BOOKS

Heavy lightweight reading

James Buchan

Aquarter of the way into Jeffrey Archer's novel, As the Crow Flies, a child is born. Charlie Trumper, who later marries the child's mother, is at hand to help the midwife. Archer is a copious writer, so I'll abbreviate the passage a little:

`Now you go away and boil me some water, and quickly.' Her voice sounded as if she wasn't in the habit of being questioned. Without another word Charlie jumped off the end of the bed and left the room...

Charlie appeared at the door carrying a bowl of hot water. `Anything else I can do?'

`Yes, there certainly is. I need every clean towel you can lay your hands on, and I wouldn't mind a cup of tea.'

Charlie came back with three towels and a kettle of hot water. Without turning to see who it was, Mrs Westlake [the midwife] con- tinued. 'Leave the towels on the sideboard, pour the water into the largest bowl you've got, then put the kettle back on so that I've always got more hot water whenever I call for it.'

A couple of minutes later Charlie pushed open the door with a foot and carried another bowl of steaming water over to the bedside.

`On the side table,' said Mrs Westlake, pointing. 'And try not to forget my tea. After that I shall still need more towels,' she added...

Charlie soon reappeared with another kettle of water, and was immediately instructed to empty the bowl before refilling it with the new supply...

He seemed to be making countless cups of tea, and carrying endless kettles of water, backward and forward, always arriving with the wrong one at the wrong time, , .

I've thought a lot about this passage. The truth is, of course, that childbirth has no overwhelming requirement for either hot water or towels: these were merely literary euphemisms for what went on behind the closed door of the confinement room. The convention eventually reached Hollywood and survives, if I remember rightly, in Gone with the Wind. Archer doesn't know this, but then he doesn't know much about the themes and settings he has selected for his novel: almost nothing about the East End of London, the Great War, big-store retail- ing, fine-art auctioneering and the stock- market, and just a little about the law. His book is multi-generational. He needed childbirth and, caught short in his flux of words, grabbed the materials to hand, which were good old hot water and towels. Jeffrey Archer is a man without aesthetic fear. You could ask him for a blockbuster about chubb-fuddling and, lo, before the cheque even clears, he's at it, thumping away:

In the light of the chandelier, the heavy chat) gleamed on Lady Wiltshire's bosom. Charlie had picked it up from the fuddler in Bond Street that very morning .. .

You might Say that you don't go to English commercial fiction for gritty real- ism. What you go for is what you go to Dickens for: length, strong plots, vivid type- characters, satisfactory themes of worldly or domestic success, journalistic informa- tion. The four novels under review are the degraded residue of the Dickensian tradi- tion. On the evidence of four bestsellers and I shall never read another as long as 1 live, so help me — commercial fiction on both sides of the Atlantic is in a mess. In addition, the editing of three of these books is incompetent beyond description.

The Archer and Cookson novels open in the early years of this century. Historical fiction, up to and including War and Peace, has always sought literary authority in references to documented events but, dammit, there are ways and ways of doing this. Miss Cookson is the more sensitive writer, but she has a tendency to witter:

Lizzie switched off the wireless; she was sick of listening to the news. Here they were in June 1943, and the end of the war seemed as far away as it had in 1941. She had thought, last October, when Montgomery had gone after Rommel and swept the board, that that would have been the end of it, but there were so many fronts now it seemed that when they did well in one they lost out on another.

If you think that is bad, listen to old Jeffrey:

In May 1940 Mr Churchill took over from Mr Chamberlain as Prime Minister, which gave Charlie a little more confidence about the future.

Reading these books, I was reminded of certain old films, where gentlemen in Hollywood morning dress, looking like rails bookies at Ascot, blunder out of the London fog, doffing their top hats: `Morning, Mr Disraeli!"Morning, Mr Gladstone!' Still at the skeletons, Mr Darwin!'

Both writers use dialect. Again Miss Cookson has the better ear, but it helps her book very little. She is diffident about drawing character and has to repeat names to distinguish the speakers even in two- sided dialogue. Archer, it seems, doesn't give a hoot. His book is supposed to cover 70 years, but the generations speak with one voice. Here is a young lady writing to a young gentleman in 1920:

I missed my period.

Their plots are slack. Miss Cookson begins in what I suppose is promising com- mercial territory — snow, the North of England, a baronet, a widow — and bangs off two double murders in the first third before she squanders it all in endless maunder on a wartime air-force base near Hereford:

She was worried about Maggie. What was the matter with her? She had definitely changed. And it wasn't only that she was concerned for Joe, because at times she seemed sort of happy. But it was an odd kind of happiness, because at other times when she had put on weight she had become depressed, and she had certainly put on weight these past few weeks. But then it wasn't surprising, because she was eating more than ever. There was no talk of diets now. It must be her worry for Joe was affecting her in this way.

Archer's is a Bleak House-y sort of plot of foundlings, bastardy and wills super- imposed on the story of Marks & Spencer. Archer compounds the offence by locating the solution to his novel in Australia. We have to travel there not once but three times, and each time the journey is more miserable and tedious than even Qantas makes it. Archer's maguffin, which is a miniature Military Medal, wouldn't fool a sick baby. Half-way through these novels, both writers sense things aren't going right and throw in an incest theme, only to drop it instantly.

