Mum's Books...Ian McEwan's 'On Chesil Beach'

I know that Mum did read this one because it was for her book group. I vaguely remember her talking about the group's reactions, although not much of what she actually said. It was a group of women who could all remember what 1962 was actually like. I think that Mum liked it, although with a few reservations.

At that point I think I was feeling pretty disillusioned about Ian McEwan's work. I love some of it. The first collection of short stories, The Cement Garden (also an excellent film, which I saw several years before I'd read a word of McEwan's writing), The Innocent, and Enduring Love are all worth reading. The Child in Time is inconsistent, but still has excellent individual scenes (I'd also already encountered an exploration of David Bohm's ideas of the implicate order in Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man which made it feel somewhat less impressive). That's just it though. Taken as a whole, despite his reputation as one of English literary fiction's great talents, he's just a wildly inconsistent writer. Amsterdam starts fairly impressively but then descends into silliness after about two thirds of the way through. That it's just about the worst prize-winning novel I've ever read was useful in that it helped me finally see the extent to which literary prizes have rather less to do with celebrating quality than with selling books. And Saturday was such a bad book that even the positive reviews put me off reading it. Atonement was better, but also felt a little like McEwan retreating into a kind of greatest-hits of Englishness: the country-house narrative, the blitz, retreat in the Second World War.

"This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing."

McEwan's fiction has often concerned itself with a single unexpected life-changing event. A very short novel On Chesil Beach narrates in at times minute detail the wedding night of young couple Edward and Florence and the lives which have brought them to this moment. It's set seemingly very deliberately in 1962, the year before sexual intercourse began. A strategy which reminds me of Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring, set in Moscow in 1913, a time similarly on the brink of transformation, one which will completely eradicate the world which the novel's characters take for granted. Their approaches are very different though. Fitzgerald's narrative voice is suffused with the commonplace, illuminating the society of pre-revolutionary Russia through rapid accumulation of small details and the tragi-comic story of English printer Frank Reid and his domestic troubles. Everything is implicit. The Russian Revolution is never mentioned, but for the reader it looms over the novel's action. We know that nothing of this will last, soon to be obliterated by the larger historical forces.

By contrast McEwan's narrative voice is always at a distance from the characters, constantly placing their story in ironic relationship to history. From the novel's opening line, their sexual difficulties are placed squarely in the context of their time, which is contrasted with the cultural changes which are about to overwhelm the world that has formed them. I can't help but feel that this risks being a little condescending. They're described as being 'trapped' by history at one point, but surely, isn't everyone? Certainly some of the difficulties between these two fictional newlyweds and their inability to communicate properly with each other - they're essentially strangers to each other despite clearly being 'in love' and intimate - seem to lie in the fact that they grew up in the immediate post war period. Their lives would undoubtedly be different if they'd been born later, but again, isn't that true for everyone? We may now live in a period which is bombarded with sexual imagery, sometimes enough to give one the impression that everyone else must be having sex all the time. There surely must be something inherently wrong with you if you're at a period of your life when you aren't having sex, or if you're one of those people who just isn't interested in it. Even so, I'm sure it's still quite easy to reach one's early twenties still as a virgin, as Edward and Florence do. And although we might think of our culture as more liberated now, I wonder if it can't be just as repressive. At least in some ways. I'm sure that sexless marriages existed in the past, and I see no reason to assume that they would necessarily have been unhappy ones. I think the pressures exerted by our culture would actually make it far less likely for such a marriage to be successful now. Although at least asexual people must now be able to find likeminded souls via the internet. Honestly, I sincerely wish such people every happiness.

Which meandering has all rather taken me rather far from McEwan's novel. It's probably the best thing he's written since Enduring Love. The distanced narrative voice never gets in the way of the emotional kick that his brief fiction provides. There's something delightful in his description of their 'innocent' courtship. The secrets they're both hiding from each mean that neither one is entirely innocent as their disastrous wedding night unfolds. You want to forgive them both for what happens and the sadness which results. The brief sketch of the lives which follow their wedding night suggests that while they are both fairly successful professionally, but also somehow unfulfilled. I don't really see how this means that they have 'dropped out of history' as McEwan's sonorous narrative voice seems to suggest. Possibly he intended their disastrous night to be somehow emblematic of that moment before the 60s began, but they seem rather more particular to me. Their conflicts and difficulties occur within a sharply realised post war Britain, but then so did so many other lives. We don't make the historical moment we find ourselves within, and our lives aren't emblematic of anything. They're just our lives. In my experience life-changing experiences are usually far more gradual than McEwan's fiction often suggests, but that doesn't mean that our lives don't alter in ways we could never have predicted. But they're also our lives, lives that no one living before or coming after us could have lived. And McEwan is quite right, they can always be changed by simply doing nothing.

