The Scarlet Pimpernel...& the pleasures of cheap print.

Sir Percy Blakeny, as the chronicles of the time inform us, was, in this year of grace 1792, still a year or two on the right side of thirty. Tall, above the average, even for an Englishman, broad-shouldered and massively built, he would have been called unusually good-looking, but for a certain lazy expression in his deep set blue eyes, and that perpetual inane laugh which seemed to disfigure his strong, clearly cut mouth.

It's seems silly to criticise Baroness Orczy for demonising the French revolution and idealising the aristocracy. That's surely what you would expect from a novel like this. And the writing seems to anticipate such criticism somehow. There's an arch tone of voice, particularly in the earlier chapters, a theatricality throughout, particularly in the hero's impossibly successful disguises, which alerts you to the fact that this is history as a charade, as costume drama. The climax strains credulity with the stupidity of the French revolutionary soldiers. The twenty strong 'League of the Scarlet Pimpernel' are all noble young men enjoying themselves, just as they would at hounds, or some similar sport, performing their daring exploits largely for the fun of it. It's history played as a game.

Being familiar only with a vague outline of the character, it was interesting to see just how much of the story is actually more a romance, concerned far more with the feelings of Lady Blakeny than anything else, for all that it contains it's fair share of adventure.

I almost certainly wouldn't have read it if I hadn't come across a cheap paperback from the 60s in a charity shop, with a wonderful painted cover. The kind you don't really get anymore. The vivid red of the Pimpernel's coat dominates the composition. The materiality of the text added to the nostalgia of the story's love of the aristocracy. Compare Baroness Orczy with Sabatini. If it came to the quality of the writing I'd probably choose Sabatini over Orczy. He's got just a better command of language. Yet my copy of Captain Blood is the most recently republished Vintage edition. It's wonderfully designed, but the form doesn't match the charm of the adventure story. It should be old, preferably printed in a time before I was born, because that's where the adventure story belongs for me. It's surely for precisely that reason that the British covers to the Captain Alatriste series evoke older pulp conventions. Form matches content, only it can never quite match the real thing because it's too obviously the product of nostalgia. The old pulp covers weren't trying to evoke anything, other than attempting to sell you the book. Trying to evoke the idiom is fine, but there's always an air of self consciousness about it. This 1960s cover for The Scarlet Pimpernel simply is.

I'm also fascinated by the other titles recommended at the back. I've never read Naomi Mitchison or Geoffrey Trease, but both sound intriguing. Clearly there was this whole tradition of historical fiction which has rather faded from view now, perhaps through the rise of a more self-consciously meta fictional historical fiction over the last thirty years. I'm not talking about historical romance here, which has clearly continued to flourish despite whatever literary fashion might have to say. I'd put Henry Treece in the same grouping, a writer I have read.

Best of all though is the description quoted for Elizabeth Goudge's Linnets and Valerians, quoted from The Observer:

Four children (Mother dead, Father in India). Scholarly bachelor uncle decides - with aid of wise old gardener-factotum - to educate them. But beware of Lion Tor, and the mist when it takes strange shapes over Weeping Marsh. And where is Lady Valerian's lost explorer husband?

I love the peremptory tone of it, the faint echo of the opening of Bleak House. The assumptions of the reviewer. It comes straight out of the Empire. "Thrilling stuff" no doubt; you needn't read the book, just let the breathless précis do all the work of the story.

I've always loved these advertisements for other other writers, other books, which used to appear in the back of the book. The promise of more books beyond the one you've just finished. It's something else I don't think we get so much any more, unless it's adverts for more books by the same author as the book you've just finished reading.

The promise of more books beyond the one you've just finished reading. Or the book you're still reading, if you've flicked to back while still only half way through. It's the promise that this wonderful adventure that is reading and that is never going to end.

This Weeks Comics

Actually, by this point The Winter Men appeared some years ago. It's probably superior to any of the comics I might have bought in the past few weeks. Haven't managed to get to the comic shop for a while. Another Amazon review:

Brett Lewis & John Paul Leon – The Winter Men 

“My little friends, I thought I would have more time to tell you how thing ended up. But perhaps for now I will just tell you the good parts..."

