick wodge reminiscent of doorstop thrillers), becoming meandering and losing its climax in a huddle of successive denouements. This doesn’t harm the pull of its yarn, but the ante has been raised and we expect more from Burgess of all people. Still, there are treasures to be unearthed here, rich parodies and pastiches of the literary and the decidedly unliterary—the lyrics to the musical rendition of Ulysses being a case in point—and multilingual jokes that work even for the monoglot.

Here is a story, then, that can be enjoyed on a casual reading, and has much for the more circumspect; but the murky, peaty depths stop too soon, too abruptly. In a book about a writer, written by the writer’s writer, this is as disconcerting as a swimming pool four foot shallower than advertised. But if not having the heart to compose a great, “high-art” acrostic—as the protagonist could not bring himself to do either—is a sin that only our mate Jim was ever able to resist, and then only one and a half times, then it can hardly be considered an original one.

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Comynycacyon betwyxt Burgess, and our sauyour Jhesu

Little Wilson and Big God, by Anthony Burgess

£8.99, Penguin (1988)

The autobiography of someone so prolific and polymathic as Burgess inevitably carries with it heavy baggage, a retinue of expectations and assumptions and questions that must be answered. From his very first disclaimer, though, Burgess both shifts the ground away from his ego and towards his experiences and history, and at the same time assures us that this will be no whitewash. If this is to be a redrafting at the hands of Memory—inevitable, and announced as such, following the destruction of most of his papers at the hands of Malaysian termites—then there will be no clear intent to sanctify the author.

Every wart on Anthony Burgess’ head has been counted. Most of them by the man himself, and some fifty percent of those in the first half of his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God. Generous with the reader and cynical of his own literati excesses, Burgess is loveable from the first flash of his wicked humour. He’s a self-acknowledged fudger, if not exactly an outright fraud, but he can both acknowledge it and get over his Catholic guilt at the fact. The master skimmer, faker in part, wins in the end because of the knowledge, wit and research—let’s refrain from using the word “genius”—that he needn’t fake: his intellectual laziness and intellectual robustness together making him so exciting and infuriating.

We follow Burgess through his troubled paternal relationship, terminated in his childhood, and his experiences at the hands of his step-family. He makes it to university, but is hardly the model pupil. Arguably his extracurricular interests save him as a human being and, spurred on by the alternatives—a teacher in the army and at a school, and various jobs in the colonies—and the sudden appearance of serious illness, his hubris, life history and willingness to just sit and write set him on the career path we now know him to have chosen.

All the time we are conscious of Burgess analysing himself, prising open old wounds for us to see, ashamed but not faltering in the task of the biographer who, even if the subject is himself, and for all his desire to paint for posterity, respects the audience he expects for his book just enough to be honest. Even if you allow for the shameless polyamory of his marital life (on both sides), he treated his wife shabbily, neglect which he clearly believed led to her eventual descent into alcoholism and death from a liver complaint. Here is no saint, no god, no perfect writing machine.

You can argue, as Roger Lewis does in his recent biography of Burgess, that such disingenuousness is bluff and counterbluff ad nauseam. That is not the point. Nor is it the point that Lewis’ work is mean-spirited, poorly researched or simply untrue, although it is. The plain fact is that Burgess writes well: he engages, he mocks, his turns of phrase are not so elegant as to be stylized, nor so clumsy as to be gauche. Such writing sits on solid foundations of artistry, skill, knowledge and learning. Lewis might want to stop crying naked! at the knowingly unclothed emperor and learn a thing or—maybe, just maybe, if he concentrates very hard—even two.

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Seek and destroy

The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester

£6.99, Gollancz (1999)

We follow murderer Ben Reich and ESP-capable detective Lincoln Powell as they battle it out in twenty-fourth century America and in the timeless provinces of the human mind. Reich is an abnormality, a psychotic, who has hidden himself through tricks and bluffs from the sprawling organization of espers. The gifted have become, through Hippocratic principles, guardians of mankind’s psychology. If Reich is a first-class killer then Powell is a first-class ESPer, and to trap Reich will take first-class methods. Everything hinges on the motivation, which only the espers can divine. Can they get to Reich in time?

