Donington on Jung and Wagner's "Ring"

Robert Donington's Wagner's 'Ring' and its Symbols is the oft-cited Jungian analysis of the cycle of four operas. In discussing the paradox of the general situation that develops in the first opera, "Das Rheingold," Donington makes the point that the "bitterness and the sweetness of life are quite inseparable." He quotes Wagner, who wrote in a letter that "'Without death as a necessary concomitant, there is no life; that alone has no end which has no beginning.'" Music, continues, Donington, "is at its greatest when it puts us in mind at once of our own mortality and of life's worth and beauty, and reconciles us to the paradox." He goes on to extend the realization to all the arts, especially "in this age of weakened religious understanding" when "the arts have more responsibility than ever for quickening our intuitive awareness that life does hold a meaning to be discovered by each in his own individual way." In short, "great art reconciles the opposites, and in so doing helps us to reconcile them and to become reconciled with life."
Wagner is not a lovable man, or even a likable one, but in his work his (apparent?) knowledge of his own shortcomings, of man's capacity for inflicting pain, seems to enrich the music. Does this forgive his sins? No, but it may help to explain the appeal of his music.

What an Awful Man!

The Baron Ungern-Sternberg is the subject of James Palmer's The Bloody White Baron: the Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia--h0w's that for a title! Fortunately Palmer is a more concise writer than this suggests and he has a whale of a story to tell. However obscure a historical figure the Baron may be, Mongolia, the background of his short, brutal rise to power, turns out to have been a crucial battleground in the years following the Russian Revolution, as the Whites and the Reds fought for supremacy and China and Japan jockeyed for power in that part of Asia.
As Palmer says in his introduction, The Baron "in one short year rose from being a Russian nobleman to incarnate God of War and returned Khan. In Mongolia he was lauded as a hero, feared as a demon and, briefly, worshipped as a god." Having fled to Mongolia as the last best hope for the return of some sort of monarchy--his preferred form of government--Ungern raised a Mongolian army, freed the Living Buddha who had been imprisoned by the Chinese and for a brief time enjoyed a a precarious supremacy in Mongolia. This did not, however, last long, and Ungern, his army in ruins, was captured and executed by the Bolsheviks.
Palmer makes a good case for the importance of his story and in his epilogue finishes the sad story of Mongolia, a forgotten country that suffered first at the hands of the Chinese and second,from the much worse tyranny of the Soviets. Ungern was arguably a monster but his story rises above the man. Palmer has a nice sense of humor as well as a gift for conveying the historical scene. Overlook the title and read this book.

Contemplating the End

Diana Athill's Somewhere Towards the End is indeed about old age, which means that it's about death, but it's a bracing book that avoids many of the cliches about same, especially given that Athill is 91 and thus might be expected to indulge herself in a few. For example, on the subject of last words, she notes that although most of the famous examples are probably "apocryphal," one "likes to imagine oneself signed off in a memorable way." She makes no bones about her regret that her sensual life is over and has a lot to say about the nature of same and her relationships with various men. Her account sounds honest enough so that one truly believes it is--a rare thing it seems to me given that honesty is difficult to achieve in sexual matters. She regrets what she terms "that nub of coldness" at her center and laziness. But she claims that she will stop at those two "because to turn up something even worse would be a great bore," besides which she's not sure that "digging out past guilts is a useful occupation for the very old, given that one can do so little about them." Amen, and bravo--there are far too many memoirs clogged with self-indulgent self reproach.
Athill also writes well about her lack of religious faith and makes some nice points about the difference between contemporary and medieval religious art, asserting that from the "seventeenth century on there is always a taint of sentimentality or hysteria in religious art, however splendid the technique." It is, she says, "the selflessness of [medieval] art that is magnetic" because the "person making the object wasn't trying to express his own personality . . . he was trying to represent something outside of himself for which he felt the utmost respect, love or dread." I'll remember this when next looking at medieval or Buddhist or any other kind of art made at a time of religious belief.
All in all I enjoyed listening to Athill's sensible voice. As for myself, I am 71, which she identifies as the moment one steps over the threshhold into old age. She describes herself as realizing then that she was "aground on that fact," a fine phrase for the realization that one is not middle-aged any more and a good example of Athill's willingness to accept the inevitable without succumbing to it more than one needs to.