For anyone following this when it was originally serialised, it must have seemed unlikely that it would have ever reached the end. Originally supposed to run for a full 8 issues, it was bounced from one DC comics imprint to another, subject to delays, cut down to 6 issues, then struggled to publish a total of 5 issues before the final extra sized special appeared over two years later. Presumably as a result of all these behind the scenes wranglings, the final chapter in this volume feels rather compressed, the exquisite pacing on display elsewhere dropped in the rush to get the story over as elegantly as possible in the space remaining. Just the good parts...

Kris Kalenov, the central character and narrator in many tightly packed caption boxes, is a recognisable type in these sorts of stories. The lone man, weighed down by some unconfessed violent past, capable of more feeling than he allows the world to see, unexpectedly honourable, and who is caught up in a series of ever escalating events, manipulated by others.

"Like many Russians, I was meant to be poet. But one does not eat good intentions. So...I have become some other things."   

One of the most striking things about this comic is its language, which wonderfully evokes the landscape of post-soviet Russia through its cadence and inflection. I've no idea if Russians actually talk like they do in The Winter Men, but writer Brett Lewis has clearly done his research, and it certainly feels authentic. Especially as the narrative sometimes feels less interested in the post-Watchmen superhero plot with which it is ostensibly concerned (most particularly in that awkward final chapter), and more with bleakly funny anecdotes of daily life. In this respect the strongest chapter in the whole book is probably the fourth, where we simply follow Kris and his compatriot Nikki the Gangster on their ordinary 'biznis' over the course of a single day.

What draws your attention to the language is not just how fine it is, but also the fact that there's so much of it, piled up in multiple caption boxes. There's a density of information both verbally and visually on almost every page with usually as many as 6 or more panels. That none of this ever becomes excessive or overwhelming is equally a testament to the layout and design by John Paul Leon with his wonderfully gritty and expressive artwork. The detail with which he overloads his pages perfectly complements the dialogue's verbosity in constructed an overcrowded landscape for the characters to inhabit and move through. And then in the odd scene where dialogue does fall away, he's equally capable of carrying the full force of the narrative.

Given its troubled production schedule, it seems only too appropriate that the collected edition already appears to be out of print. Although it was probably the superhero element that got it published in the first place, that's actually the weakest element of the book, but only really takes over in the flawed final chapter. It works far better in the early chapters where it functions more as a metaphor for Soviet nostalgia. Otherwise, The Winter Men is a fascinating and bleakly funny portrait of post Soviet Russia and violent men which is worthy to sit next to Jack Womack's Let's Put the Future Behind Us, another American book which is both fascinated and appalled by the complex reality of a country struggling to comes to terms with its Soviet past and a present of capitalism and brute market forces.

I wanted to place this here, next to my last post on LeCarre, because although The Winter Men is a very different kind of work, it shares a few things in common with LeCarre's general worldview and approach. Brett Lewis is similarly attentive to the rhythms of speech deployed by his violent characters.

A final few thoughts on LeCarre:
One of the things I didn't find space for in my earlier posts was to talk about LeCarre's similar use of language and command of idiom. He really is superb at capturing nuances of class and culture through speech. The moment which most obviously comes to mind is at the end of The Secret Pilgrim. In his final chapter Ned tells us of how he's sent to have a chat with a British arms dealer. This delightful individual has been selling weapons to a dictator and the Secret Service would rather he didn't. Ned scrupulously records the response he is given to his admittedly condescending request, carefull to record every inflection and gramatical error. His condescention comes from an over confidence bourn out of an assumption of the Service's authority and the respect in which it is surely still held. Instead he is subjected to a monologue occupying several pages in which he is disabused of any remaining innocence that he might have that he doesn't belong to a dying class and institution. It's a small masterpiece of post-Thatcherite arrogance and insolence. But the way in which Ned and be extension LeCarre frames it in the text not only makes it clear just how much reality is excluded from his well plotted and structured texts (The Secret Pilgrim, with it's structure of episodes linked only by their narrator and the history of the post war Brittish secret service possibly pushes furthest against the form of the spy story of any of LeCarre's fiction), but also retroactively frames the overarching narrative of Smiley and his colleagues as a fall from Eden.

