The Modern Library (19 page)

The Balkan Trilogy recounts in fictional form Olivia Manning’s Second World War experiences as the young bride of a British Council lecturer, first in Romania, then in Greece and finally in Egypt, moving always away from the advancing German army. Harriet Pringle, Manning’s alter ego, lives in cities where revolution, imprisonment and persecution of the Jews are omnipresent, while expatriates and a motley crew of other riffraff pursue the last remaining restaurant in which horse is not served, or finagle money or favours to enable them to survive one more day.

Harriet, a young woman never loved in childhood and about to repeat the experience with her infuriating husband Guy, is a discerning recorder of the cruelties and fragilities of men in pursuit of power, of whatever kind. A parade of eccentrics, led by the seedy emigre Yakomov, the preposterous Lord Pinkrose, the potty Misses Twocurry, alternate with personal lives from which the plangent notes of private love and grief are never absent. Reading The Balkan Trilogy, one of the finest accounts of the impact of war on Europe and on its people, is like reading Jane Austen on a broader canvas, in another time, another place.

The ghost of
David Copperfield
hovers over this beautiful novel, its evocation of childhood loss – of a father, of a mother, of a friend – is one of the classic accounts of being a motherless boy: ‘Other children could have borne it. My older brother did. I couldn’t.’

Set in a small farming community in Illinois, the narrator, now an elderly man, recalls his childhood and the influenza which suddenly removed his mother when he was ten. With her death, trust disappears – the world becomes a void through which he tiptoes with caution and he moves his muted gaze to tell the story of another gentle boy, Cletus Smith, his only friend. Cletus’ mother is unfaithful; Cletus’ father commits murder.

This is the story of two boys who live undefended in an adult world where nothing is said, but everything happens. The passions of insignificant and modest people, precisely placed amongst the animals, milking sheds and flat landscape of the plains, reach Shakespearean heights in Maxwell’s exquisite prose. As Maxwell languorously recalls the ‘strange and unlikely things washed up on the shore of time’ he gives us an elegy to memory which calls forth the vast legacy of seemingly insignificant human suffering.

‘There is a woman at the gate who wants to see you, Sahib.’ In 
A River Sutra
, she is sure to tell a story. A sutra is a thread or string, but also a literary form; in Gita Mehta’s hands a bright necklace which flashes with the religions, philosophies and fables of India.

There are many threads in this necklace. The connecting one is the experiences of a retired bureaucrat, who late in life comes to manage a government resthouse along the banks of the River Narmada, holiest of Indian rivers. This river is a place of pilgrimage, to which come ascetics, minstrels, archaeologists, bandits,
musicians
, refugees. The tales they tell the bureaucrat are sometimes ecstatic, sometimes, like Mehta’s finest achievement here, ‘The Teacher’s Story’, heartbreaking. Piercing each narrative, always, is the question: where does wisdom lie? In the thousand answers, one message is clear: it can only come through experience, and through some experience of love.

Gita Mehta uses the images and mysticism of India to dazzling effect, harmonizing sounds of landscape, animals and music, river and earth. But though these stories draw much from the history and mythology of India, they resonate with the flamboyant presence of modern India too. Mehta has used traditional Indian narratives in an entirely new and muscular way in this exquisite novel.

Dickens – Tolstoy – Balzac – Zola: Rohinton Mistry writes in this tradition. The vastness of India and the condition of its people are his subjects, but his genius lies in his exact observation, which brings to life every atom of his characters’ experiences, so that we live and breathe with them, laugh when they laugh, suffer as they do.

It is the 1970s, and four people, two Hindu, two Parsi, come together in a dingy Bombay flat. Ishvar and Omprakash are tailors, Untouchables; Dina, their employer, is a widow struggling for financial independence as a seamstress. Her lodger Maneck is a student of ‘refrigeration and air-conditioning’. Mistry retraces the background of each, placing the incidents of their insignificant lives against the majestic sweep of Indian history. This is Mrs Gandhi’s India, with its vicious Emergency laws bringing forced sterilization, labour camps, thuggery and persecution. Mistry’s energetic realism and command of comic nuance capture the long-suffering citizens of India in all their variety and stoic endurance. They burst off the page, making you laugh, weep and rail against the fates.

A Fine Balance
is a magnificent novel, beautifully crafted, a political novel which is also the work of an inspiring imagination. Despite its lyrical despair it is full of an exuberance and humanity that fix in the mind and heart a sense of wonder and excitement.

