The Modern Library (27 page)

‘Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life,’ writes William Trevor. A splendid evoker of such bits and pieces, his novels are sometimes set in England, sometimes in Ireland, but always, in ironic, simple prose, he delves into the iniquities and failures and necessary forgiveness which constitute our lives.

Mary Louise Dallon, his heroine, lives outside a small Irish town, a daughter of one of its few Protestant families. Suitable men to marry are thin upon the ground, and when she marries Elmer Quarry, a bachelor twice her age and owner of the town’s drapery shop, she confronts his sexual inadequacies and his two sisters’ viperous natures with an innocence which is fatal. Things go from worse to worst when Mary Louise meets her cousin Robert again, and childhood love re-emerges, taking up every inch of Mary Louise’s heart. He reads her Turgenev; they look for herons. Matters resolve themselves by means of rat poison, fishcakes, toy soldiers and homes for the insane. William Trevor is a writer in the finest tradition; one with particular sensitivity for people who cannot manage as others do. His exquisite style uses laughter and pity in classic contemplations of the tidal dramas human flesh is heir to.

‘I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age,’ the novel begins. But on the death of his palm-wine tapster, our narrator, who is not satisfied, saying that ‘the whole people who had died in this world did not go to heaven directly, but they were living in one place somewhere in the world.’ He decides to travel in search of his palm-wine tapster in the world between heaven and earth. The novel is the story of his fantastic adventures. It reads like a folk tale, part of an oral tradition; it is told simply, and the style is artless and increasingly effective. In every paragraph a new monster or threat appears, or a new journey, or a new strange vision; there is constant metamorphosis. He finds a wife along the way; the tone is wide-eyed, innocent, even-handed. Most of his escapades are from a world of nightmare and unconscious dread; both Jung and Freud would have had a field day with this book. What distinguishes it is the quality of its imaginative energy, its refusal to settle for a single story or a single meaning. The sense of the dead and the living and the half-dead sharing this strange world is very powerful and the use of the storyteller’s art and the sheer verve of the narrative make this one of the best African novels to appear over the past fifty years.

Maggie Moran, wife to Ira for twenty-eight years, is a ‘whiffle-head’, one of those women who tell a perfect stranger the entire story of their life, with attendant husband and children standing by, rigid with embarrassment.
Breathing Lessons
tells the story of
twenty-four
hours in the life of the sublime Maggie, Ira and their two disappointing children, Jesse and Daisy: ‘Mom? Was there a certain conscious point in your life when you decided to settle for being ordinary?’

Maggie pursues happiness, indeed insists upon it. As they take a trip to the funeral of the husband of Maggie’s best friend Sabrina (where Maggie sings ‘Love is a Many Splendoured Thing’, one of Anne Tyler’s unsurpassed virtuoso performances), dreams end in disaster, but real life taps Maggie buoyantly on the shoulder.

Anne Tyler’s novels chronicle with intricate delicacy the scratchy habits of domestic life; her affectionate disembowellings of marital and family arrangements send out simultaneous signals of anguish and humour, always captured in small details, delicately inserted, almost thrown away. Baffled but hopeful, Tyler people are in total command of pathos and humour, and, using the author’s greatest gift, they keep the reader teetering on the edge of laughter – the out-loud kind, and the flickering kind – producing a constant humming impatience for the next page.

These four novels tell the story of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, American male. We first meet him aged twenty-six, an ex-basketball player married to Janice whom he abandons, pregnant, for Ruth. Rabbit’s women – his wife, his mom, his mother-in-law, his sister, his daughter-in-law and his varied mistresses and encounters are alive in every varicose vein, as is Rabbit’s organ itself which takes on a life of its own, leading Rabbit to infidelities and betrayals, always rising and falling, jiggling around, no peace to be had at all. Life with Janice under these circumstances always remains complex and reflects the times – the Vietnam War, race relations, a society in turmoil on all fronts. The misdemeanours of Rabbit and Janice’s son Nelson echo everything that has gone before, and as their lives progress, sex overapplied and misused becomes a mordant, always explicit, analogy for the disintegration of the United States under a barrage of drugs, wars, junk food and TV; eerily predicting too, Clintonesque adventures to come.

Updike is an irresistibly funny writer with a deceptively easy style. His sense of comedy and his quirky philosophical
contemplations
flash through this quartet, a contemporary American classic. Each novel can be read separately, but read them all; each one seems even better than the one before.

