The Modern Library (28 page)

Fay Weldon’s role in late twentieth-century literature is that of the good witch, her special brew being woman and man, particularly when both are embroiled in marriage. In
Puffball
she adds to the potion by placing the marriage of Liffey and Richard within a larger structure, in which the spite of woman for woman is hilariously and lethally exposed.

Liffey is an excellent Weldon heroine – a good woman, kind and loving. Husband Richard is an ambitious advertising man, pompous in London, a bore when they move to the country, near Glastonbury, to breed. It is hell: the cottage is hell, the neighbours, Mabs and Tucker, are hell. Liffey’s womb takes on a life of its own as it battles to survive the general onslaught; and indeed there is no modern novel that so nimbly takes us through that rarely described experience, the biological stages of pregnancy, and the exact surgical instructions necessary to perform a Caesarean. If there is a message here, and all novels with happy endings like
Puffball
offer one, it is that women are biologically discriminated against by God, should he exist, and by Nature, if he doesn’t.

Fay Weldon is a perspicacious, compelling storyteller who makes you laugh – and weep – for the malice and ill-will we mortals hurl at each other in the name of love.

‘Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonized by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonized by. No. We are ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth.’ Meet Mark Renton – Scottish heroin junkie, fan of Hibs United, hopeless shoplifter, Iggy Pop fiend, and the hero of Irvine Welsh’s explosive and hilarious novel.

Set among Edinburgh’s troubled housing estates,
Trainspotting
brings a whole new world into the novel, a new kind of person, a low-life humour and demotic energy. These are mostly characters who have never known work, who defy the materialist ethos of 1980s Britain, and who embrace music, drink and drugs as the only truth in a nation of lies.

Though Welsh owes something to Burroughs and Ballard, and to his late compatriot Alexander Trocchi, he draws much more from popular culture, punk rock and the rave scene. The episodic rush of
Trainspotting
is remarkable because of the way it deals with class politics and for the power and range of its voice. It is interesting also because it offers a breathtakingly vivid picture of lives that are never written about. The world of
Trainspotting
is not a charming Scotland of castles and Bravehearts; it is a place of new sicknesses. As Renton says of an old auntie who falls in love with Romantic Edinburgh: ‘Instead ay a view ay the castle she’d goat a view ay the gasworks. That’s how it fuckin works in real life, if ye urnae a rich cunt wi a big fuckin hoose n plenty poppy.’

Eudora Welty is a writer who has listened closely all her life. Living in Mississippi, her language merits recording – the singing, teasing English of the South.

She is the alert observer of small communities of people, families, everyday things. There is a Welty miasma, an atmosphere in which wildly comic words and vigorous behaviour scuffle with a sense of loss, failure or grieving. Thus, minor incidents take on major significance, and this is exactly so in this account of Laurel’s return home for the illness and death of her father, Judge McKelva. Born optimist, ‘fairest, most impartial, sweetest man’, after the early death of Laurel’s mother Becky – beloved Becky – he has married the young and malign vulgarian Wanda May, a vixen on green high heels. Every neighbour and friend comes to greet Laurel, and each object in the old family home comes alive for her return: the sewing machine, the gooseneck lamp, cupboards ‘with the earnest smell of mouse’.

Welty’s theme is memory, the confusion of life and the comedy of love, love of all kinds: the friends and neighbours at the funeral are a melodic Mississippian Greek chorus to Laurel’s recollections. Eudora Welty is a southern magician, a mistress of words that tell us the meaning and value of the things and people we live among, and of the past.

Everything Rebecca West did, and wrote, had determination about it. This novel has the intense charm of a classic Edwardian novel recounted in the expressive prose of that time, yet it was written in the 1950s.

Rose Aubrey tells the story of her childhood. She lives with her parents, brother and two sisters in South London, in the sort of poverty associated with wayward and improvident fathers. This adored man, Piers, is given to gambling and speculation, whilst security of some kind is provided by Rose’s artistic, serious mother, so that some of what we associate with such childhoods is still there: the hearths, the gaslight, the walks, the teas, and most of all the music – for the love of music and the talent to make it is the only deliverance the girls can hope for.

