A review of The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble

It’s almost 40 years since Margaret Drabble published The Waterfall, a novel, therefore, of the swinging, liberal, liberated sixties.. The scenario is simple. Jan and Malcolm and Lucy and James are two (heterosexual) couples. Then Jane initiates a shuffle of the cards and has an affair with James. By 2007 standards, this might provide enough material for page one of a contemporary inter-relationship novel. In Margaret Drabble’s hands it is more than enough to sustain a substantial book.

The narrative is seen entirely from Jane’s point of view. Alternately written in the first and third persons, we get to know Jane’s character from within and from without. She is not always honest, either with us or herself. She admits manipulation, duplicity, selfishness and infidelity. But they were the right things to do at the time, she convinces herself, the right things, that is, until she later reassesses what she did. So she justifies her inconsistencies, her whims, her foibles, her weaknesses through a belief that they were the right thing to do in the circumstances, at least as they unacceptably presented themselves. She is sometimes assertive, sometimes vulnerable, both satisfied and frustrated, accomplished and bereft. She hates sex, cannot cope with the physical contact of marriage, yet she finds herself with two children, and those after a first miscarried. It seems that for Jane every position is a default.

She is intensely analytical, however, extruding every aspect of her own psyche in every direction possible through the needle-eye of existence. And sometimes she meets herself going in the opposite direction, offers a greeting as she passes and remains unimpressed by the concept of contradiction. So in Jane we are presented with a character who appears to analyse every aspect of her life, of her very being, in forensic detail, only to ignore any conclusion that might arise. And for Jane, life changes on the day she discovers that James can give her what her husband seemed to promise, but was unable to fulfil. The Waterfall takes us through the minutiae of their relationship, examined from every possible angle, analysed down to the particulate. But we see everything from Jane’s point of view and, as I have already stated, this is not a consistent perspective.

Margaret Drabble provides the reader with some exceptional observations. Jane’s family, she tells us, believed in the God of the Church of England, and a whole host of other unlikely irreconcilable propositions, such as monogamy, marrying for love and free will. An aunt married a tradesman (Lord save us!), but she cultivated him so that he was at home with his professional relatives, and as capable as them of verbal malice. Jane describes herself as drifting sensibly into marriage. The class difference between Jane’s family and her husband’s was enjoyed by her own parents because it allowed them to indulge their passion for condescension. And these were the same parents who ate their hearts out in Surrey as they contemplated the forbidden fruits of prestige.

Margaret Drabble ostensibly presents Jane – and indeed Lucy, her cousin – as vulnerable females. Overtly – even internally – they are weak, perhaps wavering, unsure, forever unconvinced. But ultimately it’s the men involved who carry the weight, who become the tragedies. It seems that, at least in Margaret Drabble’s Waterfall, there exists in women, within an overtly vague vulnerability, a paradoxical and contradictory stern steel resolve which eventually endures.

A review of Disgrace by J M Coetzee

Disgrace is a novel of a man’s, even a family’s decline. David Lurie is a university teacher, the kind of teacher who was at home with academic material that current course requirements no longer demand. He is also divorced, twice, and even on his best form he has to grapple with the trials and tribulations that his frayed life and career present.

He needs regular sex and visits a prostitute with regularity, always the same one, and harbours suspicions that he provides her with more than just business. He also suffers from self-delusion. So when he has an affair with one of his students, he really believes that she wants him for what he is, despite his thirty years of seniority. He convinces himself that she is a willing participant. It turns sour. She reports him. There is a committee. He cooperates, perhaps, but not in the way required by mores with which he cannot identify. Conveniently, messily, he resigns. And he loses his benefits.

David goes off to live with his daughter in a rural area in the Eastern Cape. He discovers complexities in the relationship between white and black which were at least less apparent in the urban setting of Cape Town. He is willing to make compromises, but it is not going to be easy.

David and his daughter are then viciously attacked. Motives are clear, and then unclear. Relations between the father and daughter, and between the two of them and their black neighbours become difficult and strained. Old scores are being settled, perhaps. Older scores are being tallied. A new world demands that new details of inter-relation and inter-dependence be drawn, except that for David the art seems like freehand. No-one seems to be able to say what they want or what they feel.