Their publishers are just as idle. Miss Cookson's public deserves protection from her lack of narrative vitality. The typescript should have been cut, even at the risk of laying bare its gaping weaknesses. Archer uses multiple narrators, a technique which can sometimes be quite rich in cheap effects, but he's there only for the volume: different voices recount the same events in the same tone. The chief variation is through errors. Names and numbers don't correspond even on the same page. A marchioness becomes a duchess and is immediately demoted. I wonder if Jeffrey Archer even reads his work after writing or dictating it. The public certa;nly shouldn't.

Yet The Novel, by James Michener, is just as degenerate in that it dispenses with story altogether in favour of information, some of it false. I imagine Michener set out, at the end of a long career as a best- selling writer, to write a manual of best- seller writing. The monstrous conceit of the man is right there in the first sentence: This Tuesday morning, 3 October 1990, at half-past ten, I typed the last sentence of the novel that will complete what the critics have taken to calling The Grenzler Octet.

Michener also misuses multiple point-of- view. The Writer writes, signs books in shopping malls and makes a whole lot of money, some of which he gives away. The Editor, who is a woman, Jewish and a New Yorker, finds markets for the books but is unhappy. The Critic is gay and a failure as a novelist. The Reader — I'm not sure what the Reader is about. At intervals, a man commits suicide, another dies of Aids, a third murders a fourth, but I drove right through these stoplights, the engine locked on twaddle-control.

Towards the end, Michener attempts a muddled theory of literature which I feel I can't let stand, though it is unlikely to win adherents: Middle America is not half as dumb as Michener thinks. In the Michener universe, there are two kinds of novelist. One is popular, heterosexual, American, hey, maybe a bit like Michener himself:

'Well, Jane, when a man receives a batch of letters like this almost every mail day of his life, he can afford to ignore criticism. They fuel an inner fire that keeps him warm.'

The second is highbrow, European or been to Europe, probably homosexual, or an anti-Semite like Pound, or a traitor to his country like Forster (!):

E.M. Forster's famous statement that he'd rather betray his nation than his male friend.'

'What an amazing statement.'

'Some experts claim that Forster never actu- ally said male friend, but we know that's what he meant.'

The famous statement is misquoted twice. Michener's editor can find the correct version on page 76 of the Penguin Two Cheers for Democracy, three-quarters of the way down.

Wilbur Smith does know how to plot a novel. His hero vows early on to kill a group of ivory thieves. The book ends, sure enough, when the last one of these drowns in mud. Smith uses cliché in the efficient manner of the busy journalist, to get the story told:

Then suddenly there was a sound that ripped across his nerve ends like an emery wheel. It echoed through the dark cavern of the ware- house and rang against the high roof. It was a hacking cadence, like a wood-saw cutting metal, and it set his teeth on edge. He knew what it was instantly, but he found it difficult to believe what he was hearing.

A leopard!

The only fault here is the emery wheel, which trips up the reader, because as a cliché it is not quite dead, Thriller-writers are always striving to invent new clichés, without realising that they are a hindrance. What the hell is an emery wheel, anyway?

Smith doesn't attempt character. In the grand tradition of the English thriller, he uses racial type. The villains are respective- ly a Sikh (who gets chi-chi to speak), a black African and a Taiwanese, while the hero is a white Rhodesian. Women are treated as scaled-down versions of large and dangerous animals. Smith's action scenes have a Tom-and- Jerry quality:

Johnny knew that he was mortally hit. He could feel the arterial blood squirting out of the wound in his groin and he rolled on his side and swiftly loosened the top of his trousers. Immediately he smelled his own faeces and knew that the second bullet had ripped open his intestines. He reached down into his crotch and pressed his fingers into the wound in his groin. Blood spurted hotly over his hand.

You might say this passage would be intol- erable in the hands of a more intelligent writer. Imagine this happening to a believ- able character! Imagine authentic emotion here! Imagine Ian McEwan loose on this!

I believe the point is back to front. Because Smith can't invent character or convey any emotion through his figures except a dull aggression towards Africa, its native populations, and its fauna, he is doomed to depict scenes of ever greater violence and foulness till he carries the whole genre over a cliff. Elephant Song stands in the same fatal relation to the action thriller as The Wild Bunch to the Hollywood Western. The best of the books under review is also the most debased.

The writers of these bad books are prob- ably a lost cause. But someone embarking on a career in commercial fiction would do well to consider whether Dickens is our greatest novelist because of his prolixity, knowingness, name-dropping, vulgarity, count - the - hairs- in- my - nose familiarity, journalism and cardboard characters or in spite of them. In some mysterious way, Dickens manages to achieve (as the old queer traitor himself said)

effects that are not mechanical and a vision of humanity that is not shallow.

Anybody thinking of writing a bestseller should take Forster's sentence as a starting-point.

As for myself, I shall carry these half- million words to my grave.