]]>The first hour is wonderful, from the opening scene to the moment half-way through when the big derrick blows: all the hands-on mucky dangerous trade of getting stuff out from under the ground, eye-bogglingly well filmed. Scene 1: Daniel Fairview the obsessive-compulsive getting stuff out, on his own, and breaking his leg in the process. He drags himself miles over terrain so barren it makes the violins screech on the soundtrack. It’s marvellously well shot, and we believe every bit of the effort it costs both Daniel the character and Daniel the famous method actor. (Did he break his leg just to check he was doing it right?)
After that, all the business, the logistics, the encampments of workers – and, brilliantly, the full-size derrick that gets itself built in the background…. We’re there. The logistical trials are completely convincing, as are the charismatic performances put on by Fairview each time he wants to win over another pinched, overworked community – all shot in (I think) long takes in which Day-Lewis persuades the cinema audience as surely as the farm communities. And all along, of course, he’s using somebody else’s boy as a prop, pretending.... So we can see past the rhetoric to the conman beneath and we think: Bastard.
23 February
Yep, I’d happily watch the first hour again. But.... Anderson doesn’t do much else with it. He squanders the opportunity he has for developing a genuine opposition between Fairview and the equally charismatic (in at least two senses of the word) Eli Sunday; it ought to be the strongest thread in the drama, but it isn’t. In fact they’re hardly ever in a scene together once Fairview has started drilling, so there’s no spark. Sure, there are set-piece confrontations, and they are brilliantly done, in their way. But it’s fireworks, not drama, because after any one of them they don’t meet again, sometimes for years.
The scene is set for these head-to-heads when Eli asks to be allowed to bless the drilling. There’s a crowd gathered, Eli is ready – and Fairview does the blessing himself, using Eli’s best lines to put on his own show. Bastard, we think again, as Eli looks bemused. And after the drill strikes oil we get the first confrontation. Eli asks, fairly robustly (because he doesn’t yet know what a nutter he’s dealing with), for the money Fairview promised. Fairview responds by subjecting him to a ritual public beating, and dumping him in an oil slick. End of scene, end of dramatic possibilities. After that we get exactly two more scenes between them in the remaining hour, both pyrotechnical set pieces but essentially reducing their confrontations to those of competing alpha males in a nature documentary.
For the film to have any tension, Eli ought to have been a force of nature in opposition to Fairview. Instead he looks like second-best. In the alpha male competition between the actors Day-Lewis wins by dint of sheer screen-time. He’s hardly ever off-screen, and Paul Dano is hardly ever on. We do see him, as it happens, shortly after the humiliation in the oil-slick when he has a one-sided fight to establish dominance in his own family: he beats up his worn-out father. It looks exactly like the sort of thing Fairview would do and establishes that Eli is just as ruthless as the oil-man is. But, as before: end of scene, end of drama. For half an hour or more Fairview pootles along doing this and that, and it all gets a bit boring. There’s a mean trick he plays on his pretend son, now deaf, to get him away; some business with a brother who isn’t really a brother; some stuff with businessmen who try to buy him out. It passes the time, but it’s not that interesting....
Along comes the next Grand Guignol set piece. Eli has a chance to pay Fairview back, by putting him through an even more public humiliation than he suffered himself. To accompany the metaphorical abasement – Fairview has to confess his sins before God and the congregation – there’s physical abasement and no little violence to go with it. But then, nothing in the film stays off the physical level for long (I’m reminded of Fairview’s not-quite son returning from his exile to kick his not-quite father on the shins) and Fairview is left silently incandescent with rage as he pretends to submit. It’s no surprise that this clip is the one often shown on tv.
Another long gap. More stuff, including Fairview routinely shooting the man who turns out not to be his brother – what else is a man to do? – before we get the third, deciding bout. As ever, any rhetorical sparring soon becomes physical – and because this is the final confrontation (it even sounds like one of those Alien Vs Predator-type movies) it has to be to the death. Obviously.
Years have passed, and Eli is a busted flush. Fairview, even in the middle of a hangover that would kill ten ordinary men, delivers one knock-out blow after another. He forces Eli to deny his faith and proclaim his preaching to be a pretence. Then, as the preacher staggers up from the canvas (good this, innit?) Fairview follows up with a worse blow: the oilfield is exhausted, so his promised financial rescue of Eli’s church was just a joke. Down goes Eli again – and now it’s time for the fight to become literal. Obviously.
They’re in Fairview’s private bowling alley – as weirdly hermit-like as Leonardo di Caprio’s mansion in The Aviator – and at first we get cartoon violence, straight out of Tom and Jerry’s Bowling Alley Cat from the 1940s. Poor Eli gets a bowling ball tripping him up, gets bowling pins lobbed at him (in one comic sequence he disappears behind a screen and we see Fairview chucking the pins down at him).... And finally Fairview catches up with him. Careful with that bowling pin, Danny boy... oops, too late, and he’s delivering the inevitable coup de grace: three blows to the head. Thankfully, like the almost identical scene at the end of Reservoir Dogs (although far less resonant with regret) we see only the assailant, not the victim. But the angle widens and, well, we always know with Fairview that there will be blood. Ho ho.
