The Modern Library (3 page)

This short novel, written in short chapters, tells the story of the end of one era of civilization in a remote part of Nigeria, and the beginning of colonialism and Christianity. Achebe’s touch is so light, however, and his skill with character and pacing so brilliant, and his sense of detail and nuance so delightful, that you barely realize as you turn the pages that you are being steeped in the atmosphere of a crucial moment in history. The novel focuses on the character of Okonkwo, strong, stubborn and hard-working, locked into the traditions he has inherited. It tells the story of his wives and his children, village life, local traditions, including the story of a boy who is taken from another village as retribution; he comes to live with Okonkwo’s family, and slowly Okonkwo grows to love him, but the reader knows that he will eventually have to be sacrificed. The scene where he is killed is magnificently stark, almost unbearable to read. It is clear now that Okonkwo’s strength is a sort of weakness. The arrival of the English is seen first as a small, insignificant event, and there are moments towards the end of the book where Achebe presents what the reader knows will be a tragedy with a mixture of irony, sadness and a sort of anger. When this novel was first presented to Heinemann, the reader wrote ‘the best first novel since the war’. Forty years later, it is still the best first novel since the war.

This is the story of Jim Dixon, who finds himself lecturing in Medieval History in a provincial university. Jim’s prospects are grim; he knows hardly anything about his subject. His real skills are making funny faces behind people’s backs and disguising his complete contempt for those around him (especially his dreadful boss) – but the second of these fails him when he meets Bertrand, his boss’s bearded and pretentious artist son. Jim is half in love with mad Margaret who teaches at the university; she throws him out of her room when ‘he made a movement not only quite unambiguous, but, even perhaps, rather insolently frank’. In one set scene the boss gives a really awful party, and our hero manages to burn the bedclothes.

The writing is constantly funny; Dixon’s ability to cause calamity all around him and then make things much worse, his mixture of innocence and pure malice, make you laugh out loud and follow his antics and his fate with amusement and great interest. Amis is brilliant at stringing out a joke, at twisting and turning the plot, and at never making Jim either ridiculous or stupid, but somehow right to get drunk when he does, or put on funny voices, or curse his boss, or hate the Middle Ages and an appalling student called Michie. The comedy is brilliantly sustained in the book, and the conflicts well articulated, so that the narrative becomes a picture of the post-war age when a new generation – the Jims of this world – grew up having no respect for their elders and betters.

John Self is one of those young men who sprang up in Thatcher’s England in the 1980s, savouring money and using it like tomato sauce. A thirty-five-year-old director of TV commercials, Self is about to make his first real movie. With his devotion to alcohol and nicotine, pornography and video nasties, and sufficient fast food to ensure his hideous pot belly a life of its own, it’s only money keeping the wolves of excess from Self’s door. He jets between New York and London encountering a misbegotten collection of narcissistic and exquisitely named stars – Butch Beausoleil, Caduta Massi, Spunk Davis – panting alternately after his English girlfriend Selina Street and his American muse Martina Twain.

Self’s story is a corrosive moral tale about England’s recent past – ‘The skies are so ashamed. The trees in the squares hang their heads, the evening paper in its cage is ashamed.’ With the mordant thud and rhythm of his startling prose, Martin Amis beats the greed and venality of that decade into submission. The verbal rainstorm that Amis pours through Self’s repellent mouth – the dialogue acid, perfectly pitched – is a rousing example of the Amis style which has made his work in general and
Money
in particular so important to his contemporaries, and so splenetic a mirror of late
twentieth-century
England.

In 1947, the year of Indian independence from Britain, there were five hundred and sixty-two Indian princedoms. These princes were gradually stripped of their power and Anand, the great Indian chronicler of the humble poor, turned his attention to these ‘poor rich’. Anand’s fictional prince, the Maharaja Ashok Kumar, is one of those who preferred to believe Queen Victoria’s pledge –
reaffirmed
by subsequent British governments – that their rights would be protected in an independent India. Foolish man. Scion of a long line of equally foolish Maharajas of Sham Fur, Ashok is a charmer, but decadent, spoilt and politically incompetent. Having rid himself of two Maharanees, he is ruled by the whims and hysterics of his mistress, the spellbinding Ganga Dasi. He lives in disintegrating times: his greed and improvidence have led his subjects towards revolt; his assertion of independence is anachronistic and useless. There remains only his sexual obsession, and this survives betrayal and madness to take on an integrity of its own. Anand is a master of character and circumstance, and he recounts his prince’s story with a powerful mixture of psychological understanding, perverse humour and political insight. This is one of the best descriptions of sexual obsession: it is rare to find a portrait of a man bewitched, which is at once so ironic and lyrical, so profoundly affecting.