The Sealed Letter is Emma Donoghue's vivid re-creation of a notorious mid-Victorian divorce case in which Henry Codington, a vice-admiral in the British admirality, sought to separate himself from his promiscuous wife Helen. Involved in the sensational trial as a witness was Emily Faithfull, a feminist and a businesswoman as well as a long-time friend of Helen's. Born in Dublin, Donoghue now lives in Canada but her knowledge of London as it was in 1864 is extensive. Yet beyond the facts of the case, interesting enough in themselves, what makes this novel so powerful is the author's invocation of the complex snarl of emotions revolving around the relationship between Helen, "Fido," as Faithfull was called by her friends, and the admiral himself. No one of them is blameless, but neither is any one to blame entirely for the fiasco that resulted from the case, the results of which seem to have satisfied no one. All in all, the novel is an argument for the more liberal divorce laws that came in time but much later than one would have thought given the misery exposed by Donoghue. Most of all, though, it's a wonderful novel.
The Birthday Present, by Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell), is a nasty bit of stuff. This is not surprising given its author and I don't mean it in an entirely negative way. The "gift" referred to in the title is a mock kidnapping with strong sexual overtones set up by Ivor, a budding politician who is having an affair with a young married woman. She is to be "kidnapped" and delivered to him, all of which is a supposedly a happy adventure for her. Well of course it all goes awry in a big wayand what follows is the haunting of Ivor by the aftermath of the event. For about half the book I sped along, eager to pick it up again, but then it all began to seem unsavory and repetitive. Vione is a good writer with an eye for the telling detail but it's all kind of sordid unless you're really interested in the possible (and real) peccadillos of British politicians.
Lastly, having avoided the dreary-sounding movie I decided to read (I would say re-read, but I don't think that's so), Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road. Dreary, yes, horribly so, but what a good novel this is. The paperback edition I had featured a superb introduction by Richard Ford, a big favorite of mine, lamenting Yates's lack of critical attention, and pointing out what's so fine about his writing. This novel struck me as a cross between Cheever and Updike and yet it is very much it's own thing. Yates's ability to turn a phrase, to nail a character with a sentence or two is awesome, as is his unrelenting depiction of suburban angst, waste, soulessness, whatever. there is nothing very admirable (that's putting it mildly) about Frank and April, the two protagonists, and watching them destroy each other is not a pretty sight. But two other couples, friends of the main pair and their real estate agent and her husband, are portrayed with a large degree of compassions--this is not immediately evident but it becomes so in the course of the novel and it serves to sweeten the bitterness of tone. I liked it so much I might even decide to see the movie, but only on Netflix so I can walk out if necessary.

If you're looking for a good thriller I recommend The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson. It's a truly gripping police procedural/freelance tale about the corpses in the closet of a large Swedish industrial family. The oddly matched but effective "detectives" are a financial journalist and Salander, a tough waif with photographic mind and advanced computer skills. The result is a classic page turner. I was devastated to read in the author bio that Larsson has died since writing this--no more to anticipate.
And for something competely different, a quotation from a Tessa Hadley story, "She's the One," published in a recent issue of The New Yorker:
“She imagined the reading she did now as like climbing inside one of those deep old beds she’d seen in a museum, with a sliding glass door to close behind you: even as she was suffering with a book and could hardly bear it, felt as if her heart would crack with emotion or with outrage at injustice, the act of reading it enclosed and saved her. Sometimes when she moved back out of the book and into her own life, just for a moment she could see her circumstances with a new interest and clarity, as if they were happening to someone else.”

In the March 16th issue of The New Yorker, amidst articles on the fashion world, are nine poems by the late John Updike on the subject of his impending death, four of them sonnets. Years ago I heard Updike read his poems as part of a series at the University of Pittsburgh. In the front row of the audience sat his elderly mother, so often a figure in his work. Listening to him, looking at her, was an oddly moving experience, like seeing a fictional character come to life. This last poetry is very moving, especially since the speaker's voice, so often heard during my lifetime of reading, is no more except in his work. What I loved about Updike, even in the things that I didn't like, was his curiosity about the world and its inhabitants and his apparent belief in the ongoing power of ordinary. Thus in one of these poems, "Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth," he thanks his childhood friends, his classmates, for providing "a sufficiency of human types," which is the end, "all a writer needs." He goes on to claim that it was all a writer needs, that it was "all there in Shillington." I tend to believe that, moreso as the years go on. All we need to do is look around us, which is what Updike always did, even when he was dying.