India...R.K. Narayan

R.K.Narayan - The Painter of Signs

Another amazon review:

A beautiful, simply told story that conjures up the sights and sounds of a small town in the midst of change. Ah Raman! What a wonderful character! Torn between the competing demands of his traditional mother and the progressive, demanding Daisy. It might seem perverse to compare him to Dostoevsky's unnamed Underground man, but he really does seem to be part of the same dynamic. A passionate, intelligent man whose education has separated him from the social world within which he finds himself within. Where Dostoevsky is trapped by his circumstances, living within a heightened expressionistic world, Narayan's subtle comedy finds a solution for Raman by, as Monica Ali's helpful and perceptive introduction makes clear, opening him out to a reception of the world where he is no longer able to judge, but must accept and can be a part of. It's a subtle and hopeful celebration of the communal world, as represented by the small town of Malgudi. A wonderful little book.

I came across this is in the Blakehead, a vegetarian cafe and discount bookshop, one of many businesses which is now no longer with us thanks to the combined incompetence of the banking industry and our elected politicians. I'd been discussing Narayan with my wife an evening or so before, so it was a synchronicity which I appreciated (it's not the first such experience I've had where I have a particular author in my head whose work I then unexpectedly find in a charity or discount bookshop).

If I'm gradually becoming more interested in reading more Indian literature (whether that's in translation or an Indian English langauge writer), then obviously that's because I'm now a part of an Indian family through my marriage. Before I met my wife, apart from Rushdie I think I'd read no more than a few novels by Anita Desai and The God of Small Things (which it turns out we both disliked!). Some Rudyard Kipling and Forster's A Passage to India and William Dalrymple's White Mughals, although obviously that's all coming at India from the 'other side' so to speak. The former colonial rulers. I'd seen a few films directed by Satyajit Ray. Black Narcissus. India and Indians must have been a presence within some of the fiction I read and had read to me when I was younger, much of which I've doubtless forgotten. At least one of Willard Price's Adventure series of novels is set in India as are a few of George MacDonnald Fraser's Flashman novels. Tintin? That cartoon version of Around the World in Eighty Days with animals, definitely. Willy Fogg marries an Indian princess, doesn't he? Well, as far as I'm concerned, so did I!

I can still remember a scene in an episode from Jimmy McGovern's Cracker where Robbie Coltrane is questioning a young black girl. I'm paraphrasing the dialogue from long-a-go memory, but it's something like, "You tried to go out with white boys, didn't you? But they just wanted to talk about the 'Black experience', and what it means to be 'Black' in England, whereas you just wanted to talk about David Beckham and music and clothes" The ever tactful Fitz. I understand the point he's making though. And I know that my wife has had at least one well-meaning but ultimately incredibly patronising middle class white male flatmate who somehow felt that he had to apologise for the British Empire. Well, we are in academia... I would certainly hope that I've never been guilty of such a patronising attitude, although of course we've had our conversations about India, colonialism, imperialism and all the rest of it. Well, we're academics aren't we! But one never knows.

Graham Greene famously said about Narayan's work that, "Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian." It's quoted on the back of plenty of editions of his novels. Undoubtedly he was being sincere, and he did a lot to assist Narayan in acquiring publishers at the beginning of his career. For me though, what I found with this novel at least is how being an Indian doesn't feel all that different from being an Englishman. The feelings of Raman are entirely explicable to me. He's a character with whom I found it almost too easy to identify with. Of course, the cultures which formed us are very different, but I wonder if what it means to be a human in any culture might ultimately be very similar.