Much of the novel is autobiographical. Rebecca West was Rose Aubrey, and the power of the novel comes from her resolute belief in the way things were. Into her portrait of Piers Aubrey, her father, she pours dreams of worship: ‘Our Papa was far handsomer than anybody else’s … he stood like a fencer in a picture …’ These long-remembered cries are like ghosts in the novel giving it the keenness of a lament – for a family life that could have been, for the artistic aspirations that, instead, made life worth living.

Edmund White’s
A Boy’s Own Story
tells the story of an unnamed American white boy growing up gay in the 1950s. It is a careful and close examination of an effort to invent an identity. Nothing is taken for granted. His parents seem distant and strange even before their divorce, and after the divorce they emerge as capricious and irrational, as does the boy’s sister. He is alone with his sexuality. He wants, and the sense of his desire in the book is overwhelming, to sleep with a man, an older man, a younger man, any man, just as he wants to escape from home. But he does not want to deal with the implications of any of this and this makes his story complex and fascinating. He does not want to become the narrator of
The Beautiful Room Is Empty
(1988) or
The Farewell Symphony
(1997), White’s two novels which deal with our hero as a young gay man on the rampage and an older man in the age of AIDS. The sense of honesty in the book is matched by the writing, which is wonderfully dense and sharp at the same time; White understands, as almost no one before him did, how perfect the novel form is for a dramatization of gay identity, how a gay character’s search in a hostile environment for recognition and completion remains, for the moment, intrinsically interesting and tense.

A Jewish refugee scholar, Himmelfarb, the half-caste painter Alf Dubbo, a washerwoman from the English Fens, Ruth Godbold, and the spinster and innocent Miss Hare, alone in the abandoned wilderness of the mansion Xanadu, are Patrick White’s riders. Their stories become a study of love and hate, of good and evil; evil as epitomized by the Holocaust, but also the persecution everywhere of those who see a vision by those who don’t, of the publicly weak by the publicly strong. This is the most compassionate and the most beautiful of all Patrick White’s works; colours fly everywhere; his words, comic, ecstatic, are like the brushstrokes on a canvas by Nolan or Blake.

Each rider is a creator and misfit – outcasts all. Circling them, in contest, are the citizens of Sarsaparilla, Patrick White’s mythic Australian suburban town. Patrick White’s account of the Holocaust is an epic achievement; but Himmelfarb’s experiences are balanced by portraits of the female harridans of Sarsaparilla which are acute and farcical – a fierce battalion of Barry Humphries’ Edna Everages, taking the Holocaust from European isolation into neighbourhood life. Patrick White tells us in
Riders in the Chariot
‘that all faiths … are in fact one’ – and so the greatness of the novel also rests on the fact that it remains thunderously relevant.

There is something effortless about this novel; the tone is a mixture of almost innocent wonder at how richly strange things are and shrewd memories and sour observations. The narrator is both knowing and unknowing, and the play between the two makes the novel absorbing and fascinating.

Our heroine has been adopted by a most religious lady, and, it should be said, a most neurotic one, in the North of England. Prayer-meetings, stirring sermons and Bible-readings fill her childhood, as well as strange urges (and a fortune teller) which lead her to believe that she will never marry. Odd fairy tales are spliced into the narrative, which helps give this story of a charmed young girl a mythic quality. Everyone around her intrigues her, puzzles her and amuses her. She goes deaf, and the people in church think that she is full of the spirit. She goes to school, but fails to fit in, and the description of the failure contains some classic comic writing. She works in an undertaker’s. She then falls in love with her friend Melanie, much to the horror of the church. She suffers from a mixture of religious fervour and lesbian passion: it is clear that one of them will have to give. She cannot go on preaching by day and doing the other by night, although she sees no reason why not. And it is this seeing no reason, this pure (or impure) determination, that lends great drama to the narrative and makes this book fresh and original, one of the best English novels since the war.

Cloudstreet
is an Australian novel remarkable for its sense of the country, for the atmosphere of the streets and houses, the weather, the aboriginal people who are the ghosts in every city, and their companions at the bottom of the heap, the ordinary Australian women and men who live on the cities’ fringes.