I have a few books to talk about, and an odd assortment at that. In the order read in which I read them, the first is Jonathan Carr's The Wagner Clan: The Saga of Germany's most Illustrious and Infamous Family. Termed by one commentator "fiendishly enjoyable," it is all of that. It's also an absorbing history of Bayreuth, the theater that Wagner wanted it to be, what is has been and what it might be in the future. Although it's sometimes difficult to keep the family members straight, especially as time goes on and the cast grows larger, it's never hard to marvel at their eccentricities. Wagner's daughter-in-law (Seigfried's wife) Winifred looms large. Energetic, intelligent, opinionated and deeply compromised by her cosy relationship with Hitler, she is nonetheless largely responsible for the continued existence of the festival, which has survived two world wars and family conflicts beyond belief. Carr narrates the tale with aplomb and sympathy; he never neglects the moral issues raised by all this happening in Germany, but neither does he preach. He also displays a constant awareness of the importance of the great music without which there would be no story and takes a sensible attitude towards the issue of whether or not it is in and of itself anti-semitic. If you're at all interested in Wagner, or in modern Germany, this is a must.
Then I took a breather and read a thriller and a mystery. The thriller was The Silent Man, by Alex Berenson. Welcome back, John Wells, savior of America in The Faithful Spy and The Ghost War. A CIA agent, Wells is, however, the despair of the CIA establishment. Preferring to do things his own way, he is given assignments that no one else will touch or else he just takes them on, permission be damned. In defying death on a regular basis, he threatens his relationship with Jennifer Exley, the love of his life and an agent herself, but one less devoted to self-destruction. Berenson is a good plotter and the details always sound right even if maybe they're not. But somehow this one left me unsatisfied, as if I'd eaten too much candy and still wasn't sated--just a bit overstuffed. I kept thinking I'd read it all before--not that I could put it down, mind you. The story involves a stolen nuclear device and an awful lot of space was given to the plotters and the physics behind their venture--more than I ever wanted to know about concocting a nuclear device, especially when I knew it was doomed to be a dud.
As for the mystery, that was Fatal Lies, by Frank Tallis, who specializes in period mysteries set against the backdrop of late 19th-century Vienna. The gas lights flicker, the sachertorte is delicious, Strauss waltzes play in the background--what more can one ask? But to be picky, there's a thing called too much atmosphere and sometimes those gaslights glowed just a hair too long. Still, Dr. Max Liebermann, an expert in Freudian psychology--the good doctor even makes an appearance--is an attractive protagonist and the plot, centered on a brutal murder at an elite military academy, is believable. It all makes for pleasant reading, and would be perfect to take to Vienna if you're lucky enough to be headed that way.

The prolificBritish writer A.N. Wilson now tackles the challenge not only of Hitler, but of Richard Wagner. He does so in Winnie and Wolf, a fictionalized account of the relationship between Wagner's daughter-in-law Winifred and Hitler that occurred in the years between the two world wars. The result is an odd but informative book that attempts to shed light on Wagner's music at the same time that it explores the nature of Naziism and the German psyche. The story is told by a fictional character, a young male secretary at Wahnfried, the Wagner home in Bayreuth. The idea is that Winifred and Hitler (known as "Wolf" to the family) had a child who was ultimately adopted by the secretary and his wife. The novel is a letter to that child,now an old lady living under an assumed name in the US, explaining it all to her.
I read the book as part of learning more about Wagner, and in many ways I did as Wilson's effort to explain alway the composer's supposed fascist leanings is pretty convincing--although that's an argument that may never be resolved. The narrative is awkward at moments, so often the case with a fictionalized history--the gaps between reality and imagination show. But no matter, it's a good story. There is a wonderful and poignant scene towards the end when the narrator describes driving back into Bayreuth at the end of World War II, when the town has been badly bombed--he claims because of Wagner's sympathy for the Nazis, or rather, Hitler's love of his music. Their clothes having been destroyed, the townspeople have raided the costume racks at the theatre and are walking through the streets dressed as the Rhinemaidens, the Nibelungs, Parsifal, etc. It's a powerful image, suggestive of the interplay between Wagner's mythological world and ours.