It’s not climactic. There could have been a sense of catharsis if Anderson had made more of Fairview’s asceticism and all-round withdrawal from society. There are hints of his self-denial (verging, as it were, on the asexual) throughout the film: he sits out while his so-called brother gets a welcome shag in a brothel; he refuses to talk about his so-called son’s mother, or marriage in general – we never, ever, see him talking alone to a woman – because for Fairview such things don’t exist. (Interesting how even family relationships are sham, if not through his choice then through somebody else’s.) So the final murder doesn’t come as a release from this, a bursting of some kind of psychological dam, because we’ve seen such releases before. His industrial-scale boozing, his readiness to resort to violence and a whole range of bullying techniques, his sheer force of personality make us forget that his inability to make any kind of link with the human world ought to be tragic. There’s nothing orgasmic or self-revealing about the final murder: it’s the coldly stupid act of someone with no other tricks.
Any other thoughts? A couple, such as... this being an American film about men, it’s bound to be big on the idea of fathers and sons. There’s the son who isn’t a son, of course, the one person that Fairview starts to become attached to. But he can’t keep it up, because business always comes first. (It really is as crude as that in this film. Business always comes first – with Eli no less than Fairview.) We see how close he’s become when he rescues the boy from the gusher, putting himself in danger to save him. But he buggers off almost immediately, leaving the boy to the terror of his own deafness. He leaves him again later, when he tricks him into staying on the train and literally walks away.
And, because this director likes threes, the third strike means he’s out. The day before his last showdown with Eli he has a showdown with the boy, now grown up and, unlike Fairview himself, married. (Now there’s symbolic.) Unfortunately the poor lad makes the mistake of telling him he’s going into business. Unlike Eli’s father, Fairview won’t take this lying down (either literally, like him, or metaphorically). The younger man would be a competitor – Fairview rolls the word around his mouth like a pebble – and, in the strange moral universe he once tried to describe to the brother who wasn’t his brother, this makes him a mortal enemy. He savagely disowns him. Of course he does.
This is the third nail in a different coffin: Fairview’s betrayal of fatherhood. The second was to do with his own father: when he finds out that he’s recently died… he doesn’t react at all. The first was when he set Eli against his own father by cheating him – which leads to Eli’s own corruption: just like Fairview, Eli lets money dictate his behaviour. (If the final scene is anybody’s tragedy, it should be his. But it’s lost in the noise of Fairview’s meltdown.)
Other family relationships in this film, and there aren’t many, are left largely unexplored. We know what happens to the false brother: Fairview kills him even though he’s grown to rather like him. He had a real brother but he died, apparently. So it goes. Eli has a twin brother, but that just leads to confusion. It would make sense for the ‘twin’ we meet early to turn out to be Eli simply pretending, in order to distance himself from the apparent greed of his demands. (This is what I’d assumed: it would be further confirmation of his feet of clay.) But they are two people, and Fairview’s promises have split them apart. Fair enough.
And… that’s it for family. Any non-family relationships? Nope. The one person who could be a friend, Fletcher – played by Ciaran Hinds – has absolutely nothing to say in this film. We’re so busy with the bizarre world of Fairview’s fixation that there simply isn’t enough time for anything else. In fact, any interesting bits after the first blowing of the oil-well take up a tiny proportion of screen time, maybe 20 minutes out of one and a half hours. They’re little offshoots from the single, one-dimensional trajectory of the film: Fairview’s monomania which, once we’ve seen it, carries on more or less without any further development. The murder at the end is the thud of the firework rocket into the ground.
]]>
]]>The first is a review and the second is Dalrymple's response.
http://aolsearch.aol.co.uk/aol/search?query=Last%20Mughal%20chapatis&invocationType=sb_uk
http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/optical_character_recognition/return_of_the_white_rabbit.html
I hadn't read the second until today and it confirms my feeling that Dalrymple is unwittingly racist. As we said he fails to adequately balance the book and in his response he seems to be 'out of awareness'. I think his problem is that he is a romantic with a small r, someone who feels life rather than thinks about it. He has a feeling that Indians are innately unpredictable and childlike whereas the British are organized and rational (he even manages to reconcile the seemingly contradictory behaviour of the English as ruthless psychopaths by presenting them as men who 'think through' their slaughter).
I'm glad I read the book for all it's weaknesses. If nothing it has made me want to read some of the poetry produced during the three hundred years of Mughal rule.
The eyesore that is the British Barracks was built in the 1860.
]]>The novel's most striking aspect is how, in this book, Waters makes a serious stylistic departure from previous work in that she chooses to re-tell her story by reversing events. We first meet the main characters in 1947, a group of individuals drained by the war and exhausted by personal dramas. The book then proceeds through two sections (1944 and 1941) to dig back into their pasts to uncover not simply what happened but why. For many people this device has proved too 'tricksy' and reviews often suggest the book's full impact can only be gained from a careful re-reading. This may do both the book and the writer a disservice.
