Ignoble ruin
Paul Ableman
Darkness Visible William Golding (Faber £4.95) A scenario: a novelist conceives a novel. His starting point is a character that seems to him representative or significant or meaningful. He may also vaguely entertain ideas for development, the nuclei of other characters, appropriate incidents etc. He starts writing and his work prospers. He soon senses that the act of creation is taking place, that his words are fusing into new meanings, his sentences generating a work of literature. Then, after a week, a month, a year, the doubts assail him. Isn't it rather slight? Isn't there, so much more to the world? The media keep bombarding him with apocalyptic messages. The planet seems to be erupting. Has he any right to sit on the rim of a volcano weaving garlands? Thank God, he's realized in time. Its not too late. He can still tackle the burning issues. Fiercely he takes up his polemical sword — and the shy, bright thing, the work of art, that was emerging from chaos flees back into chaos, frightened off by the flashing blade.
Signs that an author has reached such an impasse, and has fatally resolved it in favour of the will rather than the imgaination, are common in the fiction of our time. Last Year, I reviewed John Irving's The World According to Garp in which, after a magnificent first chapter, the author plunged off in pursuit of universal significance and his book fell apart. Iris Murdoch's Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea showed tell-tale traces of having succumbed to the challenge. I have, however, never met a more melancholy example of an author Yielding to the intrinsically worthy impulse to tackle the world's problems and, by so doing, wrecking his own book than that represented by William Golding's new novel.
I read the first part in a trance of admiration. It tells how a boy, nameless but later informally christened Matty, walks out of the heart of flame which is London's firebombed East End. Golding's prose flares White and rose with the blaze and plods with the charred victim. It groans with the long agony of his surgical restoration, brightens with the rare tenderness he encounters and peals with compassionate mockery at the scorn his repaired but still-ghastly countenance arouses, This prose delicately and impeccably fashions itself to the evocation of Matty's strange story. It puts forth fronds of sophistication to generate Mr Pedigree, a tormented, demonic paedophile to whose class Matty is consigned. It becomes the ironmonger's shop in which, after a tragedy at the school, Matty works and also the wondrous being, a girl, at whom Matty peers before retreating, sensing that human love is forbidden him forever. It turns into Australia, to which Matty emigrates, and the desert and, perhaps most mysteriously of all, it becomes the steaming pool in the forest, writhing with parasites, in which Matty baptises himself before embarking on his mission to . . .
To what? For somewhere about here came the caesura, the break with the imagination. I can only speculate as to the real cause. Perhaps Matty simply wandered beyond the sphere of. art and there was nowhere aesthetically credible for him to go. Perhaps Mr Golding just ran out of vision. The break is not abrupt. Matty travels on in almost pristine form a little further, back to England where he meets the blue and red Spirits of Paranoia or, if the author really accepts the supernatural, of the Hidden World and is directed by them towards a new encounter with Mr Pedigree, who is now a confirmed police case. But all the time the prose is shrivelling underfoot, like grass denied sun and water., There are 265 pages in this book. Part one take us to page 102 and ends with a long extract from Matty's mystic journal which, if not quite so fine as the preceding narra tive, is still delicate and convincing. Of nothing that follows can this be claimed.
Part two immediately introduces us to new characters, miraculous girl twins who, horribile dictu, talk baby-talk. But I have neither space nor heart to recount all the silliness and tedium that drags us through the final three-fifths of this book. Whereas the first part is not only beautiful and artistically true but also unified, the remainder is an untidy mish-mash of contemporary themes forcibly grafted onto the excellence that went before.
The girls shoot up to be respectively a sadist and an urban guerrilla. Their father analyses chess computers and denies his daughters love but copulates coldly with a succession of 'aunties'. Silly, and worse, unconvincing, young men sur round the two fey beauties. Old booksellers and fading teachers maunder on about philosophy and theology and politics and every damn thing. Matty, vulgarly metamorphosed into a kind of black Christ, stalks about working miracles. Pedigree hops from loo to loo. Finally, for implausible reasons, the girls burn down a school and Matty fulfils what has by now become his puppet's destiny of ending as a living torch. Alas, all the violence and intended shock of the last two sections fail to generate a flicker of either emotion or interest because they have not been earned by either empathy or use of language. I was left with a sense of loss and outrage. If Mr Golding had really reached the end of an imaginative trail, he should have stop ped. He might still have published the work as a fragment. Even incomplete it would have been an ornament to English Literature. As a rag-bag for his not always savoury views (there are sour observations about 'pakis' and `nigs') it is merely an ignoble ruin. When an author strays too far from his literary imagination, why then, sic transit gioria libri?
A Revenger's Comedy Derwent May (Chatto £5.95) Sophle's Choice William Styron (Cape £5.95) One of the characters in A Revenger's Comedy, called Hole, is famous for his enormous remote-controlled puppets. In likenesses of Kojak, Queen Victoria and Wedgwood Benn, these glide over the symbolic lawn in Essex where a group of wellknown writers, publishers etc. meets daily to get ready for a televised dinner party, paid for by a mad hermit. The people have nothing to do except score verbal points, eat, drink and pair off. Events are observed by a young outsider, living in a nearby cottage, who passes judgment on them all but is determined to be included. It turns out that the hermit has set it all up in order to burn the house down with all the famous people in it. As they are mostly either nasty or boring, or both, this development is not unwelcome, but they are saved by the puppets, except for the hermit who kills himself. The author's attitude to his monstrous creations is an uneasy combination of venom and admiration; when a witty remark falls flat one wonders if it is meant to illuminate the hollowness of the media hero, but it tends to have the effect merely of a bad joke — embarrassment and the desire to be elsewhere. And the suspicion is aroused that the author thinks it is witty.
William Styron's enormous. novel forces together two genres, the we-must-face-thereality-of-the-death-camps novel and the agonised-lustful-adolescent-seeks-first-screw novel. After what feels like millions of vigorously sprayed words, in an extravagant muscular counterpoint of titillating nearlays and deeper digs at the truth about Auschwitz, the young male, Stingo, at last loses his virginity to the beautiful, harrowed survivor, Sophie, and discovers the final layer of the horrors in her past: the trauma of being forced to choose which of her two children should be gassed, otherwise she will lose them both; and her willingness to lie and connive in a desperate attempt to save the child she thinks is still living. Meanwhile, Sting° finds himself as a writer with a novel about his own past, the slavehaunted South, and Sophie travels towards a double suicide with her impossible hyperactive Jewish lover, Nathan.
It would be nice to be able to say, as Nathan does about the New England autumn, 'that this singularly American spectacle, this amok flambeau unique in all nature, was simply an aesthetic encounter not to be missed'. I can do without amok flambeaux myself, but I admired his effort, self-conscious but often convincing, to sitnopaghtine% ttohrtneetnhtooursght-processes even of
Emma Fisher
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