In 1975 Indonesia invaded the Portuguese colony of East Timor, half an inch above Australia on the map. The USA wanted East Timor’s deep-water channels for their nuclear submarines, so allowed Indonesia to annex East Timor: one in three East Timorese died in the slaughter that followed.

Timothy Mo changed names, places, nationalities in this stirring fictional testament to the East Timor resistance fighters, but the connection between fact and fiction has become even stronger with time.

Adolph Ng, an outsider on the island, is a homosexual Chinese hotelier, and his is the knowing voice we hear. Ng’s account of the invasion and the years with the freedom fighters in the hills vibrates with crazed brutality, starvation, disease and the gruesome sights which were their daily fare. But resistance is only the backdrop to the humour and humanity that dominate this novel; Adolph is a wry fellow, and as he records the shifting allegiances of the islanders he produces that rarity – a vivid, funny novel about people who fight without hope: not heroes, ‘just ordinary people asked
extraordinary
things in terrible circumstances’.

Mo is a detached yet incisive chronicler of the worst aspects of Empire; in this furiously unsentimental novel about a forgotten war he reveals, with sympathy and political acumen, the real meaning of nobility: courage, exercised when it can achieve nothing.

Brian Moore had three phases. In his first incarnation, he was an Irish novelist.
Judith Hearne
, 1955 (USA:
The Lonely Passion of
Judith Hearne
, 1956), is probably his best from this period. In his second coming, he wrote intense novels about faith and morals, obsessions (
The Doctor’s Wife
, 1976, is particularly brilliant) and history. In his third phase, he wrote terse novels about
contemporary
political crises. Always, he was preoccupied by the conflicts surrounding loyalty and belief, and increasingly, he strove for a style which is almost neutral, without flourishes.

Black Robe
is set in seventeenth-century Canada. Father
Laforgue
, a Jesuit, has come to the remote and hostile territory to convert the heathens. The novel dramatizes the conflict between his certainties and the beliefs of the natives, which are presented with immense conviction. The narrative is powerful and emotional, and the violence in the book is shocking, more graphic than anything in Cormac McCarthy. The landscape, the dark forest, the constant menace, the untamed world, are wonderfully evoked. This is Moore’s darkest book and most haunting; his account of the Jesuits’ colonial enterprise, which echoes other moments in the history of the building of empires, is gripping and deeply disturbing.

The hero of this novel calls himself variously Sean or Ian, seeming unable to make up his mind between the Irish and Scots version of his name, a fitting bafflement for a modern Australian male, floating in beer and fornication yet emitting muffled longings to be otherwise.

About to become forty, a drinking, writing man addicted to women, he is partial to sluts. His grandmother made a fortune being a whore in the caves of Katoomba, and the seventeen-
year-old
girl he truly loves has departed to London to find herself by becoming a call-girl. His ex-wife Robyn is about to die of cancer. Among the high points of the novel are Robyn’s first letters to him; everything that is lost in middle age is plaintively rendered in the naive voice of this young girl. Then there is Belle, one of those sluts who get the blues, and the invaluable seventy-year-old Edith with whom he travels to conferences in Vienna and Israel.

This is a finely crafted work, cleverly moving back and forth through time, written in rueful, mocking prose. Moorhouse’s artistic achievement is to give his hero a life that seems casual, but this man on the loose is in fact ligatured to women, and the novel beats with a particular pulse of desperation which is both touching and exhilarating.

‘For a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.’ This is Paul D., whom Sethe, our heroine, has known in slavery. He has not seen her for eighteen years, and now he has come to visit her when her husband has disappeared, her mother-in-law is dead and her two sons have left, her house is haunted by her dead baby daughter, and she is living alone with her daughter Denver. It is 1873 in Ohio. Sethe is torn with memories of the dreadful past, the petty cruelties of being a slave, and then the particular viciousness of certain events which she finds almost impossible to contemplate, and yet cannot forget.

The novel’s strength comes from its obsession with the power and the problems of love between people who are enslaved and savagely exploited; there is an extraordinary skill in the way the narrative goes back over events of the past while focusing also on the domestic minutiae, small moments of tension, the play of light, the interior of the house, the constant efforts to survive the catastrophe which haunts the novel and indeed haunts the reader. The figure of the mother-in-law Baby Suggs, who has been bought out of slavery by her son, is especially memorable and sad; the idea of the house being haunted by the dead child is presented calmly and with authority and becomes immensely credible.