Science fiction arguably works better as a style rather than a genre—the pure desire to present fascinating ideas and scientific speculations is more suited to an encyclopædia than a novel, but by using those ideas as a medium and source of analogies for a story is a subtle balancing act that makes good, better, bester. That the The Demolished Man is a thriller, and a fast-paced, convoluted one at that, enjoyable and rich in detail and characters is undeniable; but that it’s SF? Well… SF definitely takes a back-seat at times, but if it weren’t along for the ride then where would the fun be?

The novel has aged badly in places. While Asimov can be forgiven for programming his spaceships with punched cards, making them charmingly Heath-Robinson, in fact, it’s hard to forgive Bester for concretizing pre-1950s psychology. Ascientific Freudian nonsense mapped out before your eyes—a telepath having highly literate conversations with someone’s preconscious, for example, or a trip through their ego, id and superego like the cheap special effects in Star Trek V—stumbles, and is stuffy and unconvincing. The more highfalutin reasons for risking so much to catch Reich are also, it must be said, nonsense: Reich killed someone, which nobody has done in mainstream society for years; why abstract it further when there’s no need?

But if it is nonsense (and the careful characterizations, fascinating cultural/technological interfacing, and otherwise watertight plot must surely rescue the rest from such a condemnation), it’s grand nonsense, blockbuster, rollicking, thumping, readable, enjoyable nonsense. If it’s nonsense, then let’s have more.

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Body as text

The Simmons Papers, by Philipp Blom

OOP, Faber and Faber (1995)

Purely for interest’s sake, I found myself reading papers purportedly from the estate of one Paul Simmons, Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy. These publicize Simmons’ time working on a great project, language’s perpetual perfecting by a secret international network of intellectuals-as-encyclopaedists. Or do they? It is never clear whether Simmons is actually writing about himself, or himself writing fictional prose. This doubly literary persona, known only by the initial letter ‘P’ on which he works, archiving and detailing word meanings and etymologies, finds himself suffering from psychiatric problems, the pursuit of words perverting the old gentleman’s personality.

Pre-empting the reader’s own powers, Blom has provided footnotes and cross-commentary from imaginary critics who parrot received wisdom in their fields on the nature and intent of Simmons’ legacy. Complete with a pseudobiographical preface, The Simmons Papers’ pose as a palimpsest is clear. Blom is playing tricks, which occasionally fall flat: knowing and arch, sesquipedalian and sixth-form. When Professor Trefusis from a certain polytechnic pokes out of the pages early on, the posture has clearly already been assumed: Blom wants us to know that he considers us wise indeed, but no more wise than he. So we put up with a protectorate of in-case-you-missed-its and this-is-the-clever-bits. Providence smiles upon us!

Plainly Simmons, or ‘P’, is shown as pitiful and pernickety in this occasionally sympathetic portrayal. His plaintive passions towards the pretty woman in ‘M’ plunge us into the depths of his soul, and his prolonged longings for her stand starkly against his bookish bumblings among biblical bromides and the Shakespearean shibboleths that his work warrants yet which he can scarcely stomach. Yet it is all contrivance and claustrophobia: the intellectual powerhouse is clearly a poor man’s Bodleian Library, Simmons a potluck of whoever Blom bumped into in Oxford, and the project a poorly defined pastiche of academic endeavour.

Probably Blom would find in Simmons a moderate fan. His protagonist would pore over this book permeated with plays on words and postmodern flourishes. But Simmons’ interest would be clinical and cold: the linguistic games would provide him with hours of particularizing, but in passing he might well admit that the a better editor would have produced a better book.

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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.

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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.

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My vibrations will live on

Vertigo, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac

£5.99, Bloomsbury (1997)

When you die, does your soul pass into another’s? Flavières would once have said no. Once a straightforward-thinking policeman, a terrible accident during a rooftop pursuit of a suspect made him forsake the service for the life of a private investigator. But when he falls in love with his best friend’s wife Madeleine, who he’s trying to protect from herself, and who seems to be channeling the spirit of a suicidal ancestor Pauline, what should he believe? And when Madeleine finally succeeds in killing herself, only for Flavières to find Renée who resembles her to an uncanny degree, what can he think then? Is Pauline truly Madeleine, and Madeleine truly Renée, though the grave separates them all?