Ruth Rendell writes under two names, her own and that of Barbara Vine. The Rendell novels are, generally, detective novels centring on Chief Inspector Wexford and the fictional southern English town of Kings Markham, whilst those written under the name of Barbara Vine are psychological novels in the manner of Dickens or Wilkie Collins. To start on her detective novels, read
From Doon with
Death
(1964), a Rendell classic. And so too is
A Dark-Adapted Eye,
her first Barbara Vine novel. Set in Suffolk, mostly in the 1950s, this story of the Longley women, Vera and Eden, uses the things that English gentlewomen do – embroidery, baking, keeping a spotless house, making do and behaving as women should – as a foil for what they also do in secrecy, in pursuit of power. This story of love and murder between sisters has such impact that the very trees in the Suffolk lanes arch up to warn of the damage wreaked, particularly on their menfolk, by women such as these, tight-laced in snobbery, fighting for life within rigid social rules.

There is more to this wily novel than meets the eye. The Longley clan always speak in ‘half-shades and half-truths’ and thus Barbara Vine ends this novel … the other half of the truth being there for us to find out if we can.

‘Take off they pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me.’ This is the voice of Celie, who writes most of the letters in this novel. Her voice is vivid and strong, her intelligence is sharp. Although the novel is set in the American Deep South, whites appear in the book as a sort of afterthought; the book is more concerned with the relationships between black men and women, between Celie and her stepfather (who is the father of her children), between Celie and her wastrel husband, between Celie’s stepson Harpo and his wonderful wife Sophie and his second wife Squeak. These relationships are all fraught and difficult, if also various and immensely interesting, in sharp contrast to the relationships between the women, especially that between Celie and the singer Shrug, whom her husband loves and brings home and who eventually rescues Celie, which is tender and complex and sexual (it is clear from very early in the book that Celie is gay).

The other letter-writer in the book is Celie’s sister Nettie, the clever one in the family, who has escaped and gone to Africa and whose letters have been withheld by Celie’s husband. This relationship, too, is full of tenderness, love and warmth. Alice Walker risks a great deal with Celie’s voice – her spelling, for example, is often wildly inaccurate and there is an innocence about her observations which plays against her general shrewdness – but succeeds in creating one of the most memorable characters in contemporary American fiction.

There is no one quite like Sylvia Townsend Warner. She has her own way of looking at the world and a breadth of vision as open as the East Anglian sea and sky she writes about here.

In the early nineteenth century, Anchor House in Loseby, Norfolk, is the home of John Barnard, a house made of the dark flint of the area, as is the soul of the man himself. A man of lofty morality, he fears ‘nothing but God’, an emotion which sours his life and that of his family – wife Julia, sipping rum all day, and wimpish children, the Wilberforces and Euphemias of the time. But then there is his pretty daughter Mary, a serio-comic creation of the first order, who raises the pursuit of self-interest to a high art. Around them bustle those instigators of teas, dinners, walks, visits, attendances at church – not to mention the surprising fishermen of the village: inventive disturbers of all of those who live behind the sharp walls of the House of Flint.

Warner is not a romantic: she has a keen eye for malevolence and other flaws of the soul, yet she absorbs us totally in the personalities and daily concerns of her characters, unheroic though they be. Every novel Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote was entirely different from its predecessor in subject, period and story, but all of them are the work of a great English stylist, and all are diverting, funny and very, very clever. This little-known novel is a lost treasure.

This is a beautifully structured and deeply melancholy account of England and the Second World War, which also contains moments and scenes of pure hilarity. It is written in a spirit of great tenderness and tolerance and a sort of humility. Guy Crouchback is the scion of one of the great English recusant families now down on its luck. He lives alone in a castle in Italy. His wife, the irrepressible Virginia – a figure straight out of Waugh’s earlier fiction – has left him, marries twice more, and pops up throughout the trilogy to humiliate him. The first novel opens at the outbreak of war when Guy, at the age of thirty-five, returns to England and joins up. The trilogy then deals with his sensations and
experiences
. He is sensitive, watchful, loyal, good-humoured and a devout Catholic, but he is also distant, awkward, slightly priggish and self-centred. His character works superbly in the books because his loneliness and sadness are absorbed by the war, and his personality undergoes many tests and changes – he sees action in Africa, Egypt, Crete and Italy. The novels move fast in a series of short scenes; Waugh’s comic skills are used with great effect, especially in minor characters and the whole business of military operations and regulations. Guy’s father, retired now, living in a hotel by the sea, is one of the miraculous creations in the books.