Waters has mentioned in interviews how as a child she had a passion for archaeology and we see here how by re-ordering events, reversing the chronology we engage with the process of uncovering history, digging backwards into the past, like archaeologists who brush away the dust to reveal new and surprising finds. The work of the reader is to uncover unexpected elements from the past, which inform and reshape the present. Kay, a young lesbian who has enjoyed the war as a release, a time allowing her to dress in suits and act gallantly in masculine ways, says about entering cinemas halfway through a film to watch the ending first, "I almost prefer them that way - people's pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures." Waters is asking us to trust the writer to make the past more interesting than the future.
Night Watch revolves around the inter-related lives and loves of five main characters : three lesbians (Helen, Julia and Kay) , a straight woman (Vivien) and a young man imprisoned for attempted suicide (Duncan). Through Helen, Kay and Julia the book explores how love pursued is often love unreciprocated. Some readers may find these three central characters to be Virginia Woolf/Bloomsbury types, teetering on the edge of caricature. Their introspection and well-bred struggles to own their sexual identity occasionally slip into narcissism: they care too much for themselves and too little for a world at war. That aside Waters usually succeeds in making this corrosive love triangle believable, the characters genuine and their affections real.
In contrast the character of Vivien is a near faultless creation, an ordinary woman whose beauty attracts a married sweetheart (Reggie). Vivien is described as a 'glamour girl' but her struggles with family, work and love are far from glamorous. Her brother (Duncan) has been imprisoned for attempted suicide. She feels a fish out of water at work in the typing pool, a place reserved usually for refined ladies who know not to say 'toilet' when the word 'lavatory' is called for. We see how Vivien is trapped in and yet strives to transcend her class. Her ultimately doomed love life is perhaps the most fully realised relationship in the book taking the reader on a journey from laughter and attraction to pain and resignation.
The fifth member of the central quintet, Duncan is perhaps the most problematic and here it can be argued that Waters' reach exceeds her grasp. Imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs for a botched suicide attempt the frail young man becomes something of a martyr to man's inhumanity to man, more a symbol than a fully realised character. His homosexuality is confusingly hinted at but left unclear in the reader's mind. Around him swirl some of the book's large themes (wrongful imprisonment, the need for people to hide their true identity, the question of conscientiously objecting to all war) and at times Duncan becomes trapped, the sheer weight of ideas smothering his unhappy life. His relationships with Fraser, a well to do, well-educated 'conchy', Mister Mundy an ex-prison officer and the mildly deranged suicidee Alec are all ultimately disappointing.
Against this can be set the books real strength and that is that Waters, an assiduous researcher, has the ability to deploy her knowledge effectively to evoke both the time (the Forties) and the place (a war ravaged London). We step back through the dialogue and description into a vividly realised past. We enter a world where people say 'Blimey!" "Crikey!" and "Chum!, where men wear "dark blue demob suits already shiny at the elbows" and women are dressed in headscarves, "decorated with faded tanks and spitfires". We enter houses where 'there were yellow, exhausted photographs,' or where 'the walls of the room were done in lincrusta, painted a glossy chocolate brown' . We fall headlong into the blitzed city where a burnt, bomb injured man sits 'with glass on his face 'dainty little glints', a dark world where a dentist, can be an abortionist who does 'this other thing on the side'. We watch workers through Duncan's eyes leaving their menial jobs in a candle factory, rushing home to leave an empty space, a yard 'like a sink with its plug pulled'. We weave through the 'handsome higgledy piggledy red-bricked' streets of London and confront the horror of a woman impaled of railings whilst St Paul's stands tall a symbol of 'elegance and reason and … great beauty'. We become caught up in a visceral world, whether it be the central crisis in Vivien's life where blood falls from her 'thick and dark and knotted as a length of tarry rope' or as we arrive alongside Kay at the blast scene where a 'man's head had rolled out and landed at her feet'. We are convincingly in a world where, as Viv remarks, "We might all be dead tomorrow."
Amidst the constraint of war Waters has effectively recreated a world where paradoxically people felt the possibility of escape. In the wrong hands the notion that war licences excess might become clichéd. But in Water's hands some of her characters do, for a time, transcend their constraints. Helen, Julia and Kay find love in the shadow of the Blitz and Kay, a masculine lesbian, is free to behave with 'gallantry' and manliness. Vivien finds passion with Reggie and Duncan's life may change with the promise of a friendship forged initially through kindness in the bleak harsh world of Wormwood Scrubs.
Ultimately this is a serious book where people who had extraordinary lives must continue to strive to come to terms with their past, must struggle, exhausted, to move towards an unknown and unknowable future. As the first line of the book suggests, in life it may not be possible to see a way ahead but only be possible to understand 'the sort of person you've become'.
]]>17 January 2008
I started listening three days ago – and I’m already a third of the way through. I love it, again. In 1969 – eight years before I first read it, on a plane – it must have seemed extraordinary: this omniscient author who keeps stepping out of the story to let us know he’s no more omniscient than we are. He’s a bloke writing a novel… and whatever ideas he might have had about where his characters are going, they’re going to make up their own minds. The great thing is, of course, this might be just another metafictional trick: when he says he expected Charles to do one thing, but he turns out to do a different thing, he might be giving us a genuine insight into what it’s like to be a writer. Or he might be having a laugh.