That's not to say that LeCarre ever idealises the Brittish upper class whose rule had by 1993 been displaced by commerce and Thatcherism. On the contrary, he's highly critical in everything he writes about that class. But there's also a nostalgia throughout LeCarre's work for a more stable and known world. Some of my thoughts about this have been stimulated by having finished reading The Tailor of Panama last month. It's perhaps not quite as strong as its obvious model, Greene's Our Man in Havana which moves with a swiftness LeCarre's expansive texts lack, but still fine entertainment, with a marvellous portrait of the Jewish tailor and fantasist Harry Pendel. In their different ways the detailed histories of both Pendel and his nemesis, the British secret agent Andy Osnard both hark back to older worlds of Englishness. The past overshadows both characters to an intense degree, a common LeCarre trope. Pendel also demonstrates some awareness of how these tropes of Englishness are always at least in part constructed, since his whole life is built on a lie. His success at marketing himself as a tailor is based on his manipulation of a fantasy of nostalgic Englishness. Even his real past in the old Jewish East End starts to take on an elements of the fantastical, since it is now equally receding into the past, recorded only by Pendel's nostalgia. Just like Greene's earlier novel, The Tailor of Panama exposes just how much fiction is resent within the world of the Secret Service, but it's equally good at exposing how unstable is this fantasy of Englishness.


Postscript:
And now I shall cease writing about LeCarre and try to catch up with some fo the posts I've wanted to get to for the last few months. I've not had enough time to devote to this blog as I would have liked over the last few months, and that is unlikely to change any time soon, but we shall see how I do.

Honourable schoolboys...(more on Le Carre)

I've long thought that The Honourable Schoolboy must be the perfect title for a Le Carre novel. At least it was for that period of his career when he was addressing both the Cold War and the post imperial decline of Britain. When Smiley takes charge of the Circus at the beginning of the second novel of the 'Karla' sequence he's a positive force for change coming in and shaking things up in an institution previously in decline, a metaphor for just what Le Carre imagined the British state then needed (of course, the new broom for the malaise of British politics in the mid-70s eventually turned out to be Thatcher, a solution which I don't imagine Le Carre liked very much).

In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson suggests of the actor James Fox that he 'has mined the uneasy ground on the fringes of the English upper class'. So many of Le Carre's characters seem to come from a similar place, that hinterland between the upper middle class and the actual aristocracy. They're people you only have to look at to know they've been to the right schools, even if it's only a minor public school. The kind of sad and faded institution featured in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, clearly drawn from Le Carre's own experience of teaching at such an institution. It's more than that though, they're also characters marked by their schooldays, the way that some of us are. You could look at most of the cast of Tinker, Tailor and easily slot them into suitably cliched roles at their schools. 'The best days of my life...' is a cliche that conceals as much as it reveals. Perhaps it's a consequence more common for those who have attended public schools, a form of institutionalism.

It's interesting to note that the two characters clearly marked as coming from a different cultural place are Ricki Tarr, a working class thug eventually manipulated by everyone, and Toby Esterhase. Esterhase's name may link him with the real life aristocratic Esterhazy family, but he's still obviously not quite 'one of us', the weak link in the upper circle who run the Circus in Tinker, Tailor. Marked as an outsider because of his foreignness. Ricki Tarr is a character that the new film definitely gets better than the old BBC series, if only because Tom Hardy is just better in the role than Hywel Bennett was back in 1979.

It was the casting of Colin Firth which put me in mind of the David Thomson quote above. Watching the trailor, because I knew the story and characters, I could guess exactly who was cast as who. The casting of Firth as the bisexual, upper class traitor Bill Hayden is almost too obvious. Perhaps you can't associate him with the upper class in quite the same way as Thomson does with James Fox, but coming after I last saw him as King George in The King's Speech, it has a fascinating echo. King George must now rank as one of his defining roles, along with Darcy in the BBC Pride and Prejudice. Both characters are representative of a British establishment, fundamentally honest, patriotic, upstanding. It's fascinating to place this portrait of corrupt Englishness against these two earlier roles, have them echo each other, the contrasting surfaces of the British establishment.

a find at work

And what a wonderful find!

