Through glasses darkly
Philip Glazebrook
THE WORLD MORE OR LESS rench novelists, the serious ones, require more work of their readers than an English writer may expect of his. 'When,' exclaims the English novel reader, who scarely bothers to stoop to pick up clues to the author's intention if that intention is not plainly stated, 'when is the man going to explain the point of all this stuff?' Vamaisr declares the French novelist, immediately starting another chapter on a totally different and apparently unrelated subject, and adding as he turns his back, 'If I am not elliptical I am nothing.'
A reader determined to 'understand' the novel must make of it what he can, a lost mariner judging the drift of a submerged tide from stray objects bobbing on its sur- face. He must accept nothing, however amusing, however beguiling, at its face value. If schoolboys are described idly pushing laden barges away from the quayside with their feet, the reader sees it as a political activity, prefiguring the anti- capitalist protest of the adolescents the boys will become. Congratulating himself on catching the analogy, he misses Rouaud's marvellous description of the seagulls overhead. It is not enough, with a book which comes to us garlanded like this one, to listen to the language, to watch the pictures, to love the humour, to enjoy one scintillating page after another; you feel inadequate if you have not remained alert to the work expected of you, and you will lay the novel down with guilty looks as if caught with a thriller in the BM Reading Room. This is the man, it must be remembered, who won the Goncourt with a novel 'about World War I' (so the blurb tells us) in which war is the atmosphere of the book rather than its subject. Work at it, reader.
Rouaud, mind you, works too. The strength of a trilogy (his oeuvre is three novels concerned with the same bourgeois family) is that the writer knows his subject so well that he is confident in its reality, and, by himself moving about inside it with assurance, gives us the sense of roominess which good novels have. In a profusion of Images and incidents, Rouaud has created solid ground under the narrator's feet; but he shows us this world through the tunnel vision of a fumbling myopic boy at boarding school and thereafter. This narrow viewpoint (through broken spectacles) is further restricted by there being not a single line of dialogue in the book, by which constraint Rouaud has deprived his novel of characters able to create an identity for themselves, indepen- dent of the narrator, by what they choose to say.
Thus we are shut up in the narrator's head throughout the book. His mind and his outlook need to be original if his point of view is to suffice. I never tired of it, nor of the narrator's way of expressing himself. (`And we all know what came of that [victory of the Roman fleet]: hot baths, short swords, and Latin declensions.') By his link to Gyf, the anarch who dares what others only dream of daring — to his schoolmaster he describes the Holy Trinity as 'the winning treble' — as Gyfs admirer he is drawn into the circus of student poli- tics in the Sixties. From Gyf's activities and the narrator's reflections we learn that stu- dent revolutionary activities are mostly phoney, and that the welfare of the prole- tariat is apt to come second to the wants of the student. If the narrator has a philoso- phy, it is that all activities are subsidiary to the sole question of importance, whether or not a girl will be interested in him. His novel-writing, his politicising, the revolu- tion, all Are fall-backs only to be taken up when a girl rejects him. It is amusingly told — the argument over what politically cor- rect slogan should appear on a protest- march banner is a fine piece of mockery but it is not original, it does not throw fresh light on the student revolution of Paris in 1968. We are not inside Holden Caulfield's head, or even Lucky Jim's.
The book has other flowers. It is exceptionally well written, and it is this lucidity, delicacy and power of language which give it stature and distinction. Its translator, Barbara Wright, has preserved the echoes and the resonance of the original tongue. Equal praise is due to an author and his translator whose collabora- tion can produce this thought and its expression:
That blessed space at the frontier of the night, which alleviated your school years, has lost its power to console, now that the gift of time aplenty and the absence of restraints have made its use a commonplace.
Accept this, forget the reader's responsibil- ities; pick the flowers and he thankful.
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