To me, Disgrace seems to be about change and how we do or do not cope with it. It’s about how we want to continue asserting, for want of a better word, values – assumptions, perhaps – that might no longer apply. We would only know by reading the unspoken assumptions of others and interpreting them correctly. Disgrace is also about vengeance and punishment, about settling scores, about inclusion and exclusion. The story line is strong, but the overtones are stronger.

Disgrace is a book that presents individual experience and through that manages to comment on change within South Africa and its society, What has changed is not always for the better and what is retained is not always relevant. But these are reactions to assumptions, perhaps, rather than to any external reality, no matter whose it might be. On reflection, the overt simplicity of Disgrace is part of its complexity.

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Fascination by William Boyd: a virtuoso performance

Fascination by William Boyd is a set of sixteen short stories. This may not sound either surprising or original until one considers their form. The author uses at least nine different and clearly identifiable forms in which to present this work. One takes the form of a video. There are childhood memories, a diary, a journal, an A-to-Z listing. One story is a set of dialogues over lunch. Another is a set of monologues. And William Boyd’s use of these different forms is not just a writer’s trick to impress a critic. In each case to form complements the story, adds interpretation to the events and helps our understanding of the characters. Fascination is thus no less than a fascinating read, a tour de force in miniature by a great writer. 

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A review of Going Home by Doris Lessing

It is fifty years since Doris Lessing published Going Home, an account of her return to Rhodesia, the country where she grew up. By then in her thirties, she had already achieved the status of restricted person because of her political allegiances and her declared opposition to illiberal white rule. These days Zimbabwe makes the news because of internal strife and oppression. It is worth remembering, however, that fifty years ago the very structures of Southern Rhodesian society were built upon oppression, an oppression based purely on race.

Fifty years on Doris Lessing’s Going Home an historical record of this noxious system, a record that is more effective, indeed more powerful because of its reflective and observational, rather than analytical style. Doris Lessing, a one-time card-carrying Communist, laid a large slice of the blame for the perpetuation of discrimination firmly at the door of the white working class. Though not all white workers were rich – indeed she records that many were abjectly poor – what they had and sought to preserve was an elevated status relative to the black population. She describes white artisans as white first and artisans second. Though trade unions actively sought equal pay for equal work, they never campaigned for any kind of parity for black workers. On the contrary, they demanded the maintenance of racially differentiated pay rates. How’s that for the spirit of socialist internationalism and brotherhood! (I accept there is a misplaced word there…). In fact Doris Lessing records that it was the relatively liberal capitalist enterprises that demanded more black labour, their motive of course arising from cost savings, not philanthropy. So trade unions spent much of their time making sure that companies hired their quota of higher paid, white labour.

Even in the 1950s, she remarks on the likelihood that many Africans were already better educated than their white counterparts. White youth shunned education as unnecessary, while Africans saw it as a possible salvation. She notes that the people who treated the African population the worst were recent immigrants from Europe, particularly those from Britain, who tended to be less educated themselves and drawn from the ranks of the politically reactionary. Such people, apparently, were equally critical of immigrants from southern Europe, and expected Spaniards and Greeks to work for African wages, not the white wages that they themselves demanded.

The situation in Rhodesia, clearly, had to change. Not only was such crass discrimination unsustainable, it was also comic, as are all racially posited class systems. While the South Africans over the border created honorary whites of the Japanese they increasingly had to do business with, the Rhodesians went through their own equally idiotic contortions. An example of such nonsense is quoted by Doris Lessing when she remarks that there was a privileged group of Africans who were granted the right not to carry passes with them at all times, as long as they carried a pass to record their exemption.

But it is also worth remembering that Doris Lessing, herself, was a banned person, unable to travel to certain places and very much under the watchful eyes of the authorities. In Going Home she observes a society that had to collapse under the weight of its unsustainable contradictions. The fact that this took more than twenty years after the book was written was nothing less than a crime, and probably contributed to the subsequent and equally lamentable reaction.

