Demanding Novels
My post about Henry Perowne’s Fish-Stew (as I said before, I liked the dish, but I should now add, because Perowne’s mother is afflicted with Alzheimer’s, he should be eating more curry instead) has elicited several email queries regarding the book itself. What do I think of Saturday? Is it a dish worth consuming?
Well, as it happens, I was just reading the Ron Liddle article (thanks, Elegant Variation) that uses John Banville to rubbish Saturday as an example of fiction that neither enthrals nor informs:
Just recently, the Irish writer John Banville put his finger on the problem with, particularly, the English modern novel. Reviewing Ian McEwan’s Saturday, he berated the western “tendency towards mellowness”. He added: “Are we in the West so shaken in our sense of ourselves and our culture, are we so disablingly terrified in the face of various fanaticisms which threaten us that we can allow ourselves to be persuaded and comforted by such a self-satisfied and in many ways ridiculous novel as this?” And you have to say, he has a point. For all its critical acclaim, is McEwan’s novel any less shallow and ridiculous than Bridget Jones’s Diary or the latest Nick Hornby? Writers should aim for more than what the audience asks for, was Banville’s point. Surprisingly, though, he did not seem to notice that those novels that do exceed the expectations of the audience begin by doing so in the way in which they are written, rather than in the subject matter.
If you follow the link to Liddle’s piece you’ll find that his principal gripe is against John Updike, and I think he is wrong in clubbing together Updike’s Terrorist and McEwan’s Saturday. The implausibilities of Updike’s novel, chief among them his inability to create a convincing terrorist, share very little with the dissatisfactions that might arise from a critical reading of McEwan’s well-crafted novel, his protagonist’s clinical view of the world and its problems quite congruent with what have been the writer’s identifying marks as someone looking in from the outside.
But I’m more hospitable to Liddle’s advocacy of difficult novels, especially novels that make demands on our imagination. I think that too often we settle for a lazy realism. Liddle’s sense that the more demanding novels are unconventional not only in their subjects but also their form and language is exactly right. I’m in the middle of Raj Kamal Jha’s Fireproof right now and feel that in a milieu where everything has become meaningless–life, love, the Constitution–the reader is forced to enter a terrifying world of hyperarticulate, emotional narrative. The prose is full of symbolic violence, something that you also see in McEwan. There is another thing. Jha’s sense of terror comes from not simply recording what is horrible or brutal out there in the street; from page 12 or so, I felt that the writer was looking also at the terror inside his own soul.