I have two very different books to write about this morning. First comes The Piano Teacher, a novel by Janice Y.K. Lee, a love story (of sorts) set in Hong Kong that moves between WWII and the war's aftermath in the 1950s. the pace is slow at first and I had almost given up when things got livlier with the actual onset of the war and its impact on the city's residents, Chinese and otherwise. The earlier plot centers on Will, an Englishman and his affair with Trudy, a gorgeous Eurasian with a somewhat mysterious life that turns tragic when the enemy arrives and she becomes entangled with a Japanese general while Will languishes in a detention center. The sections that take place in the '50s feature Claire, a new bride just out from England with her boring husband who falls in love with Will and he with her. The catch is that the dynamics of their affair are governed by the past that Will cannot escape, his possible betrayal of Trudy and his inflexible moral standards. Lee is very good at depicting at first, a city in crisis and then a place coming to terms after the war with what went on during it. Claire, a rather dull character at the start, comes gradually comes to life and in the end, makes a startling choice that seems quite believable, even enviable.
The second book I recommend is Patrick French's "authorized biography" of V.S. Naipaul, The World Is What It Is. I have never especially liked Naipaul's work, except for the reasonably benign A House for Mr. Biswas. One of his novels, Guerrillas, I found especially troubling in its depiction of violent sex. Further, he always struck me as an arrogant, blinkered and thoroughly unpleasant man. French's inclusive, lengthy biography did little or nothing to change my thinking, but, and it's a big but, it is a fascinating re-creation of the man's life, written with insight, sympathy, and objectivity. Some aspects of it--Naipaul's tratment of his long-suffering wife Pat and his long-time mistress Margaret Murray--are indeed repellent, yet they are part of the story and of the man himself, whom in the end French makes almost sympathetic. I can't imagine a better biography. I may even do some rereading of Naipaul and that seems the highest possible praise for a biographer.

Still Alice is Lisa Genova’s first novel. A spare-no-details depiction of a woman’s descent into early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, it makes for grim reading—how grim might depend on your age and/or family history. Alice Howland is a psychology professor at Harvard. At the top of her demanding profession, she is married with three grown children and a husband who is also a high-performing academic. Genova is not a born writer and her prose, especially in the book’s early sections, is stiff and unconvincing—we see Alice but don’t feel her. Ironically, the story gets better as Alice disintegrates. Her husband’s unwillingness to accept the diagnosis and her children’s initial confusion are convincing, as is Alice’s prolonged refusal to give in to the truth of her rapidly failing sense of reality. It’s easy to believe that this is how it might feel to lose one’s mind, literally. Genova bravely sticks to her established point of view, which is Alice’s, even when confronted with depicting a mental condition that is beyond language and for the most part, carries it off. In a sense this is not so much a novel as a psychological study of a woman suffering from a disease the reader can only hope to be spared.

The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks is by Robin Romm, whose first book, The Mother Garden was a volume of short stories that had a lot to say about dying mothers. It should be no surprise then that her latest is a brief narrative of the three weeks surrounding her mother’s death from cancer when Romm herself is in her twenties, young to lose a mother. She says in her afterword that when her mother was dying, she “found very few books that spoke of the particulars of loss,” that much “gets said about healing, but what of the violence of the actual event?” I suppose she has a point, although it seems to me that each such slow and painful death, as her mother’s was, is so particular, so freighted with emotions that escape articulation, that writing about them is impossible. Romm’s approach is to describe her anger, frustration and grief in detail in order to convey the loudness and ferocity of the experience. In some ways this is effective, in others it’s irritating. I found myself totally sympathetic to her devastating descriptions of the Hospice nurse with her bag of deadly drugs, the well-meaning friends bringing by inedible casseroles, the funeral home attendants who remove the body, like emissaries from some unspeakable underworld. But I also got impatient with her own retreats into drugged sleep, her lack of empathy for those well-meaning friends. Yes, I understand that she is trying to write in and of the moment, but sometimes it’s too much for the reader—not too much emotion, just too much self. Her thoughtful afterword helps to alleviate that in speaking of her “recovery,” although, as she rightly points out, grief loosens its grip but never let us go. It’s been said that the past is another country, and in the same way grief is another place. Once there, we never quite leave.