‘Tirra Lirra’ was the song Sir Lancelot sang as he rode by the river on his way to Camelot. Nora Porteous discovers this in a book of her father’s, who died when she was six. Camelot becomes a region of her mind, a retreat for her artist’s imagination from the dismal gentility of Australian suburbia. Seventy years later, after adult life in Sydney and London, Nora returns to the now empty family home and stretches her memory not only to recall, but to understand the past. In seven flashbacks she contemplates her marriage to the repulsive Colin – ‘Look, just lie still, will you? That’s all you have to do’; her artistic life as a skilled dressmaker and embroiderer; her female life – love, the lack of it, the presence of it in unexpected places, the trauma of an illegal abortion, acutely rendered. Jessica Anderson transforms this superficially simple story of an
eighty-year
-old woman’s quest for a sense of self into a fine novel. Often laconic, and very often funny, her intuitive understanding of the reek of futility that seeps through most people’s lives produces a telling account of the nobility of the everyday. Nora, ‘a woman of no consequence’, becomes a heroine in one of the very few novels in which an old woman is such a memorable character.

Grace Marks was imprisoned in 1843 as an accomplice to the murder of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his mistress, the housekeeper Nancy. Grace is a mysterious person, young,
defenceless
, not at all stupid, given to the odd remark that keeps her watchers guessing. Her sentence of death is commuted to life imprisonment, at which point she becomes fair game for the doctors and do-gooders who wish to analyse good and evil and women in general, and Grace in particular.

Muffled ambivalences surround Grace, her life, her minders and her betters. The medical absurdities the professionals perpetrate, and the potent contribution of sex, greed and ambition, illuminate the manners of those times, and contrast piteously with the wretched condition of the lower orders in eighteenth-century Canada – as everywhere else.

Alias Grace
has the sharp flavour of Margaret Atwood’s
formidable
intelligence; her ability to control form and structure is always remarkable. Within her easy mastery of social realism she
accommodates
serious matters, crucial ideas. The battle for power represented by enigmatic sexual encounters shows men
manipulating
women, and vice versa, in all the ways that flourished then and linger now. Reading this novel is both a gleeful and an exciting experience, because Grace herself is the perfect subject for Margaret Atwood’s talents, embroidering intricate patterns of mystery, wit and paradox on the rough fabric of her story.

Simpson thought ‘how unfair it was that the nicer moments of life – a few drinks under the belt, good food, a pretty woman seated opposite – were invariably spent in the company of one’s wife’. This selflessness sets the scene for
Injury Time
, in which Simpson and his wife Muriel trot off to have dinner with Binny, Simpson’s mistress of several years, and with Edward, Simpson’s accountant. This is Binny’s first public dinner party; Edward has a wife, Helen, whose presence is always felt. All of them are in the injury time of life; little do they know that they are also about to enter the last chance saloon. Into Binny’s party, a dinner party from hell, erupts a gaggle of gunmen. Marriages and affairs, topsy-turvy before, disintegrate in the chaos that follows. One of Bainbridge’s specialities is her close inspection of women who are in love with useless men, generally also of dubious physical attraction. Binny is one of Bainbridge’s happiest creations, and Edward a prince of poltroons. There is a wonderful boldness about the works of Beryl Bainbridge, ably assisted by her conjuror’s timing and an enviable ear for the way people talk. Sentimentality withers under her ironic, detached gaze, but canniness and black comedy flourish, as does laughter in this wily account of the ungovernable
precariousness
of love.

This is a great novel about restriction and freedom, the urge to control versus the urge to love, the battle within each person between pride and vulnerability, weakness and religious zeal. It is written with a superb rhythmic energy and flow; the rich cadences in the prose are light and effortless. It tells the story of young John Grimes, who is sensitive, clever and religious; we watch the world of fraught family life and serious sexual temptation through his eyes, much as we do through Stephen’s in James Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist
. But then the novel moves into the consciousness of three older members of the family: his aunt, who is dying; the man he believes is his father, a preacher in Harlem; and his mother. The portraits of the older members of the family are full of complexity and heart-rending loss and regret. Both his stepfather and his mother are hauntingly aware of a deep sensuality in themselves, much more fundamental than any religious feeling. Their stories give you a sense of the weight which John must carry, how his family and his religious heritage are burdens rather than gifts. Baldwin has a brilliant range of sympathy, an ability to create an intriguing and memorable web of relationships and stories. This, his first novel, remains one of the great books about family and religious bonds.