B adgering an old man to death
Francis King
FIGHTING BACK by John Bowen
Hamish Hamilton, f11.95, pp.224
Most of us worry about how not to waste our lives. But, as we grow older, we should perhaps worry more about how not to waste our deaths. It is this second worry which afflicts John Bowen's hero, a 66- year-old widower retired from his post as Regius Professor of English Literature at Oxford. At the opening of the novel, convinced that existence has nothing more to offer him, he has calmly planned to shoot himself; but, deflected by the chance sighting of a rabbit in his garden, he shoots it instead. At that, he is, in effect, reborn.
Bowen's first chapter, entitled 'A Rabbit in the Garden', is so skilful a piece of literary concision that it could by itself stand as the short-story of a master. The setting, a large, once comfortable but now dilapidated house in the vicinity of Oxford; the stoical, withdrawn, inward-looking character of the retired professor, James; James's family circumstances — beloved wife dead, nonagenarian father in shel- tered housing, married daughter in the States, estranged, drug-taking son lost to a hostile, corrupt world: all these things are conveyed with a force and clarity which make one eager to press on to the chapter which follows.
In this chapter, having unsuccessfully offered his services first to the local Citizens' Advice Bureau, which regrets that he has had no legal training, and then to the local branch of the Samaritans, which chooses to regard him as a client not as a volunteer, James ends up working for the Adult Literacy and Basic Education Scheme, instructing a highly intelligent teenage youth of half Czech extraction in the skills of reading and writing.
Through this youth, Pavel — who is an orphan and one of whose hands is cruelly deformed — James learns of the Badger Protection Commando (Oxford Area), of which Pavel is a member, and is thus drawn slowly into its clandestine activities. A gang, led by a villainous gypsy, is capturing the local badgers in order to provide them as victims for baiting by dogs. Gang and Commando come into collision, with James eventually finding himself involved in intrigue, arson and burglary on behalf of the threatened animals. There is comedy in many of these scenes; but there is always an underlying gravity, as James breaks out of the prison of self-absorption and grief for his dead wife in order to fight for a cause.
Another, less satisfactory strand of the plot deals with Pavel's uncle, a Czech philosopher who, because of his views, has lost his university post and been relegated to a menial job in a Brno hospital. The uncle turns up mysteriously in England, seemingly invited by his nephew but in fact at the instigation of the British Security Services. Two intelligence officers, one an Oxford don of Czech extraction and the other the grandson (a coincidence difficult to accept) of a man who once, in the far-distant past, was a close companion of James's parents, play sinister but ill- defined roles, which end in mayhem on the last page. By introducing some of the apparatus of the thriller into what is, essentially, a study of how a t olitary old man, eager to make a good death, even- tually succeeds in that aim, Bowen has, on the one hand, increased the readability of his novel and, on the other, has robbed it of a measure of its seriousness.
The relationship between James and Pavel, as it modulates from embarrassed friendship to a father-son love, is handled with great delicacy. The portraits of the eccentric, gallant members of the Com- mando, no less than those of James's university colleagues, are at once sym- pathetic and sharp. The details of the lives of the badgers — among the numerous acknowledgements to people ranging from Frank Kermode to Derek Altham of the Artificial Limb and Appliance Centre at Sally Oak, there is one to Chris Ferris's The Dark is Light Enough: The Field Journal of a Night Naturalist — are wholly fascinating. It is for these three of its areas, rather than for its hectic, paranoid and often confused account of the machina- tions of the Security Services, that this novel deserves to be read.
. . to my colleagues, and the public, whose rubbish made it possible.'
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