The Modern Library (17 page)

This is one of three very funny novels, all carefully crafted and plotted, which David Lodge has written about university life in England and the United States. The other two are
Small World
(1984) and
Nice Work
(1989), but there is a sort of symmetry coupled with a rage for disorder in
Changing Places
that makes it his best book.

Two professors change places: Philip Swallow from the
University
of Rummidge in darkest England does an exchange with Morris Zapp of Euphoric State in the land of opportunity. (Rummidge is a version of Birmingham, Euphoric State a version of San Francisco.) Swallow is ‘unconfident, eager to please, infinitely suggestible’; Zapp has ‘an apocalyptic imagination’. They leave their wives behind, but take with them their cultural differences. America, to Swallow, is open and glamorous – it is after all 1969 and anything can happen. England, to Zapp, is dank and cold. One of Swallow’s former students, a failure at Rummidge, has become a phone-in show host in Euphoric State, and he plays an important part in one of the funniest scenes of the novel. Both men take a serious interest in each other’s wives. The moral of the novel is that Americans, at least in the short term, awaken the sleeping sexuality of the English and are therefore a good thing. Another moral may be that people should stay in their own countries unless they want to be deeply unsettled and much misunderstood.

Bernard MacLaverty’s three novels,
Lamb, Cal
(1983) and
Grace
Notes
(1997), and his four volumes of short stories, deal with the dramatic possibilities of the conflict within the human character between the areas of darkness and brutality and the capacity for love and tenderness. His prose is clean and spare, combining a clear and easy tone with moments of pure poetry. He offers his characters a level of understanding and sympathy which is rare among contemporary male novelists; he is not afraid to create scenes of pure unadulterated emotion.

In
Lamb
, Brother Sebastian works in a Borstal in the west of Ireland. Using a legacy from his dead father, he escapes to England with a twelve-year-old boy, Owen Kane. The novel is the story of their misadventures; the boy’s vulnerability and his epilepsy make his minder more and more anxious to protect him and love him, and make the outside world of authority – brothers, lawyers, hotel keepers – seem harsh and cruel, and make the ending of this story of the failure of a dream of love inevitable and very moving. The novel is short – just over a hundred and fifty pages – and as tense as a thriller; the set scenes are perfect; the reader knows that this sojourn will be doomed and short-lived, and reads on in terror hoping that the two main characters will survive.

The name Alistair MacLeod does not appear in many surveys of contemporary writing. He has written only two books,
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
and
As Birds Bring Forth the Sun
(1986), and these contain seven stories each. His tone is old-fashioned, close to certain classic Irish writers, the James Joyce of
Dubliners
, the fiction of John McGahern or Mary Lavin; close also to the tone and timbre of certain Scottish and Irish ballads.

His stories are set in Cape Breton or Newfoundland, his characters are involved in fishing or mining, or, in some of the best work, come from fishing or mining communities but have abandoned them for cities, and are caught now between the two places. MacLeod is, like almost nobody else, able to deal with pure rawness of emotion in the relationship between parents and children, in the drama enacted around ties of blood. His landscapes can be savage and alien, but for those who inhabit them they are real and true, and haunting for those who try to abandon them. He writes simply and clearly; his openings often dry and factual, he uses the present tense with particular skill, some of his accounts of the rituals and sorrows of leavetaking almost unbearably poignant. In Canada his two books are considered classics; he deserves to be better known in the rest of the world.

This is a remarkable novel; it is written in prose of bleak, unadorned beauty, closely matching the world in which the narrative takes place, with the sort of hair-raising plot which keeps you up all night wondering how it will end.

It is set on the Monaghan-Fermanagh border in the north of Ireland in 1883. It is full of the bitterness of contemporary politics and family feuds. Beth, a Catholic, is the stepdaughter of Billy Winters, a Protestant landowner. She comes straight out of nineteenth-century fiction: beautiful, intelligent, well read,
passionate
, just as her stepfather is bigoted, drunken, duplicitous and oddly charming. All around them are the forces that will shape twentieth-century Ireland – ambitious Catholic clergy, ruthless revolutionaries, a sense of Protestant privilege. Neighbours watch each other and bear dark grudges; the landscape itself becomes a significant force in the book, lakeland, bogland, soft hills. The sense of menace, of impending doom, of terrible darkness and hatred is all-pervasive. It would make a superb film. This neglected masterpiece deserves to be much better known.