What really appeals to me is the way Fowles lets you in on one particular aspect: if he’s working hard to make a character’s behaviour seem convincing, he has a chat with us about it. He’ll even draw modern-day parallels to help. And it makes us like the author, makes us want to believe his argument that a century ago this kind of character (who Fowles makes as alien as possible in some ways, like the clothes and the mid-Victorian moral stance he has to keep up) really would behave like this. Which is the trick: we like the way this author talks to us, so we buy what he’s selling.
The alienating, step outside the narrative stuff helps him to place the other characters as well. He pretends to take nothing as ‘given’, so we don’t simply have to take characters at face value. He tells us how that stereotypical ‘Victorian’ set of attitudes arose, so that Mrs Poulteney – who really is no more than a stereotype – becomes believable. So… although Fowles tells you he’s made these characters up, we believe him when he pleads that his creations have a life of their own. Not a Greek god, then, like those in Hardy (especially in Mayor of Casterbridge) but a Christian God, whose people possess free will. Well, if it works – which I think it does – good luck to him.
21 January
Just read Chapter 27. Charles is besotted by Sarah so, being a good Victorian, he’s gone to the doctor to help him sort himself out. This gives Fowles a chance to play another game: the doctor summarises, in role as if he is Sarah speaking, all of her motivation as a character as we might have already surmised it for ourselves. (He’s a forward-thinking Darwinist with a precocious interest in the infant science of psychology, so he’s allowed to get it spot on.) This is clever, because for several chapters Fowles has kept himself pretty well hidden, so the novel has been allowed to go on its almost parodic Victorian-style way without the usual interruptions. Shit, there’s even a lightning storm to accompany the revelations about himself that Charles has to face. And... and what? Sarah will be put in a liberal asylum (or whatever), so Charles is given the chance to step back from the brink and swallow his petty upper-class dissatisfactions like a man. Except we’re not even half-way through yet, and he can’t stop picturing those eyes. Just because he knows he’s been trapped doesn’t mean he’s free of her. Reader... you’d better play the tape.
[Later] A couple more chapters. 28 is a short history of hysterical women and the scrapes they got themselves and others into. In other words, Evidence, capital E: upping the plausibility rating. 29 is a flashback: Sarah, a character we can’t help but sympathise with – she is a 20th Century woman in a 19th Century body, after all – tells it like it is to her high-horse boss, Victorian Values personified. It’s a bit like the moment in Chapter 27 when the doctor says what’s going through our mind, except this time it’s the scene we’d like to witness, not what we already think (without quite having put it into words). Clever stuff.
27 January
I’m three-quarters of the way through, and Fowles has just delivered the first ending – identical, in that everything is resolved without the crises needing to come to a head – to the ‘fictional’ ending in Atonement. But this time we aren’t given the story as written and published by one of the characters in it; it’s the story Charles has written only in his head, and only Fowles the god – he even consigns Mrs Poulteney literally to hell – is privy to what’s going on inside the head of another human being. Being an author, he tells us: that’s his job…. But this is a playful god and at first he pretends it’s what, as it were, ‘really’ happens. Then, like Eric Idle as the wag in Life of Brian he shows us how he was pulling our leg. He’s playing metafictional games again, and it’s with the lightest of touches.
This is not at all like clunky you-know-who, who has Briony the ageing author pretending she’s going for a deeper literary ‘truth’, one that’s more satisfying for everybody than the messy stuff of reality. To be fair to McEwan, he does show the reader a degree of respect: we have to work out for ourselves the extent to which old Briony’s redemptive ending comes about from her own needs, specifically her need for the atonement of the title. In the ‘real’ story – which she also tells us about in a different act of atonement, this time to all us readers who bought the happy ending – her attempt to atone for her lie is merely an empty gesture. Who am I to say that it would have been a more honest way to end without the feelgood ‘false’ ending? Briony has her cake – the world thinks she really did atone for what she did – and eats it too. But so does McEwan: he lets us have the old-fashioned ending and he lets us know he’s really a postmodernist.
[Later] Well, he’s done the deed… but only after Fowles has had some more fun messing about with the idea of the fictions we live by – as in, We’re all novelists, and this time it’s Charles who’s decided to change the ending, not me. Moi? says Fowles. I’m just a humble writer telling you what he did. Fowles knows it’s a game, we know it’s a game, so everybody’s friends. And then, just when we thought we knew whose side we were on, Fowles disabuses us. This is a novel, stupid, and you’re not supposed to know everything in advance. For instance, that bit where Sarah told us about Varguennes (or whatever his name is), the nasty French lieutenant…. Turns out she’s an unreliable narrator of her own story, Charles was a fool to believe her – and so were we. She isn’t a victim, she’s a spider, Charles is the fly – and so are we. Just because it’s an old trick doesn’t make it any less effective: the reader, like Charles, is floored by the sucker punch. Shit, even the twisted ankle was just another strand – I’ve started this metaphor so I’ll finish – of her web.
