No Aspern Papers

A. N. Wilson

According to Mark Penelope Lively (Heinemann £8.95)

The Mark of the story is a biographer, Mark Lamming, who is writing the life of an Edwardian man of letters called Gilbert Strong. This task takes him to Dean Close (no, not the school; it is a country house of the name in Dorset) which had been Strong's home, and is now inhabited by the old man's grand-daughter. She is a freckled dim-wit named Carrie, who is living there with a man called Bill, whom she met at horticultural college. They are running it as a garden centre.

Diana, Mark's beautiful wife who works in a gallery in London, lets him go and stay at Dean Close for extended periods in order to sift the Strong archive. Inevitably, Mark falls in love with freckled Carrie and she eventually consents to take him to France to see her mother, Strong's daugh- ter. The drive through France takes up a disproportionate amount of the book, but in the course of it Carrie and Mark become lovers. Carrie, who has only read a couple of books in her life (and them Mills and Boon) suddenly becomes addicted to Jane Austen's Emma. It interests her more than her newly acquired lover, and that's not surprising, really, for Mark is a shadowy individual, and the reader doesn't work up much interest in him either.

It was more surprising that Mark cooled so quickly towards Carrie. He is supposed to be madly in love with her. Greatly to my surprise (and to his), she consents to share his bed. But, merely because they have had a tedious day's motoring, he finds that 'even the sight of Carrie sitting on the bed peeling off her T-shirt could do nothing for him'.

Anyhow, it's all right, because wife Diana comes out to France and puts a stop to all this muted hanky-panky. Carrie, meanwhile, ambles off to Paris on her own and meets up with a nice journalist with whom (first time in her life) she falls in love. He returns to England with her and obviously is going to live happily ever after with her at Dean Close; and with Bill (who is only her business partner and also, conveniently, is `gay').

Meanwhile, Mark's researches into Gil- bert Strong continue. There is a disconcert- ing moment when it seems as if Strong might have cribbed his most famous travel book from a lesser-known Victorian wri- ter; but it disconcerts us less because we are interested in Strong than because we think that Penelope Lively is unconsciously remembering an early Anthony Powell novel with precisely that plot called What's Become of Waring?

Then Mark meets a major (we know he's a major because he says things like 'What d'yer want to know for? Lawyer johnnie, are you?') who apparently went fishing, when a boy, with Gilbert Strong, and has a boxful of letters revealing the one serious love affair in Gilbert Strong's life. A moral dilemma flickers into sight. Should a biog- rapher Tell All about his subject, even if the revelation throws no light on the subject's published work?

A more serious dilemma which does not occur to Mark, but which must strike the reader of this novel, is whether Strong could have been a great writer if these letters are anything to go by. 'I am bringing down a cargo of books to start work on Napoleon,' he wrote to his mistress, 'and plan to shut myself away and . .' Guess what. Buckle down to it? Full marks . • • 'buckle down to it and with your company please as the icing on my cake'. According to Mark is full of plot, though in the end it is inconsequential. The story leads us to expect that the major's letters will shed light on the ancestry of Carrie; or that Strong's influence on Mark will break up his marriage; or something. In the end, nothing much happens. Carrie settles down with Nick. Mark is still in love with his wife. And we are left with Mark and a BBC producer sitting in a basement Of Broadcasting House trying to piece together a programme. They even manage to find old Strong's voice in the sound archives.

I was disappointed by According to Mark. I could not quite see why it had been placed on the Booker short list. The theme of the tale is a good one, but we have here no Aspern Papers. Scrappily written, it Is yet more scrappily edited. Mark has a disastrously annoying habit of saying `Hmn' or 'Minn' whenever Mrs Lively can't think of anything else for him to say, and this habit spreads like an epidemic to all the other characters, particularly to Carrie. There are lots of `urn's and 'er's and Carrie can't say 'suppose', she always says 's'pose'. In real speech, hesitation occurs and syllables get elided, but the logical

extension of transcribing all such vocalisa- tions would be to write dialogue in phone-

tic speech. I dare say one would tolerate any number of s'poses, urns, ers and mmns if the dialogue at any moment came to life. But as one character says — seeming to speak for the author — 'one labours a bit keeping up the conversation'. Perhaps a decent editor could not have enlivened the decidedly unlively speech.

But he or she could have put a blue pencil through the redundant words which litter the sentences. 'The poet remained basical- ly silent' . . . Why basically? 'And yet hoW, unspeakably much more so it might be

. . . And so forth. On the other hand, the editor of this novel must have been faced with a problem. For when Mrs Lively turns

away from the straight and narrow of the, cliche (where letters are 'stashed away' where you have 'difficulties on that front',

where Dorset is the place that Hardy is 'all about' and where intrigued means in-

terested) she creates some curious usages-

Mark is 'pole-axed with emotion'. We find' a mixed salad described as 'eclectic'. Is `limber', even in a jokey metaphorical way, a word to use of a radio, as in `to limber up' the ancient radiogram'? And what, apart; from the desire to be alliterative, prompted'

the sentence, 'A covey of youths on motor-, bikes crashed by'? Since a covey suggests a' flock of birds, is it appropriate that they.,

should crash, a word which, in the context; of motorbikes, suggests an accident?.

Oddest of all is not a linguistic mistake, hut: the careless suggestion, on page 45, that' you can make a 'cake or pudding' with a' rolling-pin.