The Given Day is Dennis Lehane’s eighth novel. A lengthy ambitious work that portrays Boston at a critical moment in its history—right after WWI--it’s a good read that sometimes bogs down in the details. The narrative centers on two families, the Coughlins, Boston Irish who have chosen the police force as a means of advancement in a closed society, and Luther Laurence, an African American from Tulsa who flees to Boston to escape his unintentional involvement in a gang murder, leaving behind his pregnant wife. In Boston, Luther comes in contact with Danny Coughlin, the rebellious member of his family, who although a policeman himself, is unhappy with the status quo. Meanwhile, the Spanish Influenza is decimating the population, workers are threatening to strike and “Bolshevik radicals” are making their presence known. The novel opens with a segment about Babe Ruth, who resurfaces throughout the story, as do other historical figures such as Calvin Coolidge, then governor of Massachusetts. The climax of the novel, when everything comes together, is the 1919 Boston Police Strike, a devastating event that left parts of the city in ruins and many victims on both sides. Lehane is at his best when depicting the Coughlin household and the politics of the police force, less comfortable with Luther Laurence and the educated African American couple who take him in. Still, the pace is swift and the ending believable. It turns out that although they survive, perhaps to establish a better future, there is no place in Boston for either Luther or Danny and so they head west, the archetypal solution for so many Americans.

Here is a section from Charles Wright's book-length poem, Littlefoot:

Orpheus walked, the poets say, down to the black river.
Nobody recognized him,
Of course, and the boat came,
the gondola with its singular oarsman,
And the crowd got in, a thousand souls,
So light that the boat drew no water, not even a half-inch.
On the other side, the one paved road, and they took it.

Afterward, echoes of thge great song webbed in their ears,
They took the same road back to the waiting gondola,
The two of them,
the first to ever have returned to the soot-free shore.
The oarsman's stroke never faltered, and he hummed the song
He had caught the faint edges of
from the distant, marble halls.
It won't work, he thought to himself, it won't work. And it didn't.

I love this, with its image of the boatload of souls that weighs not a thing, and with the implacable Charon just doing his job, enjoying Orpheus's song but sure "it won't work." Is he cynical, or just knowing, like the poet who knows that poetry never makes anything happen? Perhaps he's sad that this is the case, perhaps not. So the lovers are doomed from the start. Then I saw the Met Opera's HD live transmission of Gluck's , "Orpheus ed Eurydice" in which quite the reverse happens: Orpheus (sung by the incomparable Stephanie Blythe) gives up and looks back at his love, as he has promised not to do, But all is not lost; Amor is so impressed with Orpheus's devotion that he descends from the heavens to announce that Eurydice is spared and the lovers are to be reunited. Eurydice comes back to life and all celebrate. In short, it works.
Yes, I suppose this is wonderful--but Wright's vision is so much more satisfactory, is it not?

A Mercy is Toni Morrison’s eighth novel, and a tough one it is. An unrelenting condemnation of the vision of America as the second Eden, it posits instead a universe in which everyone is tainted with sin. It’s the 17th century and farmer Jacob Vaark and his wife Rebekkah head up a household of three servants, the black slave girl Florens, Native American Lina and Sorrow, the mentally unstable orphan of a shipwreck. Each of these characters has some saving grace, each has been or is a victim, but at the same time each is guilty. Woven together, their narratives suggest that America’s tragic past is inescapable, that our nation’s history is inescapably evil. This is an enormous thematic burden for such a small vehicle—A Mercy is very short and in many ways, especially with reference to character, undeveloped. Morrison’s vision seems encrypted, written in shorthand. Florens tells her story by carving the letters into the walls of her master’s abandoned house with a nail, a painful image that suggests the difficulty of storytelling, of telling the truth except by dint of unimaginable effort. None of this makes for easy reading in large part because the tone of doom is so unrelenting. In the end, when the meaning of the title becomes clear, it’s plain that mercy is used ironically as if there is no possibility of real mercy in this world. Certainly there is none in Morrison’s. To tell the truth, I can’t decide what I think about the book, which doesn’t matter except that I’m not sure a novel’s aim should be to befuddle its readers as this one does.