This is a re-read for me, remember, and I knew there was something dodgy going on. But I’d sort of unremembered the details, and I was as just as impressed this time as I was when I first read it 30 years ago.
29 January
It turns out that the joke ‘false’ ending inside Charles’s head was just a dry run for an even more outrageous bit of exhibitionism. This time, Fowles doesn’t pretend he’s only the messenger; he puts himself right inside the story, as a character on the train that Charles catches on his disgraced way back to London. He tells us there’s a choice. He could give us the Victorian ending or the modern ending: all problems neatly solved and tidied up; or problems faced, acknowledged, unresolved and messy. He pretends to toss a coin – but it isn’t to decide which ending to give us: he’s already decided we can have both, but can’t choose which one to end with. That’s the one we’ll take away with us as the more ‘true’ one, after all.
And if you believe he really can’t decide, well, you haven’t been paying attention.
30 January
End of Chapter 60. I’ve just reached the end – I think – of the right-hand fork in the road. But this is Fowles, and he makes us think we’re on the rocky road before we reach the longed-for resolution. At Rossetti’s house there’s a tortured conversation between them, and it looks as if Charles’s hopes are to come crashing to pieces against Sarah’s – what? – stubbornness, or inscrutability, or… well, he doesn’t know what’s going on any more than the reader does. When he does think he’s got it at last it turns out he’s wrong: she isn’t immured within some mystical proto-feminism with Charles forever locked out; she’s discovered… motherhood. Charles is the father, they are a family at last –and Fowles makes a joke of the moment as the cloying sound of ‘a thousand violins’ is interrupted by the percussion of their baby’s cry. Aww.
It’s no bloody wonder, 30 years after first reading it, that I couldn’t remember how the scene ended. Talk about a merry dance.
[Later]
Finished. The other road only takes a few pages, and Fowles makes another appearance, this time as an impresario. He winds back his magic watch and – hey, presto – we’re back at a crucial point in the tortured conversation. Except this time Sarah doesn’t stop him from leaving, and doesn’t tell him about the baby. In this scenario she really is the arch-manipulator, offering Charles only companionship. By refusing her self-serving offer, Charles becomes a more complete person, achieves a kind of growth. And we really are in the 20th Century, where we know the difference between cheap fairytales and – what? – more expensive, reader-flattering ones. As Charles sails into the west (I’m not making this up – Charles will go back to America, across ‘the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea’) we know he’s man enough to take it. And, as thoroughly modern readers, so are we.
I loved it. It might only be a firework display, a showcase of literary pyrotechnics, but I’ve always liked fireworks and I’ll give it 11/10. Sometimes we can just be too solemn.
]]>5 December
Started it again yesterday, having first read it God knows when and having seen the film a few weeks ago. It was seeing the film that made me want to look at it again: there was so much I’d forgotten, especially about the endings. Plural. This morning came the first real McEwan moment: Briony’s realisation that it’s not only in her writing that she creates fictions. There’s what must be two or three pages of McEwan setting out a kind of stall: he lets the reader know that we aren’t simply reading a fiction, but a bildungsroman. ‘Six decades later’ she will write about how crucial this summer’s day was to her formation as a writer. It will be bound up with the realisation that hers is not the only version of the world that exists: she’s not the only consciousness, and the incident by the fountain could be seen in two quite different ways. She’s discovered the multiple point of view. (In fact, of course, we’ve already had Cecilia’s version, given to us by the omniscient narrator we’d assumed to be McEwan. We’re not so sure now, especially since we’ve only just seen the film and can remember the end….)
But is this no more than a McGuffin, something to tell McEwan’s arthouse readers that this isn’t just another costume drama? And do his novels always need the kick-start of a McGuffin? In Atonement it’s the succession of incidents that Briony doesn’t have the experience to understand, combined with her determination not merely to write, but to create viable narratives based on what she sees. (The manifesto-like seriousness of the section sits rather unhappily with the frankly unconvincing childishness of the Ruritanian romance she’s just written as a welcome home present for her darling older brother. McEwan tries to sell us this as the unintentionally comic Young Visiters ‘before’ stage of her development, but it’s the sort of thing a girl like Briony would have given up at primary school. And I should know. Writers like that don’t depend on moments of epiphany – That’s when I became a writer – they develop over time. And they’re always ahead of the crowd.) anyway, McEwan tells us, she knows she’s fictionalised the moment – but it’s a trick. We’re hooked like the readers of a whodunit – that’s what McGuffins are for, after all, and it’s what McEwan always does – but we know we’re not going to get a slow revelation of ‘the truth’. He’s told us, or reminded us, how different people’s consciousness turns any truth into a ghost – and the contingency of truth is what this book is obviously going to be about. And, being the trickster he is, he’s also made the idea into the aged Briony’s, with her (McEwan-like?) reputation for ‘amorality’ and a neat get-out clause for her own guilt.
