Latest Readings (3 page)

Novels in Sequence

I HAVE JUST STARTED
to read Edward St. Aubyn’s latest novel,
Lost for Words
, and I can already see that I will have to double back and get on terms with his Patrick Melrose sequence. James Wood and Will Self both have a right to say that St. Aubyn is witty, even if the rest of us find him only witty-ish. Most writers who are credited with wit have not a trace of it, but St. Aubyn really can pack the meaning tight enough for it to crackle, and he can do so often enough to make you impatient when he doesn’t. St. Aubyn’s imaginary publishing house called Page and Turner is memorable straight away, whereas Anthony Powell put half a novel into explaining the nickname of Books-do-furnish-a-room Bagshaw and still couldn’t make it interesting. Kenneth Widmerpool, the figure of ambitious mediocrity whose relentless climb to power links all the novels of Powell’s great sequence, is
a joke for the ages, but Bagshaw, because he is a joke and nothing else, is scarcely a joke at all.

Though St. Aubyn actually has the British upper-class background that Evelyn Waugh would have liked for himself, it is interesting that the Melrose books are such a hit in the United States. Thus a form not native to America is now being imported. In America, it is as if novels have to be individuals, like people. I suppose James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan books and Philip Roth’s Zuckerman books are among the exceptions; and certainly John Updike found it congenial to stretch the interior lives of Rabbit Angstrom and Henry Bech over several volumes; but generally the
roman fleuve
is not an American native growth. In Britain, specifically in England, it is as natural as a row of willows.

But the English novel sequences still looked like a big ask, until I found myself reading Evelyn Waugh’s
Sword of Honour
trilogy all over again. It had been a while since I had read its constituent books, with the usual feeling one has, when reading Waugh, that the prose is designed to go down like a glass of water. Now, reading them again, I was more carried away than ever. I could quite see that Apthorpe and his thunder box were not as funny as they
were cracked up to be—people who find Waugh unamusing usually harp on that point, as if they had something against outside lavatories—but the narrative drive was irresistible, even if the whole thing was plainly a wish fulfillment. Waugh pictured himself as the effective military officer that he in fact was not, just as he would always behave, even before he had the money, like the landed gentleman that he in fact was not. (Waugh seems to be admitting, through the persona of Crouchback, that he might have been more effective still, but his accursed gentlemanliness got in the way. The truth is more likely to have been that Waugh’s troops didn’t dislike him for his superior manners, they loathed him for his rudeness.) Some of the individual novels—even the often despised
Brideshead Revisited
—leave
Sword of Honour
looking like a grab bag.
Scoop
and
A Handful of Dust
are miracles of neat concentration, and
Decline and Fall
, for comic boldness, is beyond praise: the protracted demise of little Lord Tangent ought not to be hilarious, but it is. Nevertheless,
Sword of Honour
has the broadness of concept that makes Waugh’s other novels look as if pennies are being pinched. In them, he is spending judiciously from his hoard, whereas in
Sword of Honour
he is betting the whole bundle.

But this was merely rereading, whereas there were novel sequences I had not read at all; or, sometimes, read only in part; or, shamefully, knew only from the television adaptation. Under that last classification came the two sequences by Olivia Manning, the Balkan trilogy and the Levant trilogy. Back in 1987 there was a BBC television adaptation, called
Fortunes of War
, that squeezed the two sequences into a single series, and was so good I somehow decided afterward that I knew all I needed to know about the books it was based on. The portrayal of the two leading characters was perfect: Kenneth Branagh as Guy Pringle looked just the type to be so enslaved by his haversack full of books that he would always get the actual world wrong, and Emma Thompson as his wife, Harriet, embodied the unused qualities of sensitivity and practicality that continually underlined just why she shouldn’t be married to Guy. But married they were: he a case of useless intelligence, she a case of wasted love. How could the actual novels be as vivid as that?

