The Modern Library (25 page)

Listening to the conversational voice of Ginny, we learn to see beyond the horizon. Jane Smiley’s skill here is to use the great play but to look at
King Lear
through a different microscope. This transforms it into an epic study of a tyrant and of a family slowly disintegrating as old sins see the light of day. There is an airy clarity about this novel, echoing the rolling landscape of the American Midwest. Jane Smiley’s graceful prose gives a similar beauty to the novel’s moral twists, its passion for life and its emotional vitality.

This is, to some extent, a dark and intricate comedy of manners set in Nigeria in the years after independence. It centres around the lives of a number of young intellectuals who are ambitious and uneasy in the new society, who meet regularly, drink a lot and talk all of the time. Much of the novel is made up of their dialogue. In scene after scene – the setting and tone change in each chapter – they confront their own idealism and sophistication, their own concern (or lack of concern) with manners and morals versus the concern (and lack of concern) of the society all around them. Religion, voodoo, art, government, journalism, sex, negritude, whiteness, etiquette (the wearing of gloves by women at certain parties, for example), Americans and Germans all come in for discussion and examination. (The American and the German in the book are treated with a good deal of contempt.) Soyinka makes none of his characters heroic in any way: they all have their weaknesses, but they also have a sort of innocence which makes them vulnerable. His ability to make dialogue sparkle – especially in the party scenes, where our intellectuals are at their most cynical and observant – is astonishing. At times, the novel demands close attention as Soyinka refuses to deal in easy realism; he makes no judgements or psychological assessments; he wrings a lot of emotion out of surface detail and moments of pure, careful observation, and manages – and this is one aspect of the genius of the book – to suggest that the people he has written about are doomed and will not have the strength to withstand the pressures of the society all around them.

Muriel Spark is a novelist whose every line contains at least three insinuations. The oft-used phrase of Miss Jean Brodie, teacher
extraordinaire
, proclaiming that she is ‘in her prime’, are words now used by millions of women as they leave youth behind them.

It is Edinburgh in the 1930s. Miss Brodie is a mighty woman, forcefully politically incorrect, an individualist. She has her ‘set’ at Marcia Blanc School, five girls she raises to follow her principles, providing them with high culture, homing in particularly on Love. She involves them in her affairs with Teddy Lloyd the art master and Gordon Lowther the music master, and in her unfortunate penchant for Mussolini and his attractive fascisti. Her colleagues long to see the back of her. Miss Brodie confounds all their attempts until betrayed by one of her girls, raised to bite the hand that fed her.

This is a novel about nonconformity and spiritual pride and the nastiness of mankind, in particular in the shape of growing girls with peg legs and skinny souls. In spare, quirky dialogue, Miss Brodie and her disciples tempt fate with self-composure, accepting retribution with an imperturbable sense of guilt. This is a perfect novel, a classic, not a word out of place, laced with mother’s wit and wisdom.

(US:
Dark Places of the Heart
)

The rushing force of Christina Stead’s novels explodes with words and myriad personalities and images: reading her is like standing under a gigantic waterfall, shouting your head off with glee. Nellie Cook, née Cotter, is a spellbinder and a possessive manipulator, one of those Socialists to the left of everything, living in a tatty house in Islington, working as a journalist on a London newspaper in those harsh years which followed the end of the Second World War. Nellie never draws breath. She lies, she fantasizes, she drinks, she smokes, wandering round the house all night blowing smoke into sleeping faces, talking to the moon. She is a seductress, an emotional gangster. Her brother Tom, to whom she remains locked in adolescent intimacy, uses women’s hearts to wreak his havoc, oozing into them then out again, leaving a trail of slime behind. Cotters’ England made them what they are: the poor Northern town of Bridgehead where poverty – incest? – has stunted and perverted them, like trees growing underground. Christina Stead writes at full pelt about politics, domestic life and sexual politics. She fizzes with ideas, making no judgements, revealing everything through the monologues and encounters of the people of Cotters’ England. This is a great novel, savagely comic, demanding angry understanding for people and a country whose lives are blighted by the past.