But I’m jumping the gun. All we know is that this moment, and Briony’s attempts to understand it, will be crucial. Time to read on.
8 December
What’s McEwan’s attitude to class? In some ways he’s obsessed with it, and it slides around in everything he writes. It’s always present, and somewhere along the line he always knocks it about a bit. His working class characters have made some kind of success of their lives: Robbie in this novel, Edward (?) in On Chesil Beach- although he was an outsider in other ways , countrified and from a struggling aspiring family down on its luck – and… and others, I’m sure, like the Jonathan Price character in The Ploughman’s Lunch. To complicate matters there are things for us to sneer at in the upper-middle classes. The money in Atonement is third generation (the Tallises) or trade (Paul, the chocolate magnate) with a whiff of war profiteering. And the house is ugly. And Cecilia only managed a Third compared to Robbie’s celebrated First. And… you get the picture: McEwan’s literary leftiness is unimpeachable. But he does love those posh settings: this house, even in politically right-on decline; the big house, part of the missus’s inheritance, in Saturday; those Successful People’s places in Amsterdam. (Interestingly, Kate Grenville uses architecture to suggest disapproval in Secret River when she makes the successful land-grabber’s new villa not only ugly but also careless of the pre-colonial heritage, as represented by the covered-over rock painting in the cellar. House as symbol of… something. Maybe the White man’s hubris: the rock painting will still be there long after the ugly house has been mercifully demolished.)
McEwan has his cake and eats it. Non-middle class backgrounds can be sketched in very, er, sketchily; the Heritage bit, like the loving and no doubt carefully researched details of Cecilia’s1935 dresses, is still there – as gratefully received in the movie, along with a highly photogenic house, perfect for the film’s target audience. As, I suppose, McEwan’s knowing, conspiratorial asides to the reading group members he has in mind.
12 December
I reached the end of Part 1 and I’m… tired of listening to McEwan persuading me that the whole thing isn’t a preposterous charade, a drawing-room conceit like the 30s whodunnits it borrows from. We’ve got all the characters, all with their reasons for behaving as they do – and, crucially, reasons for covering their tracks as they do. Must this is McEwan-land, not Miss Marple-land, so motives are in line with late 20th Century mores. There's the needy Lola, persuaded by the cynical capitalist – hiss, boo – that what he’s like from her is what she wants to give him; there’s the literally absent father, busy with government affairs and whatever other affairs his morally absent wife will happily tolerate; there’s the bored little rich girl, down from Cambridge and frustrated in every way, ready for the attention of… Mr Perfect, whose only fault is too much honesty.
Overlaying all this, of course, is the precocious consciousness of the child who wants to write the story. But instead of harmlessly misconstruing events, she is led via a series of tortuous coincidences to a position where her made-up story is believed. I could start at least three sentences with the words ‘She just happens to….’ Four. Five. But I won’t, because – as I have to admit – on a first reading it’s possible to be carried along: if a story seems interesting enough it’s part of the contract to allow the writer a bit of licence. But by the time Briony makes her accusation McEwan has already spent pages on persuading us how such a story, told by such a girl, at such a point in history – and doesn’t he just love history, with all its convenient oddities of behaviour? – such a story will have its own momentum, and the girl’s motives do not have to be at all malign… etc. etc.
On nearly every page there’s another careful bit of plotting (in McEwan novels these should be abbreviated to BoPs) to make her story more convincing. One example: she finds Robbie’s letter in Cecilia’s room and runs down to give it to – whom? She was going to give it to her brother, but she changes her mind and gives it to the police inspector. Who, in exactly the way we readers of 1930s whodunnits know he would, gets it wrong and sees it as damning evidence. Her brother would have dismissed it as the bit of risqué fun it sounds like – as McEwan the spreadsheet plotter tells us a paragraph or so later – but he’s too late. The damage is done. (All this relies, of course, on the assumption that 1930s police officers lived in the same drawing-room world as those in Agatha Christie novels, particularly its general incompetence. I suspect a real officer would see Briony’s testimony for what it was…. And, for that matter, what we see of the questioning is shown to be perfectly competent: Never mind what you know, the officer replies to Briony’s ‘I know it was him,’ What did you see? But McEwan has told us, endlessly, that the momentum of her story, the class deference of the 1930s and all those circumstantial details, would be enough to sustain a whole trial. Yeh, sure. What McEwan does is use our own liberal prejudices to trick us into believing what quickly becomes an upper middle-class conspiracy. They never did like the upstart, of course they didn’t.)
One other thing. This bit of the novel is set in 1935, which is when the trial scene in To Kill a Mockingbird also takes place. Harper Lee was using the historical moment to make a point about the background to the emerging Civil Rights movement as it stood when she was writing in 1960: Look at what the Blacks had to endure only a generation ago. And what is McEwan doing? Persuading us that the class tolerance of a liberal middle-class family is only skin-deep. In fact, as we later find out, there was no assault, but once one is alleged it’s all too easy to pin it on the son of the cleaner. Ok. But… so? The thought that keeps occurring with regard to all the persuasive details is, What’s this guy selling? He obviously feels he has to, but so much layering of extra psychological evidence, or whatever, makes you realise it’s there to shore up an incredibly creaky premise.