Well, lately I have read them all, and they are as vivid as that: even more so. Beyond the scope of any camera, the writing gives us the rich depth of the exotic settings, always more detailed when seen from Harriet’s viewpoint
than from Guy’s. And minor characters that were already sharply defined on screen—the extravagant sponge Yakimov, the appalling Professor Pinkrose—are now made fascinating, instead of merely entertaining, as Manning’s style delves into their interior lives. Most remarkable of all her qualities as a writer, however, is her historical grasp. You could say that there had always been English female writers equipped to evoke a world beyond the English Channel. In the nineteenth century, Mrs. Oliphant’s book on Florence was only one of many such books written by women; and early in the next century Gertrude Bell wrote substantial volumes about Middle Eastern states that she actually helped to build. (Iraq was partly her creation.) In 1941, Rebecca West published
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
, a densely written two-volume magnum opus about Yugoslavia. But these were all factual works. Few women, and indeed few men, had written fiction that took in the sweep of modern history. Olivia Manning did it. This, we feel, is how it must have been: the troubled territories with which we are now doomed to cope are all there in her clear river of prose. Recognizing the world that Harriet puts together in her mind as she persuades the hopelessly optimistic Guy, in one collapsing country after another, to
get out while there is still time, the reader can draw solace. Doom feels a bit better.

How great was she? Deirdre David, who has written a rewarding book about Manning’s life, treats her as a giant. Having read the two trilogies, and then Deirdre David’s book as a follow-up, I feel bound to say that Ms. David is right—feel bound, that is, because Manning is still not getting the attention she deserves. She deserves something better than mere fame. She needs her reputation raised to the level of unarguable fact. (Rachel Cooke, in her excellent book
Her Brilliant Career
, which assesses the significance of ten women who came to prominence in the 1950s, gives Manning a chapter that sets the necessary tone.)

Manning is a magisterial writer, the master spirit of her chosen genre. A quick way of conveying her stature as a sequential novelist would be to say that she is up there with Ford Madox Ford in his Tietjens tetralogy; with Paul Scott and his
Raj Quartet;
with Waugh’s
Sword of Honour
trilogy; and with the twelve volumes of Anthony Powell’s
A Dance to the Music of Time
. She is more than up there with Lawrence Durrell’s
Alexandria Quartet
, she is far above it: fifty years ago, Durrell’s epic was famous, but really it should have been judged as a mass of purple patches even
then, and now it reads like a whole platter of overripe fruit.

But a better way to raise the stakes would be to bring in the name of Proust. Often invoked when discussing Anthony Powell, Proust seems to me just as relevant to Manning; although I can see that I might think this merely because I am currently under the spell of her style, and need to read Powell again. In general, however, we can surely say that Manning took the same opportunity as Proust did in using the expanse of her creation to lay out an oncoming historical tendency. In Proust’s case it was his perception of how the high society he loved was being riddled with an anti-Semitism that was bound to have long-term consequences, and in Manning’s case it was a perception of how Europe’s
mission civilisatrice
in the countries to the south and east was bound to fail, partly because Europe itself was less civilized than it liked to believe. Both writers enriched the future by fully illuminating the recent past. You could just about say Paul Scott did the same: in the
Raj Quartet
, British India can be seen to crumble.

The driving force of both Waugh and Powell, however, was their vision of how the traditional English social order was falling apart. In their one-off novels they might have
had an international scope, but when it came to writing a big masterpiece, both of them were more interested in a changing homeland than in a changing world. As for Ford Madox Ford—who can be seen as the modern instigator of the sequential form, if you don’t want to count Trollope and his Paliser novels—the effect of the
Parade’s End
novels is to take World War I personally. His standalone novel
The Good Soldier
is a better book because less self-serving. Tietjens, as a character, is the merest wish fulfillment, the self-indulgence of a mendacious, chaotic, casually womanizing author who would like to project himself as a pillar of integrity and self-sacrifice, the honest master of his feelings. (In this respect, Tietjens is a prototype for Waugh’s Guy Crouchback, the author’s daydream about what he would like to have been, instead of a portrayal of what he was.) There is nothing self-serving about Manning’s Harriet. She, not Guy, is the hero of the two sequences; and the two sequences, taken together, outstrip anything else on our list for the sense they convey that the author sees the world as it is, and as it is bound to become, tragic experience having planted itself so deeply in the texture of time. Her great creation leads from then to now, and makes now more bearable.