Doris Lessing records seeing a British film towards the end of her travels. She describes it as a “cosy little drama of provincial snobberies and homespun moralities played out in front of African farmers in their big cars”. Fifty years on, Britain is probably cosy and provincial, and the snobberies are still rife. But now it is not Rhodesia where these reactionaries look down on people of other races overpay and under-educated themselves. It is not in Africa where corporations would dearly love to employ cheaper labour, imported if need be. Rhodesia’s white privilege of the 1950s was obviously absurd. But there are some parallels with economic and class relations in the Britain of today and, like all good books, Doris Lessing’s Going Home may even add prescience to its qualities.

A review of The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester

One of my greatest pleasures is eating, so I must cook. I savour, therefore I cook. I like tasty food made with fresh ingredients that address all four of our tastes – salt, sour, sweet and bitter – to create a complementary whole. Of course, there is now the fifth taste, unami, the expanding universe within soy sauce, that can amplify other inputs. I have just made an English pie, with chicken, mushrooms, a little diced bacon, seasoning and fresh herbs. It was moistened with stock and an egg before being baked in my own short-crust. Fresh gravy and vegetables alongside is all it will need. It thus has sweet, salt and bitter, but lacks sourness. A squeeze of lemon on the vegetables will compensate.

For the expansion, take one novel closely related to cooking and read. Do try the recipes, but proceed with care. Cook things right through before committing to taste. John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure is my recommendation. It’s a highly original, highly informative cookbook written by one Tarquin Winot, an expert in the field.

In one of the most original books I have ever read, John Lanchester creates a real anti-hero. Too often the concept is ironed onto a character who is just a naughty boy doing naughty, often repulsive things, the concept of “hero” being often ignored. Tarquin Winot, the anti-hero of The Debt to Pleasure, is a brilliant and learned cook. He is also highly creative, using ingredients that only those who might cook with a purpose would choose to use. He is also something of a psychopath, perhaps. That is for you to judge. But he has survived to write his cookbook and apparently savours his retirement, courtesy of those he has fed.

The Debt to Pleasure is a superb novel. Tarquin’s narrative draws the reader, perhaps unsuspecting, into his world, evoking an empathy with and for the character. That we have as yet only partially got to know this brilliant cook only becomes apparent as we proceed through his life, a life he has peppered with his personal peccadilloes. But above all, Tarquin Winot is both a planner and a perfectionist. His culinary creations are thought through, drafted like dramas to provoke particular responses, to achieve pre-meditated ends. They are also successful, appreciated by those who consume his concoctions, and eventually they succeed in precisely the way that he plans and executes.

Throughout, John Lanchester’s prose is a delight, as stimulating to the mind as his character’s creations might be to the palate. Florid and extravagant it might be at times, perhaps too much butter and cream for some diets. But The Debt to Pleasure is a satisfying, surprising and eventually fulfilling read. Tarquin fulfils both aspects of the anti-hero and ultimately we are left to grapple with the nature of self-obsession and selfishness.

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A review of Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes is a book I have had queuing up to read for some time. I don’t know why I have never got round to reading it. Perhaps it’s because of the overtly “literary” tag that was attached to it when it was short-listed for the Booker Prize. I am not against “literary” fiction. Far from it: indeed I aspire to write it, after a fashion. My avoidance of Flaubert’s Parrot was never conscious, but was probably a result of thinking that I knew what to expect – word play, experimentation with form, biography, dissection of the writer’s role, relationship between art and life, in fact all the mundane things that your average novelist has for breakfast. The less than average ones, by the way, always have corn flakes. It is their convention. Having just finished the book, I can declare that I found all I expected and much, much, much more.

Julian Barnes has his character, a doctor called Geoffrey Braithwaite, consider various literary ideas. One, which only really applies to writing prose fiction, is the relation between form and content. Most novels, certainly most pulp fiction, never address this, since the authors usually present apparently literal material merely literally or, perhaps even more commonly, fantastical material literally. Generally within some recognisable genre, these offerings tend to preoccupy themselves with simple narration. In effect, most novels are presented in pictorial form, like a comic strip running a frame at a time through the author’s mind, with only minimally extended commentary. Their presentation is invariably linear, with the writer’s aim to spoon-feed the reader with bite-sized chinks of easily digestible plot in a context aimed at simplifying the experience.