I currently work part time for a bookseller, sometimes packing books, and sometimes cataloguing them. On Wednesday I was mostly working on the category of rural homes and country houses. Most of them are coffee table books really. Stuffed full of pictures of luxury homes you'll never be able to afford. Aspiration-porn. Interiors art-directed to within an inch of their life.

But this? This is a coffee table book with pretensions. It's a tour of the English country house, including the former homes of famous people from history such as Jane Austen. It's littered with literary quotations, many assigned pride of place on their own page.

And the cover? Whoever art-designed this is some kind of genius. The animals sitting down to enjoy their wine and food amid aristocratic squalor. Clutter. It sits somewhere in the same neighbourhood as Lewis Carroll. The Goons. The Beatles when they went psychedelic. The Bonzos. Maurice Richardson's The Exploits of Engelbrecht. English Surrealism.

Quotes...Thomas More

Writing in 1516, Thomas More gets to the heart of one of the major problem with our country's present political life:

So there you have a group of people who are deeply prejudiced against everyone's ideas, or at any rate prefer their own. Suppose, in such company, you suggest a policy you've seen adopted elsewhere, or for which you can quote a historical precedent, what will happen? They'll behave as though their professional reputations were at stake, and they'd look fools for the rest of their lives if they couldn't raise some objection to your proposal....And yet we're quite prepared to reverse [the] most sensible decisions. It's only the less intelligent ones we cling on to like grim death. I've come accross this curious mixture of conceit, stupidity, and stubborness in several different places. On one occaison I even met it in England.

Utopia, trans. Paul Turner

"...the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin.": John LeCarre & George Smiley

John Le Carre has himself rather given the game away, apparently suggesting that his most famous character, George Smiley, would now be "keeping bees somewhere" in retirement. Smiley may exist at the centre of Le Carre's masterful depiction of the shadowy world of the British Intelligence community, a depiction often praised for it's accuracy and realism, but Smiley's fictional existence seems to owe more to Sherlock Holmes, whose fictional retirement Le Carre consciously alludes to, or Hercule Poirot. Characters who exist somewhere outside of history, subject to revised time lines, never really aging. Although we do finally get that in The Secret Pilgrim, written in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, a fictional summing up of the period, of the kind of spy stories which could be told then, and of the depressing reality which for Le Carre always lies behind any fanciful depiction of the world of espionage. With the Cold War over, critics seemingly thought Le Carre had lost his great subject (and that may be true for all I know), but it was certainly appropriate that it should have marked the final appearance of his signature character, one final performance before the curtains were closed on that moment of history.
Yes, I am a fan, ever since I was dazzled by Alec Guiness in one of the BBC's handful of contributions to the claim of 'Greatest TV Show'. They did a follow up, adapting Smiley's People, when for budget reasons they couldn't make The Honourable Schoolboy, which I've still never seen. No, after seeing Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for the first time, I turned to Le Carre's original novels. Alighting first on a copy of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (in which Smiley only has a cameo), before backtracking to the very beginning and working my way through, concentrating on Smiley and the boys in the Circus, one of Le Carre's wonderful coinages for secret service slang. With my eagerness to read every thing Smiley appears in, I missed that The Russia House is actually a Circus novel too, connected by the character of Ned in The Secret Pilgrim, so I ended up reading those two the wrong way around.

First appearing in two rather conventional whodunits, Smiley has only minor roles in Le Carre's following two novels as he established himself as a major writer of espionage fiction, before eventually reemerging in Tinker, Tailor at the centre of the 'Karla' trilogy. The whodunnit plot is transposed from the quest to catch a murderer to a need to discover the double agent within the service (the 'mole', another Le Carre coinage actually appropriated by the real secret service), 'Karla' the ultimate nemesis, head of the Soviet service, an obvious double for Smiley who haunts the narrative, only occasionally glimpsed. The final novel in the sequence, Smiley's People, like The Secret Pilgrim, always seemed to me to be taking place in a narrative space located somewhere 'after', a belatedness, as if all of the previous conventional narratives of spy fiction have already taken place, leaving only a sense of loss which haunts both novels. The waste of the secretive world.

