Public policy and private feeling
Philip Hensher
A GOOD PLACE TO DIE by James Buchan Harvill, £15.99, £10.99, pp. 320 James Buchan is so good a novelist one wonders why his books aren't known by every English-reader. That is not to say that he is neglected or unappreciated; indeed, I can't think of another novelist who is held in such universally high esteem by his fellow novelists, whose books are so pored over by the competition. They are read as apprentices watch a sorcerer's stage performance, to see how the master does it. But he is so interesting, intelligent and individual a writer that his general reader- ship ought to be ten times what it is now, and paragraphs from Heart's Journey in Winter chanted in chorus by adulatory girl guides in the Royal Albert Hall. Well, judging by this astonishingly good book, that will soon come to be the state of affairs. Perhaps there are some novels which one loves best knowing that they are going to prove caviar to the general. Buchan's two previous novels, High Lati- tudes and Heart's Journey in Winter, fell into that category; they are strange, sublime books, so original in the ways they articu- late their intense emotion that they can seem cold to an inattentive reader. They do not slip lazily into what one expects to hear, but find their own subject, their own way of talking. A first reading of one of these books is rather like a first visit to a gymnasium; to his shock, the reader finds mental muscles being used which he hardly knew he possessed, and, after a while, finds he has acquired new ways of moving, of thinking. That suggests a difficult and a demand- ing novelist. Buchan can be difficult. As with Henry James, a reader may pick up High Latitudes and have the sensation of being deliberately made to puzzle and pon- der within a couple of pages. Partly it is a matter of his choice of subject matter. High Latitudes is, in large part, about the Lloyd's collapse, Heart's Journey in Winter about the deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe and German domestic politics before the fall of the Wall. Frozen Desire, a stupendous and learned diatribe against the whole idea of money, is really, one feels, about the consequences of the 1974 oil crisis. These are subjects worth follow- ing in detail, or not at all. Often, Buchan chooses to tell an already complex story in an intricate way; Slide is a biography of an individual in decline, almost bafflingly frag- mentary, Heart's Journey in Winter so exu- berant with flashback and the concealment of truth that the reader sometimes feels like one of its embassy interrogators, bur- rowing towards a reality which is uncertain, and may not, as far as the interrogator knows, exist at all. I read Heart's Journey in Winter twice before I was remotely certain of its events, and three times before I had the beginnings of a sense of who was lying to whom; but that stupendous escalation of trustlessness, that descent and deception and spreading poison, are worth any effort you put into it. It is as grand and baffling as Henry James's The Sacred Fount.
If Buchan writes about big events in a difficult way, his style is not a wilful obscu- rity but represents an acute sense that sometimes an author needs to slow his reader down; that sometimes what he is saying is invested with such grave impor- tance that we must be made to read it three times. These things — Iran, the death of the European cold-war consensus, the meaning of money — are serious, and can- not be skated over, and a writer who lets his readers do so is betraying the weight of his subjects and deceiving his audience.
It would be wrong, however, to suggest that he is always difficult. At his heart- stopping best, he speaks with a directness which few novelists in English can now match; in the last pages of High Latitudes, a voice which until that point has been fragmentary and unconfident begins to talk coherently, to tell the reader what he knows must be lies, and the power of the reader's emotion is in no way diminished by the fact that he has no name for what he feels. In more than one way, he is descend- ed from the most underrated of the great English novelists, John Buchan. He is one of very few novelists since to have struck that particularly thrilling note which comes as Greenmantle moves into its last stages, and world politics moves into mysticism.
His imagination is most vivid when it deals with great geopolitical movements and with public affairs. To compare the profoundly exciting account of the work- ings of business in High Latitudes with the sort of 'business novel' which gets short- listed for prizes, such as Julian Barnes's England, England, is to realise how many possibilities still lie before the novel. Buchan's are accurate, considered and valuable accounts of history, quite aside from their merit as imaginative creations. He is not much more enamoured of the outer fringes of Thatcherite policy than Salman Rushdie, for instance. But if you set High Latitudes next to The Satanic Verses, Buchan's deeper understanding of what Thatcher was trying to do results in a more damaging assault on fiscal policy and the society it created. Rushdie's is a bril- liant caricature; Buchan's novel amounts to an argument. And even if, like me, you often disagree with Buchan's conclusions, you would always take the trouble to argue with him. Like George Eliot, he is a grown- up writing for grown-ups. And that, right now, is rare and exhilarating and valuable.