Not a word is wasted in this taut, chilling thriller that inspired the Hitchcock film. Initially released in the French as D’Entre les Morts and translated as The Living and the Dead, the book is now typically found under the title of its cinematic equivalent. Flavières moves swiftly and unstoppably, more a plummet than a controlled journey, through the weighty scenes of the case, and the disintegration of his rational mind is frightening to behold. Different locations have their leitmotive in the text, with the fatefulness of the village church contrasting with the warm sleepiness of post-war Marseilles. Every new chapter is a surprise, with twists and turns that are as easy to follow as they are hard to predict.

An updated translation might be welcome: speech is occasionally stilted, even for the 1940s, and it might be said that there’s a French frankness of discussion that seems out of place in the English. But even in its current form Vertigo is a terrible, frightening joy to read, a sweet but poisoned chalice that keeps its most complex flavour until the very last drop.

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A tangled web

Silk, by Alessandro Baricco

£3.99, Harvill Press (1998)

The breeding of silkworms was once a secret closely guarded by a Japanese elite. Western traders, such as Hervé Joncour, would rarely be offered even the fertilized eggs; when they were, it would be strictly at a certain stage of gestation, and the race would be on to return before the eggs hatched. In such a manner does Joncour spend his days, following the trade routes to the Orient and back on a timescale of seasons and years. Then he finds himself falling in love with the conccubine of Hara Kei, his Japanese contact. His whole world is seized with a great tremor, and when the dust has settled nothing will be the same again.

While writing Silk, Baricco probably had in mind that he was putting together a stylish novel; this self-consciousness has created a rather stylized one instead. The many quirks such as repetition and dwelling on details (the importance of which isn’t immediately obvious) veer between being evocative to being annoying and back, passing through endearing on the way. More difficult to digest than that, though, is the lead character. Joncour is presented as a thoughtful, taciturn man: we are expected to believe that dark currents move beneath his show of repose. But none of them are ever really alluded to, still less rise above the waves. His emotional reactions are tangential: practically unemotional.

A love story where, owing to narrative constraints, the central character could easily be autistic seems an ill-advised proposition. Indeed, it’s difficult to engage at all with Silk on a human level. Still, the conceit of a Western novel told in the cadences and rhythms of Japanese poetry is an exciting one, and there are many set pieces—Joncour’s journey across south-east Europe and Asia—that have a charm all of their own. If only the same could be said of the characters.

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The father, the stroke and the holy mess

Three Stories, by Alan Bennett

£7.99, Profile (2003)

(This review appeared in the ReadReverb newsletter, Nov 11, 2005.)

A newly-invested vicar lets the funeral of a well-known masseur (both literal and euphemistic) get out of hand, as the congregation starts chipping in with their dirty stories. A middle-aged couple’s life is turned upside town, as their London flat is turned inside-out, swept clean by burglars and bringing on a seizure in the husband. A teacher’s father begins the long, quiet process of dying in his sleep while his family, and the ties within it, whirl and stretch and start to snap around him.

Each story in this anthology acts like a window into other people’s lives, and revel in the loose ends and commonplace, irksome complexities from which all of our own stories suffer. Each has also been fêted by the press, and rightly so: Bennett shows us what it’s like not just to be human, but to be other humans, to feel the itch of that person scratching over there and not just to perceive that they have an itch. And each story has its own individual arc and tempo: now pulling you along, now stopping to show you a detail, now involving you in the convolutions and complications.

Bennett sometimes dwells on details a little too much; a little gauchely, as the voices of the characters whose lives he is narrating suddenly leak out, and take over the telling from the otherwise disinterested voice of the author. But, as with his Talking Heads, such clumsiness could be just as studied as unintentional, and lends an endearing, conversational tone to what might otherwise be an unbelievable collision of circumstances. Ultimately every single word is engaged in the act of apologising for, indeed defending, people who any other writer might give up as inexcusable and indefensible; only the artist’s own giving-up, Bennett implies, has itself no defence.