Given my regard for the TV Tinker, Tailor, it's perhaps not surprising that I wasn't initially overly bothered about seeing the new film. It's not that I resented their making a new version, more that I just couldn't see the point, when we've already got an adaptation which is pretty much perfection. And with seven hour-long episodes in which to elaborate the complex plot, two hours would inevitably squeeze the narrative. But we purposefully took a needed day off on Wednesday and ended up catching an early evening performance. It's a testament to the director and screenwriters that the narrative never feels cramped. Many of the fabulous cast are largely reduced to little more than cameos, yet all manage to impose themselves on the material. It's clear who everyone is from even the smallest scenes. And the set design is immaculate in it's evocation of the vanished post war world of the early seventies.

In fact, I'd suggest it's almost too immaculate. It's a film that almost feels as though it's been directed by its main character. Everything, every lingering camera movement is so precise, the gloomy cinematography just so. Important scenes are often elided, seen only obliquely, the faces of several characters remain hidden from the viewer. Everything feels so very controlled, buttoned down. Compare one adaptation with another, and it's clear that for the TV series, made in 1979 only a few years after the novel was written, it simply can't be nostalgic for the Cold War period since for its makers and audience the Cold War was present day reality. I'm old enough to remember the last years of the Cold War period, born in the same year the TV series was produced, my brother and I were woken up in order to be sat down in front of the TV footage when the Berlin Wall fell. "Watch this! It's History!" we were admonished. The film captures something of my imaginings of the period just before I was born. Growing up there were enough reminders of it around, particularly in official buildings, whereas the TV series just is the time before I was born.

In fact, the film is haunted by that earlier adaptation (really, how could it not be?). It borrows some of the alterations to the novel's plotting, whilst adding a few of it's own. As good as Gary Oldman is as Smiley (and he is excellent), he's not who I would have chosen for the role. It's a trivial thing, but he's just too tall, whereas the character of the novels and Alec Guiness's performance is short and a little fat, dressed in clothes which never quite fit him. Oldman looks a little outsize at several points, where Alec Guinness' Smiley disappears into himself, rather like a mole (the animal) at times. And Oldman surely borrows from Guinness for aspects of his performance and speech patterns. Which is not to say that he doesn't bring things to the character which are absent from Guiness's earlier performance. I read somewhere that Le Carre himself has observed that he gives a much clearer sense of the cruelty Smiley is capable of, his rather passive aggressive nature.

What I love about Smiley is that sense of buttoned down emotion. It's that peculiar kind of Englishness which celebrates failure and buried feelings. Which is also what elevates him slightly into the realms of the fantastic: his complete devotion to his work, the contradiction of a person who is brilliant in one aspect of their life and a failure in another. For The Spectator Smiley is a "brilliant spy and totally inadequate man", an obvious allusion to the infidelities of his beautiful, aristocratic wife Anne. It's a rather reductive and stereotypical evaluation of masculinity, indicative of a stereotypical heterosexual panic about definitions of maleness. And Smiley is a very unsexual character, contrasted with the predatory and bisexual Bill Hayden, modeled on Kim Philby, who cuckolds Smiley. Arguably, in their different ways, the sexuality of both characters is threatening to the sort of rhetoric the Spectator is displaying.

A more charitable reading of the Spectator quote would be that the secretive world of espionage is destructive of any human relationship. It's a theme which runs through much of Le Carre's Cold War fiction, and interestingly it's also what the film adaptation plays up. That it is more explicit about the homosexuality of several characters is no doubt a sign of the respective eras in which their adaptations were made. But the film's makers go further, portraying Smiley's trusted Lieutenant Peter Guillam as a gay man who late in the narrative brakes off what appears to be a loving relationship in order to protect himself in the secretive world in which he opperates. It's certainly in keeping with what little I know of the world of British intelligence which, like the theatre, appears to have been something of a haven for gay men pre-Wolfenden and legalisation. But it also makes the narrative focus much more about the spy's personal lives.

