BOOKS

Quiet flows the don

Caroline Moore

THE MODERN BRITISH NOVEL by Malcolm Bradbury Seeker & Warburg £20, pp. 512

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hat is the difference between Malcolm Bradbury and God?' ran the graf- fito in the women's lavatories in the school Of English and American studies at the University of East Anglia in the late Seven- ties: `Ans. God is everywhere, Malcolm Bradbury is everywhere but here.' Certain- ly, though Professor Bradbury is sometimes about in the quad, his formidable energies and talent have found multifarious outlets.

He is a fine example of that modern phe- nomenon, the telly-don (Remote and inef- fectual don, where have you gone? Where have you gone?'): he is the don to whom the Sunday papers turn for views upon University matters (i.e. date-rape and sexu- al. harassment); the don without whom no critical forum upon television is complete. And, of course, he does not merely appear Upon television; he is singularly successful at writing for it, whether adapting — quite brilliantly — the works of Alison Lurie and Tom Sharpe, or creating his own serials. One can see — or hear — why this should be so. His own novels show his acute ear for dialogue: a finely-tuned observation of the way people really do speak (and dress, and move) never becomes sprawling real- ism, but is distilled in the alembic of his comic imagination into a sparkling quintessence. And he is brilliant not only at SPotting contemporary trends, but at read- ing them within an intellectual and ulti- mately a moral context: sharp but essentially genial, his is satire with a liberal core.

Bradbury's genius for trend-spotting is not merely social, but historical and cultur- al. Unlike his own History Man, who justi- fies staring out of the window at passing female students on the grounds that stu- dent fashions are a sociological text, Pro- fessor Bradbury's academic windows open Upon the perilous seas of contemporary lit- erature. He has, of course, embarked upon the waves not only as a novelist and literary Critic, but also as a chairman of the Booker Prize, amid the usual storm of controversy that proved a fair trade wind. He is an !„113ert upon Modernism and the Modern 'love' who extends his professional inter- es.ts into the problematic present. When discussing the Modern British Novel, he is Certainly not everywhere but here. This magisterially titled study offers a test of Bradbury's omniscience and omnipresence. One's natural inclination is to skip to the final chapters covering the last ten or 20 years, to find out who's in and who's out. This would be a pity. Before reading The Modern British Novel, indeed, I did wonder whether it needed writing. The subject — particularly the years up to 1945 — has been `done' so often before, in parts and in whole (often, indeed, by Bradbury himself) that it is easy to argue that anoth- er study is redundant. Do we really need to be told yet again that post-war novels are 'works of deep inner fragmentation'. Yet, as I read, I was increasingly convinced that one should reason not the need. . . or rea- son, at least not from many of the usual academic criteria (startling new material, a radically new approach, with a new canon, or new theories, linguistic, psychoanalyti- cal, sociological or historical, presented in unreadably new jargon). On all these counts, the book is refreshingly old-fash- ioned. I do not wish to suggest that the book is merely what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed: Bradbury has a clear furrow of his own to plough. Yet the book is striking not for spurious innova- 'We'll get nowhere with it until we develop marketing skills.' tion, but for its lucid scope.

Bradbury's writing is superbly readable without being bland: it often possesses some of the tensions as well as the pithy and detached packaging of an epigram. At times, indeed, its pronouncements read like nothing so much as a series of well-bal- anced essay titles: If the Fifties had largely read culture with a moral vocabulary, the Sixties with a sociologi- cal one, the Seventies with the language of personal consciousness, the Eighties quickly introduced a new discourse founded on the myths of money.

Discuss all or part of this statement.

Directly or indirectly, the wound of war was everywhere in the post-war novel, explaining the note of sharp generational change, his- torical weariness, wasteland vision and root- less psychological tension so plain in much of the best fiction.

Discuss the 'wounds of war' in the work of any two authors from the period 1915- 1930.

These are old-fashioned `A' or `S' level titles — and I mean that as a compliment. Quotations used in university exams tend to be more contentious and more preten- tious. Bradbury's remarks provoke thought, perhaps disagreement; but they do not do so by their modishness. There is no domi- nant critical dogma, no squinting through a narrow theoretical keyhole. Given the high- ly fragmented, often over theoretical and almost invariably quarrelsome condition of much literary criticism, Bradbury's over- arching Olympian serenity is remarkable enough.

Often, of course, one perversely longs for Bradbury to be, not paring, but sharpening his fingernails. Here is Bradbury upon Kingsley Amis, whose work he admires for its 'moral seriousness, displayed instinctive- ly as comedy':

In later works, like Jake's Thing (1978) and Stanley and the Women(1984), he examined the growing gender conflicts between men and women and their impact on the family and on male psychology.

