The Modern Library (9 page)

Margaret Drabble writes in a tradition currently out of fashion – that of Mrs Gaskell and Arnold Bennett, in which social conscience and a social historian’s eye control her imagination, making her a fine recorder of the way we live together, and of the moral consequences of same.

Anthony Keating, Drabble’s hero, is a perfect Seventies man. He writes songs, he works in television, then throws everything up for property speculation, the quick-buck Seventies virus which
infected
England, and which in this case gives Keating a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight. Drabble places Keating in a crowded, vivid world. With wife and children, mistress and her children, business colleagues inside and outside prison, danger abroad, danger at home, to a threnody of dead or decrepit dogs, Keating’s story is a burst of indignation for a senile Britain. Because Drabble is so skilled a storyteller,
The Ice Age
is full of surprises, full of interest, an immensely absorbing record of a shabby age.

There is a nobility about this semi-autobiographical novel. Though it captures a particular time and place of poverty – the East End of London before and during the Second World War – its sense of longing is universal. It is also an unusual addition to the literature of tuberculosis, that disease which infiltrated so many
nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century families, so often recorded in novels of the time. Most remarkable is the dogged poignancy of its portrait of the love of a child for its mother.

Louey Mahony, one of eight children in a family decimated by TB, falls for an Irishman, Paddy, who leaves her with an illegitimate girl Paddy of her own; the child tells us this story. Poverty and bombing are not the only problems Louey has to face: Louey’s TB is of the slow, struggling kind, and Paddy grows up mostly in other people’s houses, or, when Louey marries again to give a home to Paddy, with an illiterate stepfamily, peace and money always in short supply. Paddy rages, and escapes, but always her eye is on her mother Louey: resolute, neat as a pin, loving, a good woman who is allotted absolutely nothing by the country she lives in. There is an elegiac quality about this novel, and an anxious yet lyrical strength in Duffy’s writing, which fits like a glove the love story she tells.

Some of the most satisfying entertainments of the Victorian age were novels such as Mary E. Braddon’s
Lady Audley’s Secret
and Mrs Henry Wood’s
East Lynne
, which sensationally used domestic circumstances as the setting for intrigue, secrets, violence and death.

Daphne du Maurier is the direct descendant of this tradition, and
My Cousin Rachel
a great achievement in this genre. On an estate in Cornwall in the nineteenth century, Ambrose Ashley raises his nephew Philip with servants, dogs, neighbours, tenants – but no women. Ambrose, in Europe, encounters the beautiful Rachel Sangaletti, marries her and in six months is dead, having sent a sequence of troubling letters to Philip accusing Rachel of
extravagance
– and worse. Philip, the image of his uncle in every way, is possessed by hatred for Rachel until she comes to stay: small,
large-eyed
, an enchantress, she bewitches Philip entirely.

My Cousin Rachel
follows every twist and turn of a heart obsessed; du Maurier’s considerable artistry is rooted in her control of hypnotic detail and psychological tension so that even the removal of a vase of flowers takes on a sinister significance. Simultaneously she mocks and reverses our conventional
expectations
of the sexual desires that drive men and women, always leaving questions in the air. Resolutions unresolved: that was her hallmark, as was providing entertainment of the highest order.

American Psycho
is both a morality tale and a comedy about capitalism and materialism. The abject consumerism of the protagonist and his friends who work on Wall Street, their obsession with brand names, chic restaurants and new trends, and their vicious snobbery are combined with elaborate descriptions of the
murdering
and dismemberment and torture of women.

The cold, dispassionate tone in which the violence is described has been much misunderstood: the tone of
American Psycho
has the moralistic edge of Swift, suggesting a connection between the obsessive consumerism and right-wing politics of the Reagan years and pathological misogyny. Easton Ellis’s crime, perhaps, is to make all this too funny, too readable, too entertaining. His use of lists in the book is inspired, and his sense of New York as the home of the ruling class gives the book a deeply political edge. The book is written in short, titled chapters, like entries in a diary; the narrative is snappy; chapter openings are superbly gripping and interesting. Writing about murdering women in a ‘snappy’ and ‘gripping’ style is unlikely to endear the author to many people, but this is an important and disturbing book.