In the TV series, Smiley's cuckoldry is an open secret, everyone eludes to it, but nothing is stated. Nothing is even seen until Ann returns to him for a final scene in which Smiley attempts to confront his wife with her infidelity with Bill Hayden. In the film we have several flashbacks to a perfectly tacky early 1970s works Christmas party, in which Smiley spy's as a peeping tom on Ann and Hayden. Another flashback gives him a near confrontation with Hayden in which Smiley arrives back from Germany to find Hayden in his home, almost catching the erring pair. Far more emphasis is laid on the friendship between Hayden and Jim Prideaux through the repeated appearance of a photograph of the two of them in younger days that by the end it almost feels more like a love story which dare not speak its name than a spy story.

It's interesting. This is one of the great English Cold War novels, and I can't help but feel that the film subtly depoliticizes it. Whilst the earlier TV adaptation can't be nostalgic for the Cold War, that isn't to say that it isn't nostalgic for another earlier period of Britain's history. When Smiley visits Connie Sachs in the TV series Beryl Reid has a line where she laments her 'boys' who were raised to rule an empire. The TV series is in part an imperial lament, if far from an uncritical one, since these are real live 'boys' who are getting hurt as a consequence. In the film, Kathy Burke does suggest things were simpler during the Second World War, but the empire goes unmentioned. Her most memorable line is when she mischievously suggests to Smiley that she feels rather 'unfucked' whilst two undergraduates are making out on a sofa in the room next door. More sex, and less politics.

One of the changes I really liked was the scene where Smiley tells Guillam about his one meeting with their ultimate enemy, the Soviet spy chief Karla years previously in Delhi. In the TV series we get yet another flashback, with Karla played by a silent and impassive Patrick Stewart. In fairness, this was some years before he was Jean-Luc Pickard, but I never quite understood why they had such a major Shakespearean actor in such a tiny role. I think I understand it now. It's a tiny role, so it needs a well known actor than at least many of the audience will be familiar with in order to give the character solidity. In the film, Karla is an absent ghost, haunting the narrative. Oldman however narrates Smiley's slightly drunken account of his meeting with Karla in a powerful scene, but we remain in the narrative's present, the camera fixed on his attempt to act out their absent encounter. There is a flashback, but it only gratuitously reveals to the audience something hidden from the characters, that Karla was present at the shooting and capture of Jim Prideaux with which the story opens, revealed only through his still possessing the lighter which Ann once gave to Smiley. It heightens the doubling of Smiley and Karla which is present in the novel, but still denies him any real presence.

I don't think any of this is wrong. The destruction of human relationships which Le Carre's fiction finds the world of espionage guilty of is ultimately a criticism of that world. For Le Carre, politics often feels like little more than an excuse for people to behave wickedly. The makers of the film aren't betraying the novel. It's just an interesting change of emphasis, reflective perhaps that now we are more nostalgic for the supposed moral certainties of the Cold War (not that Le Carre's depiction of the Circus ever really gives us moral certainties), than we are for a lost empire. But it also reflects a modern tendency to privilege personality and personal feelings over politics. The only real misstep in the film is the final scene where Smiley finally sits down triumphantly as the new Control, contrasted with a montage of the film's minor characters who have all lost something. Where in the TV series it was nothing more than an administrative meeting in which Smiley softly informs his chastened colleagues that he will now be taking over as 'acting head' of the Circus, here it's transformed into a victory. This is a subtle betrayal of Le Carre's fictional world, where any victory ultimately feels like failure.

If I compare the two adaptations and still come out thinking that the one is a masterpiece whilst the other is just a really well made film, then that's also because I think that it gets the balance between the personal and political right. Perhaps at the end of the day it only comes down to the fact that I saw the TV series first. Still, I'm glad I saw the film, and I'll be delighted if it's success means we get adaptations of the other two volumes of the trilogy. The BBC couldn't afford the cost of filming in Hong Kong for the The Honourable Schoolboy. And I really must get around some day to watching the BBC's Smiley's People. I've read a few of Le Carre's non-Circus novels. His most autobiographical, A Perfect Spy, is as good as if not better than the 'Karla trilogy'. It's themes of nostalgia and betrayal are in a similar orbit. I've not yet read enough of his post-Cold War fiction to know if Le Carre lost his great subject with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even if he did, then he still created one of the great fictional characters reflective of that era. I think that's more than most writers manage.

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.