His novels are set at moments when pri- vate emotions and public events collide; Heart's Journey in Winter, for instance, is set
in 1983, [when] the two opposing systems [Warsaw Pact and Nato] were in such perfect equilibrium that the fall of a feather would tip the scale; and great events, for the only time in my life, came within the agency of individuals. Day-to-day affections, jealousy, ambition, love shake empires till they totter. Love, in particular, is the circus hoop through which history is forced to jump, over and over again.
The characteristic Buchan scene, I sup- pose, is of a rather foolish and unimpres- sive man who, by chance, finds himself in the same room as a great historical figure; they ought to be talking about great events, seriously, but irrelevant personal feelings keep derailing the discussion. Mrs Thatch- er is hilariously snubbed at an ambassado- rial party in Heart's Journey in Winter, and its invented characters tend to be the next German chancellor but three. The Shah of Iran puts in a theatrical, panicked appear- ance in A Good Place to Die in a beautiful empty garden, sandwiched between the ambassadors of the two nations who have always propped up his regime, and ends up playing a crucial role in the plot. They understand very well, these novels, that his- tory is mostly the result of cock-ups; they acknowledge, however, that history has been mostly believed — even by the cyni- cally marginal of its participants and agents — to be the result of ingenious conspira- cies.
Brilliant as his last two novels have been, James Buchan has come into his own with A Good Place to Die. It is much more immediately seductive than they were, less obviously intricate, but without any lessen- ing of the double force of profound histori- cal analysis and slowly growing personal sympathy for the characters. It is an account of the last 25 years in Iran, and the terrors of the Shah's regime and what suc- ceeded it are narrated by a sort of hapless holy fool, John Pitt, an English boy who goes to Iran in the early 1970s and some- how stays there. Teaching English, he falls in love with the daughter of a powerful mil- itary family, and elopes with her to a secret house on the coast. Quickly pregnant, she refuses to risk her baby by leaving Iran, and they cower in hiding, terrified of discovery. A disastrous attempt to escape leads to their separation, and, for Pitt, years of tor- ture and imprisonment.
It's a book of astonishing intellectual grandeur and integrity. The conversion of Iran is certainly one of the most important single events of the second half of the cen- tury, and probably the one the West under- stands least. Iran has been a regular, minor presence in Buchan's books for a long time, and this is a highly convincing account of the Shah's state and the revolution, history told through the tragic life of a bystander. The magic, however, lies in its unique tone; it recreates the rapturous simplicities of classical Persian poetry, of nightingales and roses and jewels. They are orthodox, exotic images of the beautiful life, but they do not strike us as merely orientalist. As the book builds to a terrible, sustained climax, these simple images retain their weightless strength against the accumulating black acts of cruelty.
He is an irresistibly powerful stylist, and the rhetorical repetitions of the high Per- sian manner give the book a throbbing force from the start:
Each night, says Molavi, the prisoner forgets his prison. Each night, he says, the tyrant for- gets his army. Each night, when it seems the night will never end, when night appears to be the natural and unvarying condition of the universe, there is a breath of wind.
The luxurious evocation of evanescence, of smoke in the blue shifting sky, is at first a grand evocation of the concerns of the classical Persian world; it is not long, how- ever, before they start to evoke the smoke rising as a firing squad inexplicably spares one victim, or the sky, as glimpsed by the same prisoner on another prisoner's shoul- ders, through the bars of a crowded cell. And Buchan's use of these properties is not merely conventional, but a continuation of his own argument. Much of the plot turns on a set of priceless rubies, the prop- erty of his hero's wife. The argument of Frozen Desire was that the meaning of money only came into being when it could be exchanged for a desired object. The rubies, for Pitt, become valueless because they cannot bring his wife and daughter back to him, and that is the only thing he wants.
Airy, graceful and big with truth, A Good Place to Die feels like a major statement of confidence, not just by an English novelist, but by the English novel. I have to admit that I hate the title, but that is a small gripe before a work so original and rewarding in its tone of voice, so admirable for the intel- ligence with which it analyses matters of high policy, of private feeling. There is really no word for it but 'masterpiece'.
Previous page