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Better safe than sullied

The Safety Net, by Heinrich Böll

OOP, Abacus (1981)

Society crumbles. Our industrial masters live cloistered, surrounded by security men and measures. Culture desecrates itself, destroying what it once cherished. sexual tolerance leads to sexual permissivity leads to sexual perversion, as a wave of pornographic media and attitudes swamps the world around Fritz Tolm, newspaper owner and president of the shadowy Association. We consume our dead and our children; the Church is corrupt; the State is authoritarian and hated. And on top of all this, not only does someone want to kill Tolm, but the hand that deals the blow might even be that of Veronica, his daughter-in-law and father of his grandson Holger.

The actions of the Tolm family in this book, which make up what is essentially a romantic melodrama, are all set against the safety net of security, which threatens to stifle every act they perform. Their lives are founded on, structured around, and shackled by the measures designed to make them safe. But in the glare of publicity at his new appointment as Association president Tolm finds a core of resolution in his family, which is tried and tested by the events of the rest of the novel—Sabine’s infidelity, Rolf’s intransigence, and young Holger’s sudden reappearance (a harbinger of his mother’s impending violent action)—but emerges strong and joyful. This resolution carries him through all the technicalities and intricacies of the measures intended for his safety to the books complex, multiply-bluffed climax.

Böll’s very prose is made from the vacillations and confusions within the minds of his cast. In addition, the book assumes (generally laudably) that aspects of this dystopia can be hinted at rather than laboured. These two tendencies do combine to make the reading experience a complicated one, yet it’s a joy to watch each paragraph take one expertly choreographed, twisted dance-step further towards sympathy with these trapped people. The snares seem so convincing when encountered singly, until one looks back at where the individual has come from and is shocked. He writes lyrically, liltingly, reflexively and poetically, producing something from the same stable as Heller’s obsessive Something Happened, but somehow less dense: Böll can both satirize the 1970s with this timeless tale and at the same time tell a beautiful, human story.

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Something from the security of every man’s life

Running Wild, by J G Ballard

£6.99, Flamingo (1997)

(This review appeared in the ReadReverb newsletter, April 14, 2006, and on the ReadReverb website)

That the task of shocking people becomes more difficult over time is a truism borne out, broadly speaking, by the trajectories of popular culture: yesterday’s X-rated films are today’s ironic artefacts; the antics of Kenneth Williams or Joe Orton are now interesting commentaries on their time; and books whose themes were once wholly beyond the pale are now ripe for discussion at A level. Nonetheless, it’s surprising to find that the disturbing plot twist of Running Wild, a foray by the iconoclastic Ballard into the world of the rich middle class, can be guessed halfway through the third page.

When the inactive CCTV cameras of a secure estate near Pangbourne are the mute witnesses of the brutal, organized killing of all the adults, and the abduction of their children, the desperate denizens of the Home Office call in a maverick psychiatric adviser to solve a problem which months of departmental work couldn’t crack. So far, so Lynda-La-Plante; but as the novella progresses it’s clear that this particular suspense thriller is hardly Saturday-night ITV fare. Indeed, the book strikes to the heart of that genre’s assumptions—all nonces are scum, the loose cannons are the true lawmakers, and if the guilty don’t get their just desserts then they’re at least verifiably guilty—and might cause the average viewer of The Bill to slam the book closed in horror, or at any rate write a jolly angry letter of complaint.

Unfortunately, the catch for Ballard is that the audience that might be genuinely disturbed by this, a deep excursion into the farthest reaches of id similar to the terrible revenge wrought by Saki’s Sredni Vashtar, are unlikely to read his books; those who appreciate a decent evening’s account of the churning, shifting sands upon which civilization’s trembling castle is built, on the other hand, are now so post-Paedogeddon that the writer needs to be either more subtle or more provocative than this. Even accounting for its age, this book was published at around the time when David Lynch was already exposing the rotten timber of the lower foot or two of America’s white picket-fences; while it’s far more approachable it’s also less bizarre and less dangerous than other examples of the genre. The biggest shock, therefore, is how unshocking it really is.