Has there ever been a male American novelist who did not want to write a vast, defining history of the American soul?
East of Eden,
John Steinbeck’s version, is set in rural California in the years around the turn of the century. It is the story of two families of settlers, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, but it is also the story of settlement itself, of the formation of the modern United States. ‘The Church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously … the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.’

East of Eden
is a rambling, garrulous family saga, with some deeply memorable characters (such as the Irishman Samuel Hamilton, the narrator’s grandfather, and the dark, almost innocent Adam Trask), and some wonderful set scenes (such as the birth of the twins Aron and Caleb, whose lives dominate the second half of the book). In the novel there is a constant struggle, epic, almost biblical (sometimes knowingly echoing the Bible), between light and darkness, money and penury, bad land and good land, water and drought, men and women, fathers and sons and, perhaps most starkly and dramatically, brother and brother. Steinbeck has a natural skill as a storyteller, and manages to make this long and powerful saga hugely credible, readable and vivid.

This novel is set in a fictional Central American country, its tone and sense of darkness and impending doom a cross between Conrad and Greene. Stone is at his best when he deals with loners and drifters, with drugs, uncertainty, paranoia, hallucinations, violence. There is a very accurate sense of the mixture of strange innocence and pervasive malevolence of the American intelligence services, and the novel is haunted by Vietnam, where Holliwell, one of the protagonists, has served.

A number of characters are moving and being moved towards catastrophe. One of them is a nun who has been told to be prepared to treat the injured in an insurrection, another a gunrunner, another a drug-crazed refugee from the United States, another a CIA man, another our friend Holliwell, an anthropologist, another a local cop. All of them are oddly powerless, only half-motivated; the writing is dense, concentrated and often powerful. Right in the middle of the book, there is a sensational description of Holliwell diving and the world under water: ‘On the edge of vision, he saw a school of redfish whirl left, then right, sound, then reverse, a red and white catherine wheel against the deep blue.’ At the novel’s heart is the drama of covert action versus botched revolution, how easily things are misunderstood and half understood, and how strong the lure of violence.

For the English, the class system has been as fruitful a subject and as devastating to contemplate as serfdom was for the great Russian writers.
Saville
is an epic account of English life in the
mid-twentieth
century, told through the story of young Colin Saville, son of a miner, living in a worn-out mining community in south Yorkshire. Colin is an observer, strong in his silence, watching the weary lives of his father and mother – subsistence allowed them, but little else – as gradually the education he earns by winning a scholarship removes him from them and from his community. The school sequences are worthy of Dickens, all the more astonishing because they tell of such recent times.

Saville
examines the consequences of poverty, class and
environment
, but there is patience and a sturdy intensity about this novel that makes the absence of so much a rich seam, for Storey elaborates many other themes – the conflict between the spiritual and the physical, the force of sexuality, the exact price paid by the English working class as they left the old ways behind. This is a realistic novel of power and beauty, full of sardonic humour and feeling and desire, using those passions of the soul which D. H. Lawrence and the Brontës drew upon to provide Storey’s people with a stoic testament.

This is an awkward book which has become a sort of underground classic. It is told in the third person by H, whose life and opinions mirror those of the author. Real characters such as Iseult Gonne, Stuart’s first wife, Maud Gonne, her mother, and writers such as W. B. Yeats and Liam O’Flaherty stalk the pages. H is a damaged individual, estranged from accepted morality. Prison seems his natural habitat: he is incarcerated – as was Stuart – by the pro-Treaty side in the Irish Civil War and later by the Allies in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The story takes place in the literary bohemias of Dublin and London in the 1920s and 1930s and then in Berlin, where our hero goes to spend the war, as did Stuart. He is in search of punishment and redemption; he seeks an ark away from the hypocrisy he detects all around him. He finds solace among the defeated and the damned. He is obsessed by life in all its rich (and often funny) detail, by women, by horse-racing and poultry farming, by Dostoevsky, but he never loses sight of his own distance from things, his deep alienation.
Black List, Section H
, written in the early 1960s, in its mixture of nihilism and visionary anarchism makes William Burroughs look like a pussycat.