Eden’s Outcasts is just what its title says, The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. Matteson argues that father and daughter were inextricably bound together, that to understand one must know the other, and that for both of them, “life was a persistent but failed quest for perfection.” In their search “they inevitably discovered flaws both in the world and within themselves:” thus the title of the book. Unavoidably perhaps, the spotlight is mostly on Bronson Alcott, the sometimes admirable but often infuriating man whose daughter just happened to write a classic children’s book. For starters, he lived a long life whereas Louisa died young and suffered from ill health for much of her life. Yet by the end of the story she too looms large as a person and apersonality
Readers who enjoyed Geraldine Brooks’ March, a fictional version of the Alcott household that plays off Little Women, may well find Matteson’s biography superior to the novel. Sorry, comparisons are odious, but the richness of the real story of the impossible Bronson and his family is more intriguing than the fictional version. Matteson’s book is also head and shoulders above Susan Cheever’s superficial romp through the Transcendental households of Concord, American Bloomsbury. His analyses of the friendships and the intellectual connections between Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau are both thoughtful and convincing. But his tight focus on the Alcott household, including the ill-fated attempt to build an ideal community, Fruitlands, is what makes this book so readable. Throughout, I found myself torn between deep sympathy for Alcott and a strong desire to shake him, hard—this is how alive Matteson makes his main character.
Bronson’s penchant for taking his ideas to the extreme and his unworldly approach to practical affairs made life hard for the Alcotts, especially his long-suffering wife Abba. Everything became easier for them eventually, in large part because of the phenomenal success of Little Women. Louisa was always the one of the four sisters who concerned her father the most, right from the beginning, and yet was the most like him. The tale of her efforts to make a life for herself and to fill the family coffers is simultaneously heartbreaking and exhilarating. Finally, as a nurse in the Civil War, she ruined her health forever when, near death from typhoid, she was treated with a “medication” that included dangerous levels of mercury. But she went on to write Little Women and the works that followed it before ending her life as an invalid. She died three days before her father, having been born on his birthday, a coincident symbolic of the emotional and intellectual bonds that united them.

The White tiger Roars

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga, introduces an exciting new writer who happens to be Indian. If it’s true—and I happen to think it is—that the quality of a writer’s voice is the key to success, then Adiga has a great future. The compelling and often terrifying but never dull voice in this novel belongs to Balram Halwai, the owner of a car service, who sits in his office in the middle of the night in Bangalore speaking to the premier of China, due to visit India shortly. He’s alone in his tiny office with only his chandelier for company. The room is filled with the flickering light that is thrown around the room by the turning fan just above it. Having heard on the radio that Premier Jiabao wants to learn the truth about Bangalore, to “meet some Indian entrepreneurs and hear the story of their success from their own lips,” Balram has determined that Jiabao hear his life story because he believes that the “future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse.” And what’s more, his story is the right one because, as he says, “I am tomorrow.”
Forget images of the Taj Mahal, incense, golden chrysanthemums, elephants padding through the jungle, or “lyrical India,” as one critic has described it; Balram’s India is a savage place, a country where he, the son of a rickshaw puller, can rise from “The Darkness” only by the most nefarious of means. Balram’s life reflects all the clichés—rags to riches, poor boy makes good, etc. You can’t listen to him without thinking of Dickens’s Pip, of David Copperfield on the one hand, of Horatio Alger stories, even Stendhal’s The Charter House of Parma or The Red and the Black. Except that, and it’s a big except, Balram gets where he gets in his own way, by conniving and cheating and murdering. And yet, and yet, it’s hard to despise him because his world is so vicious and corrupt. Balram compares it to a Rooster Coop, the box into which roosters are crammed in the market. Above them the butcher chops up chickens and the roosters smell the blood. But they don’t rebel or try to escape the coop, and as Balram says, the “very same thing is done with human beings in this country.”
And so he has become a White Tiger, the “rarest of animals—the creature that comes along only once in a generation,” in the jungle of his country." The angry outrage, the biting wit, the sheer power of Balram’s voice is so persuasive that readers are carried along, complicit in the acts that he carries out to achieve his office and his chandelier. Is he mad? Maybe. Is this the voice of the future? Possibly. Whatever else, his is a narrative of enormous power that keeps a reader turning the pages until the end just to hear where Balram will go next. Much as I have enjoyed books by other Indian writers such as Amitov Ghosh, Rohan Mistry, Karen Desai, and Manil Suri, this is the first one I’ve read that seemed to look to the future. Prophetically, it seems to suggest the world of the recent attacks in Mumbai rather than the world of a film like “Monsoon Wedding.” Finally, the angry energy of Balram’s voice reminded me a lot of Salmon Rushdie’s classic novel about partition, Midnight’s Children. Is Balram’s world the child of that 1947 midnight? This is not a happy thought.