Like John Bunyan’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress
, this charismatic novel follows the adventures of a man in search of the meaning of his existence. Our hero lives in the United States, where most people are white: white people can be seen. He is black, part of an amorphous mass, and he comes to see that, black, he is invisible. He tells us his story, and as one event follows another we watch him being led deeper and deeper into a realization of just how angry a black man in America should be.

In his travels as a black man in a white land, his idealism encounters all the temptations of his generation, and as each one comes his way, it is found to be a fraud – ‘white’ education, Communism and other radical ‘isms’, gambling, drink, sex, crime, adapting to a white society, fighting white society – all these ploys and distractions are shown to be deadly. Ellison plays with every myth about the black man – rape, for instance – and dismisses each one. He brings this about by concealing his message in a narrative as compelling and engaging as all the great storytelling novels. Picaresque in its vision, and in its insistence, finally, on the necessity for acceptance if not forgiveness, this profound, angry book is one of the great American novels of the post-war period, still resonant today.

Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel,
The Virgin Suicides
, is exciting,
accomplished
and beautifully written. The style is rich, the sentences are carefully modulated, the tone is relaxed and knowing, cynical and humorous, as though F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nabokov and the Coen Brothers had met on the lawns of some grand American suburb.

The novel, narrated by a man in early middle age, tells the story of the five Lisbon sisters, teenagers much sought after by the local youths, who commit suicide in the same year. The narrator becomes a sort of detective, or historian, gathering details about the lives and deaths of the girls, going over and analysing certain encounters with them, or glimpses of them. This is a novel alive with desire, with memories of desire, with fading desire. The mating rituals of white suburban America become, in a superbly controlled narrative, both infinitely sad and infinitely funny. The intensity of the dissection of each detail, as though the antics of the Lisbon family were of immense national importance, gives the novel’s dark laughter a manic edge. The novel is full of asides and minor digressions, all of them fascinating and perfectly chosen, some of them funny enough to make you laugh out loud.

There is, in J. G. Farrell’s
The Siege of Krishnapur
, an odd and original mixture of melancholy and hilarity. He is interested in the comic possibilities of the English character abroad as the colonists try to create order from chaos but instead create only further chaos. In
The Siege of Krishnapur
our heroes find themselves in India in the years after the Great Exhibition when the Victorians believed that they could spread progress. The Indians, however, are getting ready to revolt in the Mutiny.

Farrell loves set scenes: the mad sermon during the siege, the fallen white woman to whom no one dare speak, the natives gathering daily on a nearby hill to watch the trouble, love and poetry in a hot climate, knives and forks and spoons in a cannon. There is a sensational argument between two doctors about the cure for cholera; one dies from his own remedy. Farrell’s sense of detail never fails him, and his research into Victorian beliefs, or methods of warfare, to give just two examples, offers the novel credibility without overburdening it. He manages a light tone while remaining alert to the weight of his subject; this novel is a brilliantly dark comedy.

This book was written at the end of Faulkner’s life, but there is no sign of any loss of energy, or flaws in narrative skill, or waning of sheer enthusiasm. It uses a rambling style full of parentheses and subordinate clauses, as though someone were telling a story and constantly interrupting himself.

It is clear that the story is being told in the early 1960s about events in the early years of the century when old systems of manners and morals and landholding still obtained in the Southern states. Enter a motor car which is purchased by our narrator’s grandfather. The narrator is eleven years old, but he is wise even then, and watchful. The car is driven by Boon, his grandfather’s black servant, and when all the adults in the family go away for a funeral, our narrator, Boon and a man called Ned travel without permission to Memphis. The roads are appalling, and Ned is not entirely sane. Slowly, we realize that our narrator is telling the story of a few crucial days in his own education, when he mixed with people – including a number of prostitutes – outside his own class, when he witnessed confusion, nights in strange beds,
homesickness
, possible disaster, a racism which was new to him and an extraordinary amount of highjinks. When he gets home to his ordered upbringing, full of old patrician values, he has changed. The style, however, for all its rambling, has a sharpness and a sophistication, and the reader has a right to feel that as Faulkner lay dying, he must have taken pleasure in creating this novel.