This is a relentless and flawless version of grief and madness. It is told in the first person by one Francie Brady, whose mind moves at enormous speed and with considerable logic. He watches the small Irish town he inhabits, the coming and going of a chorus of disapproving housewives, his father, his mother, the doctor, the priest, his friend Joe, a local dog and, most of all, Mrs Nugent and her son Philip. He makes a number of escapes – to Dublin, to a seaside resort, to a Borstal, to a mental hospital. He finds work in the local slaughterhouse. He deals with his mother’s madness and death and his father’s drinking as though they are normal parts of his experience.

There is an extraordinary amount of pain at the core of the book, and this is made most clear when Francie glosses over it, laughs when he should be crying. He is obsessed with comic books and chocolate bars and pigs and the activities of young Philip Nugent as ways of avoiding what is happening in his own life. He is abandoned by his friend Joe. The account of his abuse by a priest in Borstal is superbly done. McCabe’s version of Francie’s
psychology
, and his observation of town life, are comic; using the clarity of Francie’s voice and dramatizing with great skill the inevitable consequences of his manic condition, the novel invents its own world and its own set of rules, and remains deeply convincing.

Cormac McCarthy’s vision is dark, apocalyptic and violent. His language takes its bearings from the Old Testament, the Joyce of
Ulysses
and William Faulkner; his syntax is nervous, clotted, he uses short sentences, and then immense, long, curling sentences, like an old preacher. He moves from the vernacular to a high literary style. He mainly writes about men.

Blood Meridian
is the book where all his obsessions and his genius as a stylist are most apparent. It tells the story of a group of men in possession of guns and horses on the Texas–Mexico border in the 1840s. McCarthy’s Wild West is a barren, hostile landscape; killing is both whim and passion, the book is full of scalpings and hangings, whole villages destroyed, uneasy alliances, further scalpings, dead babies hanging upside down from trees. His group of misfits roam like wild, bloodthirsty animals. His version of the American past as a sort of hell has almost no precedent in American narrative; his refusal to offer meaning and moral shape to his story makes this novel, and his other work, original and disturbing.

This novel caused a sensation when first published because of its frank descriptions, not so much of sex itself, but of all the contraceptive devices, unguents and general embarrassments that go with it – the bad breath, strange noises, teeth jarring and fiddly birth control methods that coupling requires. Read over thirty years later, the novel is still a diverting tribute to such fumblings.

The group consists of seven upper-middle-class women, Vassar educated, products of everything freedom and money can buy – and even in 1933, when the novel begins, this was considerable. These young women were among the first to benefit from advances in medicine, contraception, education and equality of opportunity. With pitiless wit and a caustic eye, Mary McCarthy shows how the progress of science elevated its voice to entrap them again. The seven friends, Polly, Pokey, Libby, Kay, Dottie, Priss and Helena, founder on the rock of bad judgement, sadistic men and useless doctors and pundits, always shakily clinging to a longing for work, love and marriage.

Mary McCarthy provides an unusual and immensely readable account of the early adult lives of certain young women engaged in life and the practicalities of sex.
The Group
does a prescient and satirical demolition job on those theoretical bullies who are always telling women what to do, and think – and who met their match in Mary McCarthy.

This short novel tells a story of love. And so it is a ballad, but also an American Gothic opera – a tragi-comic
Carmen
, a poor white
Porgy and Bess
. McCullers’s small Southern town is the kind where there is absolutely nothing to do except eat mashed rutabagas, collard greens and the occasional pig, and keep a watchful eye on your neighbour. Here lives Amelia, a six-foot-two, hairy sort of woman, clever at making money, doctoring, and distilling the best liquor in town. When her Cousin Lymon turns up – a malicious four-foot hunchback – she takes a great passion for him, which is incomprehensible but eternally fascinating to the folk who gather every night in the café Cousin Lymon opens in a store. When Cousin Lymon falls in love with the one man most likely to cause Amelia pain, the resolution of these passionate difficulties sees the lights in the café dim and the stage fall empty, Amelia’s lament lingering in the air.