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The land of the setting sun

The Long Day Wanes, by Anthony Burgess

OOP, Penguin (1981)

The British empire is on the retreat. Finally accepting that the complexity of Eastern society is a puzzle they will never solve, the massed ranks of Western officialdom are starting to pull up sticks and book their flights home. Victor Crabbe, and his eventual acquaintances Nabby Adams and Rupert Hardman are in the process of becoming anachronisms; although Crabbe is the only one to fully perceive it, he nonetheless clings the most doggedly to the evolving Malayan state. While the Malays, Tamils, Chinese and Muslims perform a vicious dance together, of accusations, fights and simmering revolution, Crabbe is hoping he can stay on long enough to help the indigenous peoples solve that puzzle for themselves. But how can Crabbe save the remnants of bureaucracy that might help to bring forth a nascent Malaya, when he has trouble saving his own career, marriage or sobriety? Through education, and a national symphony…?

Much is autobiographical about Burgess’ sprawling cycle of books, originally published as A Malayan Trilogy. Burgess was a teacher; he spent a lot of his life in the east; his marriage had its ups and downs, and his first wife her alcoholic, dissipated spells. Indeed, much of the colour of this book is clearly first-hand: vivid, although with an inevitable touch of colonialism, it brings all the characters fully, utterly to life. Many of them are at least in part stereotypes of their race, but in the volatile environment of the Malayan peninsula at that time it’s easy to believe that people would return to the values of the cultures they grew up with, entrenching racial divides at the expense of national unity. Moreover, in every case the stereotype typically forms only a tiny fraction of each portrait, like a vague political allegiance rather than the main drive of the personality. Burgess has developed the individuality of each person to the point where it completely swamps the moulds that originally formed their shapes: the inscrutable Chinese are either Britain-spoiled chortling aesthetes or confused, hair-tearing adolescent geniuses; the devout Muslims all take part in haram to varying extents, sometimes partying and mingling with the British; they in turn are neurotic and tortured, or gushing and well-meaning, scarcely ever bluff or stiffened of upper lip.

Such depth of character is very much welcome, because the plot of the trilogy might as well not be there. Events just sort of happen to people, and any attempt to take matters into their own hands leads them more often then not to minor perditions. It might be said that, certainly for Crabbe, external politics move him from place to place and advance the book, but one feels that the precise opposite happening would, as far as Burgess is concerned, suit the course of the novels just as well. It’s this pointlessness, this lack of a teleology, that makes the books so convincingly realistic. A polemic, or a more surgical dissection of the mistakes and bad judgment that took part in the formation of the Federation of Malaya, might have served Burgess’ cause more fully, but it’s not entirely clear what he was pursuing with these novels (if anything more than his own career). However you interpret his political stance and the success of its communication, though, there’s no doubting that he brings a transitional, forgotten world to life; if the remnants of the empire include the humanity of Crabbe and others, then it cannot have wholly failed.

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A self-made man

James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, by Frank Budgen

OOP, Oxford Paperbacks (1989)

To write memoirs depicting one of the great artists of one’s generation is to throw one’s own talents into sharp relief. James Boswell has arguably suffered far more than his decent skill would suggest at the hands of critics for writing in the vast, pendulous shadow of Johnson. And to intersperse such recollections with details of your own life is to risk descending to a level of beam-in-your-eye Pooterism that generations to come will mock. So for Frank Budgen—middling painter, civil servant, self-made man—to attempt to describe James Joyce’s time in Zürich (even as a first-hand account of the great man’s conversations), and then to dot the novel with his own paintings, and to interpret chapters of both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in painstaking detail, is to invite ridicule from every quarter.

Budgen was clearly emboldened in his task by a cheerful ignorance of the hit-and-miss nature of his own gift for painting. An atmospheric portrait of Joyce on the flyleaf admirably captures the man’s wiry, pent-up energy enthusiasm which often escapes later photographs, and his rendering of The Lotus Eaters is gentle and calm, while later plates include tortuously literal transcriptions of the symbology of Proteus and The Oxen of the Sun onto canvas, and what looks like Leopold Bloom wanking on the head of a bat in the vague direction of a distant Folies-Bergère filly. But all this is presented with the rather straightforward confidence that characterizes the rest of the book: Budgen doesn’t comment on his own painting, and talks of himself only in the context of being in Joyce’s wartime city, and to flesh out the city. In a sense his willing ignorance of himself makes him a factual everyman much like Bloom in fiction, and he becomes an excellent cipher for the tale of Joyce’s wrestling with both books.

