While there's death there's hope
Julie Burchill
STEPHANIE by Winston Graham Chapmans, f14.99, pp. 301 After more than 30 novels translated into 17 languages, with seven of them filmed — most notoriously as Hitchcock's Mamie — and two huge BBC historical drama serials based on the 11 Poldark books (the last and concluding saga pub- lished in 1990), Winston Graham is one of those writers, like the late Irwin Shaw, who is rarely in fashion but even more rarely out of favour. Such men are invariably described by their publishers as 'master storytellers', and disliking modern novels with no stories, I always like the sound of this. (Although recently, I've noticed, they even have the nerve to say it about Jeffrey Archer.)
Having enjoyed The Tumbled House, Mamie and Angell, Pearl and Little God as a teenager, I was reminded soon after starting this book of the singular lack of feel for time and place Graham has. Set in England, his stories might as well be set in New England; set in the Fifties, the Seventies. It might well be that when you have ploughed through 11 novels' worth of research on the minutiae of life in 11th- century Cornwall, the southern England of the late 20th century all looks pretty much the same across the decades. And, anyway, after the recent deluge of brand names and Nintendo games in modern fictions, this merely gives Graham's books a refreshingly Martian feel.
But you can, of course, have too much of a good thing — and by the time I'd finished the first sentence — 'The Portuguese colony of Goa was taken over by India in the spring of 1961' — I was starting to nod a little in my chair. This is good, plain writing, you think soundly — and then it dawns on you that good, plain writing, like good, plain cooking, is far better in theory than in practice.
Never mind; press on up the 'unspoiled beach' and through the 'rich vegetation' and we walk slap bang in on fornicating Stephanie, a blonde undergraduate (but `she looked older' — that's all right then, M'Lud) and flash, married Errol, her middle-aged fancy man. He, for good or ill, has a mobile, humorous, sophisticated face with an expression that suggested he had seen a lot of life and found most of it wryly amusing.
Go on, admit it — you thought he was going to have 'a mobile phone', didn't you?
Not surprisingly; calling the principal characters of a novel Stephanie and Errol does make it sound like a Mike Leigh nouveaux-on-parade satire, something the Indian Ocean locale only serves to bolster. And when we discover that Errol wears a post-nooky 'thin black Chinese silk robe', that he is rude to waiters (which Stephanie doesn't like, but comforts herself with the fact that 'a lot of famous men have done it') and that he plans to open a theme park, if you please, in Agra ('Ugh! . . . Sorry!' says snooty Stephanie), you don't need the word ROTTER tattooed six inches high on his forehead to know that Errol is Up To No Good.
As I've said, Mr Graham is no slave to linguistic fashion, and Errol talks like this to Stephanie; 'And what mischief will you get up to while I'm gone?' And after a night of cavorting on hash cookies, thus pronounced Stephanie: Be damned to hash. Good luck to them as liked it, but it was not for her.
In contemporary novels, Something Nasty in the Briefcase has replaced Something Nasty in the Woodshed, and sure enough peeping Stephanie finds a huge wad of money in Errol's, together with lots of cryptic notes about import, export and Customs. Being an Oxford undergraduate she soon puts two and two grammes together and comes up with drug smuggling. By this stage I was ready to go out and buy the entire collected works of Alain Robbe-Grillet and become a highbrow if it killed me. But then, on page 102, Stephanie is found dead in bed and the book begins to pick up as her father, James Locke, a lame gardening expert with a brill war record, drags himself on his crutches through the mire of the Oxford fast set in search of her killer. James Locke has his origins in Ron Smith, father of Helen, and John Ward, father of Julie, and it is very understandable why a novelist would want to write about such men. In an age when fathers are universally portrayed as neglect- ful, cruel or lecherous, they exhibit a driven, protective, self-sacrificing love which has unfairly been marked out as the province of mothers. In a culture of compromise, they risk ridicule and endless pain in search of a justice which, held a beat too long, is pathologised as crude and unwholesome. Such men are the nearest we have to classical heroes and even a pale fictional shadow of them tends to be impressive.
It is a shame that it takes the heroine's death to make this book come alive, but it is true. In Stephanie, Graham's wooden ear hits new heights of risibility. Talking about the tricky problem of drugs to her father, she comments: 'This is the new scene for my generation, isn't it?' Actually, no.
It is nothing to do with the fact that Mr Graham is a crumbly; no one writes better about teenagers today than the decidedly mature Shena Mackay and Georgina Ham- mick, whose creations are a good deal more authentic than those in the books of allegedly young writers like Amis, Winter- son and Kureishi. The problem may, for once, be one of gender; not only have women writers spent more time with their teenage children, but there is also not the element of sexual interest that old men, as a rule, have in young women which makes them portray girls more as sexual ciphers than as real people. If Stephanie had been a spiv's widow of 55, this book would have been a lot better. The lessons are, I suppose, that you should never go to Goa with a man who's rude to waiters — and that if you're a middle-aged man you shouldn't bother trying to get inside the body of a 20-year-old girl. In literature, as in life, you'll always end up looking ridiculous.
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