18 December
Briony is now a nurse, and we’ve had plenty of that McEwan-style detail concerning wounds and pain… to go with the detail concerning death and its ugly banality in the Dunkirk retreat chapters. He seems to have done his research: I suspect the retreat really was something like that, just as I suspect that the life of f probationer nurse really was that much of a grind in 1941. [Note: after writing this I read how the ‘nursing’ sections are taken almost verbatim from published accounts. He’s a slippery bugger.]
And now Briony the aspiring writer has had a letter from ‘CC’ (Cyril Connelly, I suppose): a highly detailed critique of why her novella based on only the harmless parts of the Triton fountain story isn’t as good as a proper novel would be. It needs more of a story, more development. And here’s clever Ian and his clever readers – is he just patronising us? – having a sage little nod over the literary joke. CC’s letter is a pastiche of a 40s critic describing McEwan’s own novel, taking in many of the concerns the reader already has about it: Is it deliberately old-fashioned, like a pre-Modern novel? Does the choice of points of view work? Is there too much plot (as opposed to not enough in the failed effort by the immature Briony…)?
22 December
I’m near the end of side 19, out of 20. (Did I mention I’m listening to this on tape?) ‘BT’ has signed the manuscript, London 1999. And we’ve had our old-fashioned pre-Modern – i.e. essentially 19th Century – resolution. The meeting between Briony, her sister and Robbie is a terrible strain, but the lovers are now together, they’ve had their long deferred Wiltshire moment, they know who the real villain of the piece is: the fat cat coining it as our brave lads die.
I wish I could remember what I thought about the final ‘old Briony’ section when I read it the first time around. Did I know? Did I guess, from all the clues that seem highly obvious in hindsight, that the truth is in the hands of whoever writes the story? Dunno. When I saw the film I was surprised all over again by the appearance of Vanessa Redgrave in barmy old woman mode (surely modelled on Doris Lessing, whose surprise over the Nobel Prize some months later was filmed for all to see). I was surprised all over again: I’d forgotten the black joke of the ‘other’ ending.
Hmm. False endings. This one made me think of the French Lieutenant’s Woman – and I think in the movie version Harold Pinter gave a happy ending to either the on-screen or the off-screen couple, and the more troubling ending to, er, the other couple. Must get the DVD. But I think my favourite’s Villette: not so much a false ending as a challenge to the reader: believe it if you want to, but we all know what life’s really like….
]]>I’d be lying if I said I was surprised by Oskar’s death. It had been coming for months. He started to look grey, his cheeks sunken, his eyes bruised around the edges. I’ll say this for him, he never lost his sparkle. Even on his death bed there was a light in his eyes. I don’t know why we had to do Hamlet again.
‘What about Miss Julie?’
‘No. It has to be Hamlet. They expect it,’ he blustered.
‘Well can’t you at least do less. Why don’t you do Osric? You used to make a wonderful fop.’
‘No.’
‘It’s just you get so carried away.’
He was silent and for a moment I thought he would reconsider.
‘They expect me to give them everything. I am the ghost,’ he had said and we left it at that. I almost told him to go and see the doctor but I knew he would pick Henrik. That would be no good.
When he left I looked across to the corner of the room at the horse. Over the years I fool myself and say I've become better at interpreting it’s slightest signs. Looking back I think it knew what would happen.
When they brought Oskar back from the theatre and he was dying I wanted to scream into his face, ‘I told you, you were too weak.’
The moment they carried him in you could see he was done for. Of course, we did everything and got the good doctor, not Henrik. We tried medicines, prayed even. We tried as you do but I don’t think anyone said, ‘Don’t worry Emilie, he’s strong, he’ll pull through.’
It was all, ‘He won’t suffer. He’s slipping away.’
In the time it took him to die Oskar seemed to be quite happy. Maybe there is something to Henrik’s thinking. Maybe believing makes a difference in the end. If this had happened five years earlier we would have had Henrik by the bedside, gentle, kindly, wise Henrik who gave Alexander the magnet for his little theatre and showed the boy how it attracted things.
'Attraction is a mystery, between metals, between men and women,' Henrik said and laughed, pinching Alex's cheek.
I thought of that when they bought Oskar back. He had an attraction that drew others close.
We couldn't call Henrik to attend because these days he’s ‘distracted’. If you met him now and hadn’t known him before you would say his brain’s addled but even after he changed, we still went to see him again and again.
The last time, no more than a week before Oskar’s death, Henrik was in his garden, sitting out in the freezing cold, surrounded by his ‘texts’. For whatever reason he was convinced the world was ending, that his sums were right and other people’s were wrong.
‘Millenarian nonsense. The world will end but they got the figures wrong. It’s all in the bible. The end is coming and soon,’ he had said and tapped a tract under his hand. He was wearing blue woollen gloves with the fingers missing. His blackened nails tapped the sheet and I remember the title on the front page, ‘All suffering to end’.