A Critic's Critic

For readers who want to go beyond the average review by delving deeper into criticism of the novel I recommend James Wood, a professor of literary criticism at Harvard. To put it simply, Wood is a believer in the power of the novel to express the reality of the human condition in a world without God. Although he goes to some lengths to argue that he is not substituting the novel for religion, he puts great faith in the capacity of literature to express reality. His latest contribution to the cause is a slim volume called How Fiction Works, which is refreshingly on the side of practice as opposed to theory. While not exactly easy reading, it’s well worth your time and effort. Woods is a concise writer with a vast knowledge of the literature from which he selects his examples.
As far as I go, however, Woods’ best book is The Broken Estate (1999), a collection of essays on literature and belief now available in paper. Most of the pieces were published elsewhere before appearing in book form, but reading them together leads to a deeper understanding of Woods’ and of his attentiveness to the works under consideration; in other words, he listens to the voices of the novelist rather than imposing a theory of his own, a surprisingly rare gift in a critic.
Subjects run the gamut from Sir Thomas More to Don DeLillo, and include writers as disparate as Iris Murdoch and Toni Morrison. Of course Woods has his pet peeves, such as Toni Morrison’s use of “false magic,” which he says corrupts “our ability to judge fiction, which is a measured unreality.” Yet he is open to D.H. Lawrence’s “occultism” because he, Lawrence, is a “mystical realist” who is a poet and preacher at the same time. Read together, these two essays went a long way towards making me understand what I have never liked about the former and loved about the latter. Thus Woods gives readers a critical vocabulary with which to express likes and dislikes.
There’s no obligation to agree with everything he says—that would be to miss the point. But Woods makes us think about what it is the novel does and how it does it. I, for instance, don’t agree with him about Murdoch or John Updike or W.G. Sebald, whom I will never read with y pleasure whatever Woods or anyone else says about his genius. But neither will I read Virginia Woolf again without remembering Woods’ impassioned claim for her. He argues that what she seeks in her art is an “indefinability” of something that can’t be found, but that we all sense, a meaning that is always elusive, “finlike,” that her art at its best is always moving toward. Woods sent me back to her novels with a deepened understanding of their genius. At the end of the book’s last essay, which is on the nature of the broken estate, Wood asks “Why must we move through this unhappy, painful, rehearsal for heaven, this desperate antechamber, this foreword written by an anonymous author, this hard prelude in which so few of us can find our way?” Why indeed, but thank the heaven that doesn’t exist for the literature that has been written in that antechamber.

Nowhere to Go

Nothing to Be Frightened Of, self-described as a “memoir of mortality,” displays the wit and linguistic facility readers expect of Julian Barnes, whose most recent book was Arthur and George, a novel based on a relationship between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and an unknown Anglo-Indian named George. Barnes’s latest begins with a bang suggestive of both its seriousness and its humor: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.” What follows is Barnes’s self-examination of his irrational fear of death and the pointlessness of such an emotion, if one can reduce a profoundly troubling psychological state to h an inadequate word.
Readers learn a lot about Barnes’s family, grandparents, parents and philosopher brother who, by the way, sounds like a true British eccentric, and who regards his younger brother’s whinging about the inevitable with affectionate (I think) scorn. But Barnes also draws upon what other writers, especially French, have had to say about the grim reaper. One often cited is Jules Renard, the nineteenth-century French author whose sometimes mordant wit and brevity may explain Barnes’ attraction to him. Stendhal appears too, primarily in the context of Stendhal’s Syndrome, a supposedly near-death experience brought on by exposure to great art that overcame the writer the first time he visited Florence. Barnes debunks Stendhal’s description of what happened, pointing out that the details are all wrong, that it cannot have possibly transpired as Beyle/Stendhal claims; he does not, however, deny the worth of the experience. The story, he says, “is true, not least because we want it, we need it to be true.” Thus too we need to believe when we are told that death is not to be feared, in which instance it’s harder to accept the convenient lie.
The fraught question of the ephemeral nature of the novelist’s output and the unreliability of memory pops up throughout the book. Memory, Barnes says, begins to seem “less and less distinguishable” from the imagination as age sets in. The novelist—he cites Ford Madox Ford, who was known for his storytelling—“could be a mighty liar, and a mighty truth-teller, at the same time, and in the same sentence.” But does any of it endure? For a few generations perhaps, but seldom longer. Towards the end of the book Barnes describes a visit to Renard’s grave in the village of Chitry-les-Mines, which shows no signs of frequent visitations. “Is there anything sadder than an unvisited grave?” he asks, knowing full well that in time every grave is unvisited.
I liked this book. Barnes is at times too clever for his own good, but he is always intelligent, always provocative, and sometimes moving as he defends his fear of death and his lack of belief in an afterlife as perfectly rational if not inevitable for a thinking person. I share many of his views and the night I finished the book just before falling asleep I had a most unpleasant dream, the details of which soon faded, but from which I awoke speaking the words, “I have nowhere to go.” Having initially remembered them as “I want to get out of here,” upon reflection I realized I was wrong. It seems obvious now that my terror was a response to Barnes’s assertion that we die only to go nowhere.