Patrick O’Brian and His Salty Hero

MY ELDER DAUGHTER
should take some of the credit, or blame, for getting me to start reading again as if there might be a tomorrow, when I was ready to settle down on my deathbed and read nothing but the Bible. She had all of Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey novels in her house and urged me to try the first one,
Master and Commander
, with a promise that it was even better than the movie. She was like a drug dealer handing out a free sample. Within a few days I was back for the next one,
Post Captain
, and in the course of remarkably little time—the excitement of reading stopped me reminding myself that it was time I didn’t really have—I had read all twenty volumes. I found that my mental image of Jack Aubrey’s physical appearance never shifted. To my mind, he looked exactly like Russell Crowe. But Aubrey’s abilities and ambitions fascinated me, to the point where I started wondering whether
I might have been a better man if I had gone to sea. Very early in my life, while I was still an adolescent who read voraciously but not seriously, Kipling’s
Captain’s Courageous
had had the same effect: an effect only reinforced by C. S. Forester’s Hornblower books. But now here I was, at the other end of life, and once again I was hero-worshiping an example of leadership, discipline, and carelessness of danger. My admiration for Aubrey would have been absurd if I had not detected that O’Brian was daydreaming on his own account. He was escaping from the pettiness of today into the supposed high values of yesterday. His hero was a time traveler.

Nevertheless, Aubrey brooks no belittling, even as a musician. He plays his violin on the night before battle, but the author assures us that his musicianship is enthusiastically workmanlike at best. He is good with the strings but better at climbing ropes. O’Brian does not do the usual thing and give his hero a whole range of talents at the genius level. When Conan Doyle invented Sherlock Holmes, he showered the sleuth with extra gifts: the infallible detective was an expert in many fields, seemingly without ever having studied them. This best-selling tendency to make the man of action a
uomo universale
went
all the way down to James Bond, who, were he not a spy, could be a linguist. O’Brian doesn’t suggest that Aubrey, were he not the captain of a frigate, could be Isaac Stern. O’Brian’s restraint in this matter was an important act of self-discipline, because the temptation is always there to turn the superior character into superman. John le Carré had something going with George Smiley but should have abandoned him earlier. When, in
The Honourable Schoolboy
, Smiley revealed a hitherto unsuspected knowledge of ancient Chinese naval architecture, it was high time to toss him over the Reichenbach Falls. It might not have worked, however. It didn’t work with Sherlock, who refused to be eliminated, and came back because the public couldn’t get enough of him.

The public never got enough of Jack Aubrey, but eventually O’Brian was caught by death after having made a start on the twenty-first volume, so a twenty-volume series is all we have. My own theory is that Aubrey could have ended up as First Sea Lord and still have been interesting, but that there was an automatic terminus to our interest in Aubrey’s buddy, Stephen Maturin. Increasingly as the sequence goes on, Stephen’s chief function is to fall through hatches or off the back of the ship. A greatly talented physician,
everyone’s dream of a ship’s doctor, he is still a stooge: like Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, Stephen can’t stay coordinated for five minutes, except when he unexpectedly turns out to be a crack shot. But even then, he can’t shoot as accurately as he can fall headfirst down a companionway. It makes you wonder about what kind of surgery he is doing down there belowdecks when the ship is reeling under the impact of massed French cannon.

O’Brian doesn’t really know what to do with an interesting female character. The only woman on a par with the leading men gets killed off in a coach accident. No, these are boys’ books, and the lesser for it. I try to remember that most of the fans of O’Brian that I have met are women, but I suspect that they want a holiday from feminism, just as his male fans want a holiday from inertia. (I should leave room at this point for the possibility that some of the female Aubrey experts in my vicinity see no contradiction between feminism and their allegiance to the age of sail, and quite fancy the picture of themselves dressed as commodores with epaulettes.) But if the Jack Aubrey books are merely entertaining, they are that at a high level. Part of the charm of O’Brian’s magnificently decorated sequence—it makes me think of the bowsprit on HMS
Victory
—is the
continuous and lavish deployment of seafaring terminology. Scuttle the larboard strakes! Every sheet and cleat is named. It doesn’t matter much if you don’t know what he is talking about. Aubrey has to tell Stephen what a “cunt splice” is. I didn’t know either, and still don’t; and even Google was too shy to speak on the subject; but I was ensnared by yet another example of the salt-sprayed vocabulary. It really does help to learn the names of all the sails; but then, the same thing helped when one was reading the Hornblower books, all those years ago.