Indeed, although Budgen does not make it explicit, it seems like Joyce was trying out a number of his literary and artistic theories on him: whereas Joyce admits himself to be no critic—he can’t let himself make such objective judgments in his own pursuit of his art qua subject—Budgen freely expresses his own taste, intentions and ideas all mixed together. Joyce and Budgen talk a good deal, none of it reflecting wonderfully on Budgen (and therefore probably true) but all of it enlightening about Joyce’s opinions and motivations, both retrospectively behind Ulysses and also behind the ongoing Work in Progress that would become his last, great book.

Every few chapters Budgen unburdens himself of chapters of Joyce as if he has taken a purgative, and the effect is to prevent in turn the flow of the genial narrative that his more literal recollections comprise. No doubt he has a number of important points about the groundbreaking nature of Joyce’s work to illuminate, but one does wish he might let the man speak for himself, given he clearly did so on many occasions. Still, he quickly picks up the thread again of his meetings with Joyce, and Zürich is described with understated, unaffected affection. The wartime antics of Budgen and the British in Switzerland are an amusing sideline to what, quietly and unassumingly, begins with an accurate picture of Joyce and eventually becomes a much more revealing, verbal portrait.

posted at: 20:48 | path: / b / bl-bu / budgen_frank | permanent link to this entry

A photograph is a secret about a secret

Master Georgie, by Beryl Bainbridge

£6.99, Abacus (1999)

Beautiful George Hardy has never been alone. With some utterly undefineable charisma he is able to attract and then surround himself with a coterie of friends, quasi-servants and general hangers-on. The cerebral Dr Potter hovers around him, gradually exhausting Georgie’s good will and his purse. Meanhwile, poor Myrtle is so devoted to him that she has become an it that loves, while Pompey Jones, with his birth-bruised upper lip and a dark heart, knows he is closer to what Georgie really wants. Between them these three tell their stories, inextricably entwined with Georgie’s own, and punctuated by the drawn-out procedures that the taking of photographs demanded in the 19th century. Georgie is a force of nature, pulling them all along in his wake. But he couldn’t stop his father dying; he can’t deflect his own desires; and ultimately nothing will help him dodge whatever Crimean bullet bears his name.

At first glance this is a light book. Sparsely told, Myrtle’s first story (of six: two told by each companion) seems far lighter and simpler than the events that it portrays. But it soon becomes clear that Beryl Bainbridge spares not a single one of her sentences in this novel: each is necessary, a grain of oxidized silver that permits us eventually to see the full picture of these tragic, twisted lives. The more stories we read, the more the truth of the characters’ history is filled in, and we are given not merely the appearance of past events but also their sinister import. We gradually learn the truth about Potter’s dysfunctional marriage, Georgie’s friendship with Pompey, and the provenance of Georgie’s children. Always there is something more, some other dimension to the events already described, that change their aspect completely and leave the reader guessing: is this really the truth? Is the truth yet to come?

Indeed, despite the apparent simplicity, this book can perform arcane and legion magic tricks on the mind of the reader. Each chapter begins with a description of a photograph to be taken at some point before it ends, ironically summarizing some subtler aspect of the story. And the first time it switches voices between characters is a sublime event, so apparently effortless is the manoeuvre. The gradual dissolution of one narrator’s senses in the heat of war is terrifying in its sense of rationality falling unstoppably downhill. And as the dirty secrets of each character start to tumble out one by one, littering their understandings of each other, so too does the dirt and blood of war multiply and spread, filth piling upon filth, with our four characters scrabbling over the dead and dying to keep their heads above its level, still climbing, still devoted to Master Georgie, right up to the book’s cold, cold climax.

posted at: 16:48 | path: / b / ba-be / bainbridge_beryl | permanent link to this entry

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.

posted at: 14:16 | path: / b / ba-be / barnes_julian | permanent link to this entry