The sound of a voice that continues
John Fowles
STILL by Adam Thorpe Secker, £15.99, pp. 584 Ifinished this brilliantly jumped second novel, the traditionally tough fence, of a writer whose first I had much admired three years ago, in foreign parts — to be precise, deep in the Alentejo of Southern Portugal, perched over a lake in the shade of an olive tree amid a landscape as full of spring flowers as it was of appropriately mocking hoopoes and cuckoos (you need only change one consonant to grasp what they really say). A cat among the cistus, I was purring. 'Great' is a foolish boomerang to throw at the living, yet here . . .
Especially if you take Still not only in its obvious cinematic sense, but that of `notwithstanding', it makes a fitting stele to mark the end of this millennium and its unhappy final century. This is a prodigious- ly rich and allusive book, as alluring to any academic, as pandering to the natural ferret, as a bowl of cream to a hungry cat. It is outwardly the unfilmable script, far more imaginary than real, of a would-be English cineaste, one Richard Arthur Thornby (RAT), currently lecturing in Texas on the cinema. He airs a hypotheti- cal movie of both his own American present and his middle-class English fami- ly's past. The fiction ends with the screen- ing of this `masterpiece with no pictures . . . once only'. This allows Thorpe, en route to this non-event — both premiere and derniere — to bounce down a dazzling cataract of different mores, milieux and moods, from before 1914 to today.
Reading Still is like looking down a con- stantly shifting — sometimes from sentence to sentence — kaleidoscope. To begin there may seem a near total absence of normal sequence or continuity; but at the end, after countless flits, glides and zigzags — through an Edwardian household, through contemporary Texas, an affair with Zelda, a maddeningly sharp but kooky American (she calls Richard's intimate gabble the `eternal autocue'), the horrors of a First World War gas attack, the almost tribal lunacy of a 1913 English public school (Eton?), an equally self-trammelled and dotty American college of the 1990s one happily succumbs. The constant sharp- ness and richness of detail of these very diverse scenes, their poetries and sub- tleties, their relativity, their heughs and syzygies (words Thorpe himself obviously likes), their strange abruptness yet linked- ness . . . it no longer seems a confusing mystery tour, but a magnificent evocation of the complexity of 1990s life. It is the politically correct, the conventionally ordered, the classically discrete views of reality that come to seem absurd.
Among other things it makes a nonsense of the delusion that the visual now super- sedes the verbal. I was delighted to see it so eloquently proven that if you truly want to convey and communicate, you still need words. The theory that the death of the older form of narration is imminent is false. Still is a stiff Laphroaig (we share a similar fancy in malts) to take against all those prone to kowtow before Doc Diar- rhoea and his faeces-writing followers (such bad puns speak for one side of Richard the bitter lecturer). Very few writers or directors receive the homages they normally crave. Only our hero's saints, Bresson, Tarkovsky and Dreyer, escape his scorn. As iconoclastic a job is done on a certain Texan institution — here termed `Houston' — as was performed in The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh.
Yet Thorpe, behind the spits and spat- ters of acid and vitriol under that mask, is both more poetic and more serious. He has an acutely sensitive ear for the richness of words and their colloquial use. Another self reminded me of John Osborne's Enter- tainer by brilliantly evoking the sniggers, false matiness and audience-working of the old music-hall routines. We lack a word for a sharper type, perhaps more male than female, of today. Generation X, les bofs . . . they don't quite fit. These characters seemed to emerge about a decade ago. They accept the general futility of life and take corruptness and mauvaise foi in any- one `important' for granted. Cynical, sour as lemons, sharp as razor-blades, they think nothing not bettered by denigration, and exult in the pun and instant wisecrack. I'm tempted to hoist Thorpe on his own neologising petard, and suggest we call this very frequent phenomenon (not least on TV) by the name he clamps on his protago- nist: Dicky.
But this doesn't sufficiently acknowledge the enormous skill (and humour, from the slapstick to the drily ironic) with which he elaborates both the virtues — the some- times outrageous puns, the genuine cutting wit, the splendid range (and rage) and command of vocabularies and tones, the ruthless self-mockery — and the sadder cultural things, the pathos behind the emptiness and uncertainties, the very general sense of having been betrayed by history and ecological folly. We haven't been exposed to such a Rabelaisian gusto of language, such an endless jacuzzi of slang, film-crew jargon and erudition since Ulysses and Finnegans Wake: so much quirky humour since Tristram Shandy.
Is Still, like the Virgin, immaculate? Well . . . it is very long, at times a shade too fluid, too gorgeously moire. Just here and there the Cockney backchat, the sitting- pigeon massacre of American pseudo- intellectuals and students (`thinking telegraph-poles' tasting like the inside of balloons), the mock friendships and put- downs of various `big' names in European culture, don't quite come off; but this is rare. Far more general is the wonderful effervescence of the author's humanity, his uncorking of the dive bouteille of words. Still is so mobile and allusive that one can't pretend it's an easy read. But if you want to claim that you have lived through this cen- tury, that you think you `understand' its peculiar English seas, its psychological immensities — not least those of self- deception — here is your book. Fins de siecle don't have too good a reputation; but Thorpe's dazzling linguistic and existentialist firework-display augurs well at least for the 21st. The novel Is not dead. Humanity, in spite of all, still keeps its balance . . . and its sense of irony.
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