Book World

Like a large, needy reptile

An outstanding essay by Colm Toibin in this week's London Review of Books on The Importance of Aunts (in the 19th-century novel).  Unfortunately it is available online to subscribers only but for this alone the £3.20 cover price is a snip.

The novel, after all, is not a moral fable or parable; it is not our job to like or dislike characters in fiction, or make judgments about their worth, or learn from them how to live. We can do that with real people and, if we like, figures from history. They are for moralists to feast on. A novel is a pattern and it is our job to notice how the textures were woven and the tones put in place. This is not to insist that a character in fiction is merely a verbal construct and bears no relation to the known world. It is rather to suggest that the role of a character in a novel is never simple. A novel isn’t a piece of ethics or sociology. It is a release of certain energies and a dramatisation of how these energies might be controlled and given shape. Characters in fiction are determined by the pattern, and they determine the pattern in turn.

....

The novel, as a form, is unsure whether it is a story, told by a single teller, or a play enacted by a number of actors. It is both static and theatrical in its systems, a sphere in which a single controlling voice operates, or many competing voices. And since the novel is made up not of characters moving across the stage wearing colourful costumes and projecting their voices, but grim black marks on the page, one of the other purposes of aunts is that they allow for dramatic entrances and departures. All through the 19th century, aunts breach the peace and lighten the load. 

And at this point, as I realised I have an aunt-like figure in my own writing, entering a closed world and disturbing the peace, I had a little frisson of recognition.

And then this about Henry James's development of the aunt's role

[he] saw what was possible, that the aunt could be made not simply an enabling figure, or a cruelly comic figure, or a passive figure, but a highly sexualised woman, and thus, within the dynamic of the novel, one capable of darting at will from one guise to another, causing havoc within the narrative confines created for her: she is exciting and subversive, dangerous, potentially explosive.

Comparing the aunts in The Wings of the Dove and Edith Wharton's House of Mirth (one of my personal favourite books) he has this lovely line:

the aunt hovers over the action, darting in and out of the narrative like a large, needy reptile.

I must now go and urgently read Washington Square, Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove.  All of which I sense have a theme that I am trying out in my own work.

And on the themes that writers share, Toibin has this nice comment:

By the time he began The Portrait of a Lady in 1879, James had followed the serialisation of Daniel Deronda. He read the book carefully, disapproved of it, and then took what he needed from it.

 

Beautiful and sad; ordinary and heroic.

Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall  left me requiring a quiet moment of contemplation.  And wonder. And admiration.

Its plot is slight: Peter Harris, middle-aged art dealer, in a companionable but arid marriage to Rebecca falls in love with someone unsuitable, is rebuffed by the love object and resigns himself to carrying on with his 'impossible' old life.  But plot is the very least of what this book has to offer.The writing is exquisite and nuanced: Cunningham is one of those rare writers able to describe clearly a sensation that has been inchoate in some part of your life and which now comes into focus as he places it on the page before you.  

Peter, whose point of view we inhabit for the main stretch of the book, is self aware, almost self-conscious in his analysis of his thoughts and interior life, and the issue he is constantly circling around is that question we all ask ourselves: how shall we make a meaningful life in the dislocated consumer society of the 21st century in the affluent west?  

But of course, 'we' do not all ask ourselves this question and for that reason the book may strike some as too rarefied, too self indulgent; missing the big political angle.  But for me the book was a perfect, gorgeous, precious stone: something that exists in the real world but is almost too good for it, something to marvel at and be uplifted by the beauty of its form.  And the ending, in its resignation, in its clear eyed acceptance of having been duped by dreams of being someone other than one's real self, the final embracing of the ordinariness and yet the extraordinariness of an individual soul is very moving and lovely and almost heroic.

 

What took me so long?

What took me so long to find the work of Jennifer Johnston?  Perhaps she is not fashionable or talked about but, oh, can she write!

The Captains and the Kings is her first novel published in 1972 but without checking the publishing data I wouldn't have guessed this - it has a timeless and yet contemporary feel.  It is a slim volume and understated in tone telling the story of Mr Prendergast alone in a large crumbling house in Ireland after the death of his wife.  He takes comfort in books, the piano and whiskey and resents the intrusive attempts of the local vicar and his wife to cheer him up.  His only companion is the alcoholic gardener Sean who tends the garden Mrs Prendergast created.

Prendergast's slow journey towards death is interrupted by the arrival of a boy, Diarmid, from the village and, entirely believably and without sentimentality, a gruff friendship grows between them. Prendergast is haunted by the death of his elder brother, their mother's clear favourite, in the first world war and scenes from the past interweave themselves into the present.

The charm of the book thus far was the excellent quality of the writing, but just as I was glorying in the prose, the author sneaked a gripping and rather tragic plot in without my quite noticing her sleight of hand, and snapped it shut as neatly and brutally as an animal trap.  

I sat open mouthed with admiration after finishing the book.  My own clumsy attempts at a novel make me appreciate just how hard that sort of effortless looking writing and plotting are.  Really a very, very lovely book and the good news is that there are a good few more and that the London Library has the lot.  And that feels very much like a working definition of 'joy' right now.