Do these works examine, or are they embroiled in gender conflicts: Bradbury's eirenic formulation ignores the violent alle- gations of misogyny directed at these par- ticular books. He may well be right to dismiss such questions as essentially irrele- vant; but one misses the engagement of a critic who has descended into the heat and dust of the arena.

Nor will you find in these pages the plea- sures of the iconoclast ('another classic to cross off your list'). He is reverential towards the Grand Old Men of English Lit- erature; profoundly respectful, too, of the female line, subscribing to ideas about the `feminisation' of the novel. He does remark of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage that it was `called (by May Sinclair) "stream of consciousness going on and on" (as, to be frank, it rather did)'; but such barbed

asides are relatively rare. The book is witty (except in the diaries of country ladies, Edwardianism would never really have a good literary press') but not waspish; it has, indeed, a high seriousness and generous tolerance.

The all-encompassing nature of Brad- bury's enterprise is mirrored by his style. His sentences typically work through a combination of parisonic balance and sonorous accumulation of clauses. This deftly crams in an uncommon amount, as in this typical auxesis: 'literature took on modern sensibility, as social representation was fragmented, language decentred, reali- ty de-stabilised.' Or, on the nouveau roman, with a similar sprinkling of com- mas,

Their books were fantasies about realities, refusing to salute the flat, honour the sign, or function as stable texts, playing with, defer- ring and parodying the funds of narrative, the laws of story, the categories of genre.

This style is not used merely for generali- sation; it forms shapely pronouncements Upon individuals too:

[Martin] Amis is a pained post-modern iro- nist. . . but he is also a novelist of the `unpre- sentable', a writer of late modern Gothic, a novelist of extreme black comic knowingness, a writer of uncomfortable ambiguity, a moralist virtually driven out of business by an age that seems incapable of registering its own moral centre,

Professor Bradbury is a liberal optimist. One of the optimistic contentions of his book is that the novel is far from mori-

bund. Critics have announced its death in every decade of this century; the reports, however, have so far proved an exaggera- tion. There is no particular reason to sup-

Pose that this time the regulation gloom Will be justified. Au creative renewals are by their nature continually necessary and Profoundly unforeseeable. If an individual novelist cannot foretell why or how his own imagination will stir and quicken into his

next work, it is even more impossible for a critic to predict `whither the novel'. Encouraging signs, however, can be gleaned from the past. Bradbury draws some interesting parallels between the 1980's and the 1880's, when `artistically

Plural, confusing and troubled times were radically productive'. His artistic liberalism emerges most strongly, too, in the excellent chapter on the Eighties, where the plight of Rushdie Prompts Bradbury's most overt manifesto. The novel, he writes, has a role 'in explor- ing and shaping our heritage of moral dis- covery, humanistic exploration, and intellectual freedom'; our Western tradi- tion is `not only modernistic plurality', but also

humanistic faith in the power of imaginative fiction to explore our place, and fate, in the fissured, schismatic, pluralistic world , and the belief that through art and the imagina- tion we can seek some larger wholeness.'

This humanist note might suggest that Bradbury would recoil from the dehuman- ising experimental techniques of the post- modern novel; and recoil, even more, from the `post-humanist' fiction of the years when the only intellectually fashionable thing to be was a deconstructionist, under- mining all wholeness of art, imagination, self and meaning. But Bradbury reads these phases, too, as expressions of the human spirit suffering in the toils of a par- ticular historical era; nor, in his view, are the alternative literary traditions any more — or less — valid in themselves. This is not the liberalism that eschews all judgment — Bradbury's book is full of judgments, aes- thetic and moral — but a rather more strin- gent awareness that the British novel has never been dominated by any one tradition, and that each has its potentialities and limi- tations, stimulating or restricting discovery. More important still, each can and always has cross-fertilised the other — though, equally, teeming cultural pluralism in a world which is, as David Lodge put it, an `aesthetic supermarket' of available styles creates its own problems.

Bradbury is always aware both of the rewards and the restrictions of each cre- ative choice. This study emphasises the rewards: and, indeed, his own excitement and enjoyment as a reader shine through. His generously appreciative voice is partic- ularly in evidence when he is celebrating the work of recent years; yet he is always implicitly aware of the aesthetic quicksands which these late-modern writers are skirt- ing — that self-consciousness, stylistic bril- liance or even feminism may not in themselves be enough: that 'post-modern trickiness' needs to be more that just a trick; that 'the fire of art and the imagina- tion' should indeed, as the novels of A.S.Byatt suggest, `restore romance to the disconnected, over-textualised world of the late modern novel.' And Bradbury makes out a convincing case for the sheer creative energy of the modern novel, even — or indeed especially — in recent years.

The novel is not dead. I hope that Brad- bury's book kills off the exhausted cliché that so regularly claims it is — or I would so hope, if Bradbury's book did not make it plain that literature often thrives in 'an era of dismay.