He drummed the table as he spoke, ‘But it’s not going to be the Christian nonsense people spout. The end will be wonderful for everyone, everyone who is decent. These priests who wish for a hell? Well maybe they are the ones who will get to meet the devil when the time comes. Be careful. That’s what I always say Oskar. Be careful what you wish for.’
He handed over the yellowing sheet and on the way home my husband said, ‘He may have a point the old man. He knows a thing or two.’
Well it was right for you my husband. Your suffering ended. In fact, as we waited in the bedroom you hardly suffered at all. You just died.
Your mother sat in the corner of the bedroom in that horrible purple outfit and watched me swab your poor mouth. The 'good' doctor wandered around with his head bent like some kind of large bird and the horse stood by the Japanese screen. At times it’s brown coat glows and at that time, as it stood next to the yellow of the screen it seemed to begin to disappear. For one moment I felt faint with hope and thought this would be it, the release, the moment the horse would leave. I had this overwhelming rush of optimism that made the hair on my neck rise and my skin tingle. The old woman looked at me and nodded, thinking I was shivering with fear. Then you died and the horse stayed, tied to my life.
There was only one time I was tempted to tell someone about the horse. I had it all prepared. To being with I would explain how it appeared in the country when we went out to Arhus for the summer. I was eight and we stayed at my twelve year old cousin's farm. Katerina was a real Tomboy and it's ironic that I'm the one who got saddled, if you'll excuse the pun, with the horse. She loved riding.
'It's wonderful. To have such a magnificent beast under your control. It makes me feel strong,' she said the day before the accident.
I hated the country. When we went through one village I cried at the smell of the children and the stink of some drunken men. On the day of Katerina's accident I saw the dead badger, lying in a ditch on its back like a stuffed toy, rigid, it's limbs stiff in the air it's black and white fur as coarse and sharp as thorns.
I was waiting by a hedge when it happened. Something spooked the horses, they think a gunshot from two men out fowling and Katerina's horse bolted and turned for home. The poor girl had no control and clung on as she headed across the field back towards the farmyard. Every rider talked about 'the tree', a big old oak with one deadly low branch that you had to avoid coming back to the farm. Katerina hit it at full speed. The branch smashed into her back, picked her off the horse and threw her to the ground. She broke her collarbone and shoulder. One mended but the other wouldn’t set, I can't remember which, and she simply withered away, a sickly invalid, dying at eighteen.
I first saw my horse standing by that tree when the accident happened. Ever after, all my life, it appeared, the same small, perfect animal, everywhere but not all of the time.
I had this story prepared a few years ago for Henrik. It was summer and we three were in the garden with Oskar off down by the river fussing over bees. I had Henrik to myself and waited for the moment. He began to talk.
'Did I tell you about Susannah? Her husband has taken her to Austria to see some Jew. The poor woman. Hysteria. I've read about it and they say it only affects women. At least that's one thing electricity's good for, hysteria. A few shocks and she'll be cured.'
Needless to say I decided not to tell my story.
I don’t care what people thought that night when Oskar died. I know I screamed for hours like an animal. I couldn’t use words. I couldn’t scream to his corpse, ‘I just wanted you to say to me once that you saw it. It is the only thing I ever wanted Oskar, my only wish.’
I screamed so hard I couldn’t speak for hours afterwards. My voice came out as a faint high croak until the words disappeared. I stood by your body and the horse waited by the coffin. That day its coat seemed to darken, a black brown like horse chestnut. When it moved I could pick out and count every rose, every lily, every long thin candle against its skin.
When the Bishop came I expected his condolences but not the comfort. The children, smart in their matching outfits, behaved well although I worried for Alexander because he can be such a mouse. I sat whilst the Bishop spoke to us about heaven and redemption and the promise of a good life hereafter for the just and, as he spoke, I watched the horse. It did nothing. What did I expect? A sign? Without turning I could sense the man near to me, sense him reaching out to touch and in that instance I saw without seeing, like a vision, Katerina, broken in the spindly wheeled contraption, crippled, smelling of decay. I felt revolted, sickened, nauseous and he must have seen me shiver with pity and disgust. All the time he was with me the horse never moved.
And then came the dinner and it was the same. The horse gave no sign. . I called that meal Oskar's last supper, with all the town there to eat one last time at his table. My mother-in-law sat at the centre in her glory but I could hardly begrudge her this moment, again in the spotlight.
I wouldn’t say I was surprised by what happened. It was more than that.
One moment small talk, the ordinary stuff of life, observing the funeral rites and then, the Bishop leaning quite close to me and saying, only for my ear, 'I think you have a beautiful horse.'
Is it just me or are you sick of strings? I've spent the last few years trying to 'approach' classical music and the one thing that's making me cringe is strings. When did the long drawn out dying fall of the orchestra's slush section become synonymous with heartfelt sentiments? Now don't get me wrong. Thank God for sentimentality, without it most people would be bereft of all human feeling. But when did strings get to be the sine non qua of sadness, the main spring for melancholia, the go to option for grandeur the last and only hope for love? Not a clue. But there you go. Another day, another dollar.
]]>