Toru Dutt...The Diary of Mademoiselle D’Avers

Judging a book by its cover

One of a number of books I picked up during the extended death rattle of our local Borders. I'm not sure what it was that attracted me to this exactly. Turu Dutt is not a writer I'd ever heard of before. Something about the cover, Renoir's Two Girls Reading in the Garden. There are whole swathes of art history about which I know little, so I'm actually more familiar with some of the films of his son, but this is a lovely picture. Idealised certainly. A picture of how we want to imagine reading. I like that there are two of them pictured, an act which is often seen as solitary (and usually is in my experience) becoming a communal one.

It's not a bad choice of cover for the novel, since it's a picture which is French and also one that was painted in 1890, about a decade after the novel's composition. Mademoiselle D’Avers, whose diary and narrative voice constitute the bulk of the novel apart from a final epilogue which switches to an omniscient narrator, is hardly solitary - she interests herself in everyone around her - but the form of a diary isolates her for the reader. Her simple language is very effective in creating a gentle narrative flow which carries you along. It's an novel of adolescence, frequently rooting it's scenes in a lucidly described natural world. Mademoiselle D'Avers is a kind hearted person, deeply pious, and perhaps as a consequence misses important information about the web of relationships in which she finds herself when it's all fairly obvious to the reader. Her rural idyll also encompasses madness, jealousy, murder, sickness and death. Which is not to say that isn't an optimistic book, suffused as it is with a gentle and kindly Christian faith.

It's also one of those books which is interesting as much for its author as for its story. Toru Dutt as her name implies, was not French, like every character who appears in her novel, but Indian. Its funny to imagine how this book ended up in our Borders, published by Penguin India and with a price in rupees on the back cover. Both of the novel's introductions (there are two, one for this edition, and one which was attached to the novel on it's original publication in France in 1878) push for a biographical reading, a reading which is not unconvincing. Toru Dutt set her fiction in France, and her other possibly uncompleted novel written in English in England, because it was only in the West that she could imagine the freedom for her heroines to choose who they loved. Even in a liberal family such as the one to which she belonged, the women where prevented from going into society in contrast to what they experienced in the West. Written in secret, her novels were only discovered after her early death at the age of 21, prepared for posthumous publication by her loving father.

The more you read about Toru Dutt, the more romantic a figure she becomes. Both of her siblings died young, with all of her literary work (she was also a poet, translater and writer of critical essays) produced within only a few short years before her own young death. Her family apparently lived for a time in both France and England, her father only deciding against settling there because of the illness of his children. Judging by the quotes from her letters included in the novel's 1878 edition she appears to have strongly identified herself with France and the French nation. She's clearly significant as an author simply because she came first. Author of one of the first Indian English poems, the first novel in English by an Indian woman, and the first novel in French by an Indian of either gender. The latter, The Diary of Mademoiselle D’Avers, is particularly fascinating because she wasn't the product of French colonization, but of English. G.J.V. Prasad, author of the novel's modern introduction, sums it up well when he describes it as a 'unique product of the colonial encounter', written in French during British dominance of India, a Christian novel written by an author who was born as a Hindu (Toru's family converted when she was 6), a French novel that her father dedicated to the English Viceroy of India. The many layers here are fascinating for the way it inevitably complicates the idea of the colonial encounter. Here in the West (and in academia!) it's routinely imagined as the simple encounter between a single self and other. An author such as Toru Dutt and her various imaginative identifications complicates that rather naive assumption.

What's most fascinating to me is how utterly she seems to vanish into France in her novel. There's the odd wrong note, such as when Mademoiselle D’Avers comments that the count, the man with whom she is in love with for the first half of the novel, is clearly of noble birth because of his pale skin, a sentiment more pertinent to the society Toru Dutt was imaginatively trying to leave. Otherwise it feels entirely of France to me. The novel it brings to my mind is one written more than thirty years later, Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes. It's a unfair comparison really, since I don't think it's nearly as good as that French classic, but both novels are stories of adolescence. They both present the reader with a seemingly idyllic, placid surface which obscures a more troubling reality. Perhaps that's a good description of the move from childhood to adolescence?

I suppose that I'm fortunate that those two girls caught my eye! Partly perhaps because the novel borrows the form of a diary, I found myself reading it mostly as a few pages a time in between attending to other things. It creates a real sense of intimacy. Toru Dutt is clearly more knowing than her protagonist, which might give pause for too much enthusiasm for any biographical reading. Despite the sometimes dark events which surround the protagonist, and its tragic ending, what the novel leaves behind is a feeling of Mademoiselle D'Avers' kindness.