Choked by gas . . .
Teresa Waugh
FIELDS OF GLORY by Jean Rouaud, translated by Ralph Manheim Harvill, £13.99, pp. 160 Reading Fields of Glory, Jean Rouaud's Goncourt Prize-winning novel, is rather like returning to stay with the Cailars in Saint-Germain-en-Laye where I lodged for some time as a teenager in the late Fifties. Monsieur Cailar spoke little, but everything he said was prefaced by the phrase, 'During the war — the 1914 war... ', whilst Madame Cailar, an energetic, wiry woman, talked ceaselessly of the horrors wrought in France by the Boche during the second world war. The same nostalgic, dreamy atmosphere hangs over the novel as hung over the Cailars' conversation, and there is the same feeling of aimlessness and lack of direction.
This novel has no real plot, but consists rather of the narrator's confusion of mem- ories of another generation — grandfather, father, great-aunt, now all dead. One mem- ory gives rise to another, and as with real memories, time is of no great consequence. The only trouble is that this is a novel and the reader is bound to ask himself where he is going and what next? But there never seems to be anything next, so that in the end you are left with an unsatisfied feeling of having come to grips with nothing.
At the beginning of the book we learn that Grandfather has died and we are then treated to a character sketch of the old man who had 'all by himself smoked up whole fields of tobacco', and who drives his grandchildren around in a leaky old 2 CV, skidding and bouncing around the roads with little regard for danger. Then we move on to what amounts to an essay on rain in the Lower Loire. This chapter is not only a triumph of evocative writing and a master- piece of translation, but it makes one long for rain, every sort of rain, even the 'glacial rain' brought by the northwest wind 'that sets the blood tingling'.
This unbroken drizzle of the black months of November and December . . . it is a thoroughgoing invasion, a slow, dense, obstinate curtain, which needs no more than a light breeze to help it penetrate sanctuaries where the dusty ground has preserved its light colour; it permeates the entire country- side and crushes the last stirring of hope in the hearts of men.
But what next?
What next indeed? More memories, more character sketches, more essays and even greater triumphs of translation. The first world war, we are told in the blurb, 'dominates the narrative like a brooding presence'. Never mind brooding presence, the essay on the poisonous gas used for the first time on the battlefield of Ypres is a repulsive reminder of the disgustingness of war:
Thus it came about that Joseph saw a green- ish dawn rising over the Ypres plain .. . The complicit wind pushed the green mist towards the French lines. It clung to the ground, hugging every rise and fall in the terrain, plunging into hollows, swallowing hillocks ...
and in the trenches it produced
the intolerable burning in the eyes, nose and throat, the suffocating pain in the chest, the violent cough that tears the lungs and the pleura and brings bloody froth to the lips, the acrid vomiting that doubles up the body, the fallen whom death will soon garner, trampled by their stronger companions trying . . to escape from this swarm of human worms.
Joseph, of course, dies, later — a slow, painful death in hospital, watched over by his sister, Marie, who is a central figure in the novel, being somehow symbolic of all the waste and loss and loneliness around her. Only one of her three brothers returns from the war and she becomes a withered spinster schoolteacher, consoled by religion and an obsessive relationship with the saints. She is a sad, vivid character who eventually goes mad, but either the symbol- 'This is my future widow.' ism has gone too far or Rouaud is being silly (or, don't tell me, it really did happen to his aunt) when, at her dying brother's bedside, Marie decides that she has noth- ing to give but herself, 'she will give him her woman's blood', and so, at the untimely age of 26, she bids 'good riddance to that bothersome monthly reminder of her womanhood'.
Jean Rouaud has an almost Balzacian eye for detail which brings a piquancy to his anecdotes and adds an intensity to his characters: nuns scurrying across court- yards in the convent where Aunt Marie is dying, holding their skirts down against the wind, Grandfather tracing a geometric figure with the tip of his cane in the dust of his daughter's Provençal garden, the rusting gate at the narrator's home ...
And somewhere amongst it all there is a really big novel struggling to get out.
Previous page