Liars, Rogues and Thieves

Company of Liars by Karen Maitland—a specialist in psycholinguistics, whatever that may be—is a chilling account of a group of strangers forced to flee together from the ravages of the Black Plague that struck England in 1348. Advertised as a reinterpretation of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, it has little in common with that great chronicle other than being structured as a journey during which some of the travelers tell their tales. In this instance, however, the tales are primarily a fictional device for filling in their backgrounds. That said, the novel is a fascinating narrative of what the arrival of the plague on England’s shores signified. A large portion of the population died and abject fear took over the country. Maitland creates a believable portrait of life in a country still largely rural in nature that does not make one long for the past, which she portrays as brutal, diseased and filthy. The novel puts paid to the myth of the medieval world as a place of minstrels, castles and Christmas feasts. Although it uses some of the same devices, Company of Liars is head and shoulders above the usual “medieval world come to life” novel.
The travellers’ tale is told by Camelot, a seller of relics who ends up leading the disparate group of pilgrims, most of whom either dislike or distrust each other, as they wend their way across England, the plague always on their heels or even ahead of them, always forcing them to rethink their route. His fellow travelers include a young couple expecting a baby, two Italian musicians, a young man with a swan’s wing for an arm, and a distinctly unsettling very blond little girl with a nasty habit of knowing what is about to occur, usually something terrible, usually death. Every one of these refugees from the mainstream has a secret to keep, all of which are divulged in time. Many of them come to a bad end so all in all it’s a grim tale, but very readable. Camelot’s secret is told only at the end, and is the least convincing in that it seems like too handy an end to the novel’s journey, a journey which, like Chaucer’s before it mimics man’s progress through life. A pilgrimage is a very handy metaphor around which to build a novel and Maitland makes good use of it.

Appointment in Eastwick

John Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick has its comic moments but the shadow of the grim reaper hangs over it. “We all have ends. The heart beats time. Time beats us,” notes one of the widows bleakly and as it turns out, prophetically. Jane is one of the three of women whose history continues after the long hiatus since Updike introduced them in The Witches of Eastwick (1984). Her story ends this time around, but Sukie and Alexandra live on. At the novel’s end the narrative voice—the collective voice of Eastwick, the chorus as it were—primly rejoices that the three “unholy wantons” have once again left. It regrets, however, that they seem to have shed the guilt of their former sins—recounted in the first novel—“as casually as when they shed their clothes.” Yet time beats for the two survivors just as surely as it did for Jane, and in the face of death, what does a little guilt matter—we’re all guilty of something. The nature of the women’s’ witch hood—were they really witches and what did Updike mean by it?—that hung over the first novel seems a side issue this time. Like the frightened man in Somerset Maugham’s re-telling of the tale of the servant who flees to Samarra to avoid death only to find him there, these three women return to Eastwick not only to re-live their past, but to prolong their lives by re-discovering their younger selves. In a sense they do find the past, or the fragments of it that exist in the rather sad New England village that Eastwick has become, but it fails to revive them.
As always, Updike writes like an angel yet there were moments when my attention wandered. In the first part of the novel the women do some traveling, including to Egypt and China. The sections read as if Updike had dug out his old itineraries and incorporated his characters into them—I’ve been both places and I could almost have done the same myself. I could not, however, have re-created tired old Eastwick as he does, or the scene in which the three attempt to summon up their supernatural powers once again, complete with a circle dribbled onto the carpet with dishwasher soap. Nor could I have near to creating the immanence of death that pervades the novel—the sudden sharp reminders that this is Updike’s subject. As one of the women says, “Weddings and funerals. Graduations and divorces. Endings. Ceremonies get us through. They’re like blindfolds for people being shot by a firing squad.” That’s us, dear readers, standing in front of the firing squad with our eyes tight shut.