Flaubert’s Parrot is the polar opposite of this. The only plot is Flaubert’s life, both physical and intellectual, alongside that of his enthusiastic intended biographer, the doctor, Geoffrey. Geoffrey’s research, notes, speculations and musings provide the book’s utterly original form. Since the adultery of Flaubert’s fictional Madam Bovary provided the scandal that created his fame, evidence of his attitudes towards women and sex in his own life provides a fascinating backdrop against which we can assess the author’s motives and desires. The death and revealed adultery of the narrator’s own wife provides motive for his obsession with Flaubert and his femme fatale, and, quite unexpectedly, this culminates in a truly moving moment of emotional empathy that the author, Barnes, not Flaubert, not the narrator, evokes in his reader.

This emotional intensity developed as a real surprise towards the end of the book. Through it, Julian Barnes achieves a perfect marriage of form and content, the finest I have ever encountered. No matter how much we analyse the creative process, it is our emotional lives that provide the stuff of art. The writer moulds it, contextualises it, formalises it, but eventually the rawness of the experience, the chasm of bereavement, the hollow of betrayal, the consonance of love that makes us laugh or weep as we read, and Julian Barnes provokes both responses in this beautiful book.

There are some stunning moments of virtuosity. There are, for instance, three concatenated chronologies of Flaubert’s life – an encyclopedia of success, a record of failure and a personal diary. This is a masterstroke, effectively answering the rhetorical question of why we remain interested in the author, even when we consider a work as iconic as Madame Bovary. The narrator’s dissection of “correctness” in fiction is utterly poignant, especially so when we cannot even agree on the detail of reality. And so what if the writer decides to change things around? Isn’t it supposed to be fiction?

But the enduring memory of Flaubert’s Parrot is that masterstroke of marrying motives via Falubert’s real life, whatever that was, the imagined world of his femme fatale and the apparently real life of Geoffrey Braithwaite, with its own experience of adultery and bereavement. And then, of course, we have Geoffrey’s obsession with Flaubert, through which we reflect on the ideas of the self and its selfishness. Stunningly beautiful.

And the parrot? Probably a fake. Or perhaps just faked. Or then again….

A review of The Valkyries by Paulo Coelho

I found Paulo Coelho’s The Valkyries a bit of an enigma. I suspect the author at least partly intended it to be so. In a nutshell, the author seeks to discover new aspects of his psyche, to develop new angles on his existing skills. After a consultation with his mentor, he and his wife set off for a jaunt in the Mojave Desert to find what it is that they seek. Our author is in engaged in a quest, a search for his personal Angel. The reader, I am sure, will be convinced from the start that she accompanied him throughout.

They wander off in full sun one day, take their clothes off (for some reason) and have to be rescued by Gene, who has seen it all before. He reassures the travellers that they will find their valkyries. And they do. They turn out to be a band of leather-clad women on motorbikes, ladies who have profound mystic powers which they practise amidst their regular partying.

I was a bit perplexed by the narrator who claimed to have trained as an engineer in one breath and then discussed the existence of the universe in terms of ancient Greek elements. I suspect that the high performance motorbikes relied on a rather more complex analysis of matter. But honing the skills of a magus apparently requires the application of ancient knowledge, no matter how wrong, whatever the context. And sure enough the revelations come flooding in and lives are duly transformed. I have just a suspicion that there is something in the observation that no matter what one does with reality, spirituality is necessarily a personal experience, its significance purely internal, even when shared with others.

The Valkyries has all the Paulo Coelho elements. There are short scenes presented in a variety of literary shorthand. The text is suffused with magic, religiosity and self-realisation set in an earthly medium. It’s a quick and easy read but ultimately a satisfying one, even for someone like myself, who cannot suspend belief long enough to share in the book’s experiences.

But Paulo Coelho is a magus and a magician of the highest order. He has sold over 90 million books and, as a writer myself, I will read more of his books in the hope that I might discover his magus touch, his waft of a wand that will reveal his secret. Even without sympathy for the detail, it’s a lovely, rhythmic read.