Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (155 page)

Big as his sales are, King’s inferiority complex is bigger. He has a burning sense of ‘injustice’ – against himself. He despises ‘smarmy’ literary critics but yearns for their attention. The main thrust of his NBA speech was
Carrie
-style payback. They hadn’t emptied a bucket of pig’s blood over his head, but the literary establishment was guilty of ‘tokenism’ – treating him like a house Negro with their confounded ‘lifetime award’. What did they know of his life? The literary establishment declined to be cowed by some hack, who had struck it rich with a reading public even less
cultivated than himself. Harold Bloom, who is to literary criticism what Einstein was to physics, declared that the NBA’s decision to give an award to King was ‘another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I’ve described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.’

He deserves better than Harold Bloom. What sets King apart from other super-selling authors is his constant straining against the limitations of genre. Works like
Gerald’s Game
(1992; a wife is victimised by an S&M loving husband),
Rose Madder
(1995; a wife goes on the run from a sadistic husband), and
Dolores Clai-borne
(1992; a battered wife is driven to homicide) are, probably, husbandly homage to the admirable Tabitha. But they also indicate King’s willingness to write against the grain of his branded product. Ever restless, King revived the Dickensian novel in numbers, issuing
The Green Mile
(1996) in serial instalments. Less successfully, he had a stab at the e-novel, with
Riding the Bullet
and
The Plant
. Together with Peter Straub, King has pulled off, with
The Talisman
(1984) and
Black House
(1989), that rarest of literary achievements, the tandem-authored novel that is, at least, half decent.

Few novelists have been as graphic about the trials of authorship.
The Shining
(1977) is, on one level, about the problem of writing with a wife and child distracting you (why not chop them up?). In
Misery
, the writer is – as King must often feel – in bondage to his number one fan. King’s fear of unconsciously plagiarising is dramatised in
Secret Window, Secret Garden
(1990). In
The Dark Half
(1989), the novelist hero is bifurcated into a ‘class’ novelist and a ‘hack’ – King’s own agonising dualism.
Bag of Bones
(1998) is a fantasy about writer’s block: few writers have allegorised their professional plight as imaginatively as King. As the many websites testify, Stephen King stimulates what can only be called cultism among his more devoted followers – those who could earnestly discuss for hours whether ‘Ka’ turns clockwise or anti-clockwise. Running through his work is the vision of a Manichaean struggle between the powers of light (almost always represented by a child) and the powers of darkness – variously incarnated as Randall Flagg, Walter o’Dim, the Fisherman, the Man in Black or – latterly – the Crimson King. King’s dualistic cosmos is most starkly portrayed in
The Stand
(1978). After a global epidemic, the world is stripped down to two camps; Armageddon and apocalypse ensue. Who wins the day is enigmatic.

King’s philosophy of bestsellerdom, ruefully expressed over the years, is that the money is nice, the adulation is nice, but he yearns for an ordinary man’s privacy – the privilege, for example, of going to a Red Sox game and not being recognised. Ever
since his horrific accident, when he was run down walking along the high road in Maine in June 1999, there was something missing from King’s fiction. He noted it himself, in typically wry fashion: ‘I watched
Titanic
when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.’

I’m not a guru or a sage. I’m a storyteller. The only times I get disturbed is when I find people who seem to be taking this too seriously.

When it came out in mid-October 2009, Robert Jordan’s posthumous
A Memory of Light
(completed by another hand) shot to the top of the hardback American bestseller list. Jordan’s publishers, Tor Books, were unsurprised. They had authorised a first print run of a million copies on the basis of the novel’s thirteen predecessors in
The Wheel of Time
cycle.
A Memory of Light
caters to hard-core initiates of fantasy fiction. If you have to ask who Robert Jordan is, you’ll probably never know or care to find out. According to Amazon, those who like this book also go for the sword, sorcery and pseudo-religious sagas of George R. R. Martin, Terry Goodkind, Raymond E. Feist, Robin Hobb and Fritz Leiber – names which will ring few bells with the general reader, but all of whom have their faithful bands of devotees.

Jordan (real name James Oliver Rigney Jr) was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and was proudly Southern his whole life. An older brother introduced him to the works of Jules Verne (at four years old, Jordan claimed), which left an indelible impression. It was not, in his early manhood, destined to be a literary life. He served two tours in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner, winning a chest full of medals (most honourably the Distinguished Flying Cross, for gallantry under fire). On being discharged he took a degree in physics at the Citadel, the military academy in South Carolina, and then he was assigned to the US Navy, as a nuclear engineer. Jordan did not begin writing seriously until 1977. ‘From the age of five I intended to write, one day. When I had established myself in a more stable profession. Then I had an accident that resulted in a month’s stay in the hospital, during which I almost died, and I decided life was too short to wait on “one day”. So I started writing.’

It came easily to him. Under the pseudonym ‘Reagan O’Neal’, he turned out
a series of pirate romances set in mid-eighteenth-century Charleston. His career as an author was assisted by his wife, Harriet McDougal, his editor at Tor Books. The couple lived in a 1797 Charleston mansion, of which Jordan was inordinately proud. As his skills developed he moved on from swashbuckling to Westerns, then – most successfully – to sword and sorcery. He did not, he later attested, ever want to write about Vietnam – or anything even allegorically connected with that horror. Fiction was escape; it may even have been therapy.

Jordan is credited with seven Conan novels between 1982 and 1984, beginning with
Conan the Invincible
and ending with
Conan the Victorious
(see Robert E. Howard for the origin of the Barbarian hero). On the American version of
Desert Island Discs
, Jordan chose his trusty M16 rifle as one of the three objects he would take with him. Like dog-owners, authors, it seems, come to resemble their heroes.

The first in the ‘WoT’ series,
The Eye of the World
, came out in 1990. Like Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry Jenkins’s bestselling
Left Behind
series – a fictionalised Book of Revelation – Jordan aimed to complete his series in twelve volumes (in the writing, it extended to fourteen). Both series concluded with versions of Armageddon, the final battle.

Despite the parallels, it is doubtful that their readerships overlap. Jordan casts his net beyond the evangelical belief system of LaHaye and Jenkins deep into heathenish hinterlands. It’s easy to read his fantasy as an allegory of current, real-world American anxieties. It was observed that sales of Jordan’s series jumped after 9/11.

It is impossible to summarise, with any lucidity, the swirling plots of the ‘WoT’ saga. One of Jordan’s devotional websites makes a gallant stab at doing so for the first in the series:

A crazed Lews Therin Telamon wanders through the wreckage of his palace, not seeing the corpses of his wife and children. A man named Elan Morin Tedronai appears to kill him, but is angered to realize that Lews Therin is too insane to recognize him, and heals him (painfully) using the Dark One’s power. Returned to sanity, Lews Therin sees the dead body of his wife Ilyena and begins sobbing uncontrollably. Tedronai offers to bring her back from the dead if Lews Therin will serve the Dark One.

It gets more complicated over the next fourteen volumes – and cosmic in its time and space frames:

‘Ten years! You pitiful fool! This war has not lasted ten years, but since the beginning of time. You and I have fought a thousand battles with the turning of the Wheel, a thousand times a thousand, and we will fight until time dies and the Shadow is triumphant!’

In book-trade terms, ‘WoT’ (as ‘WoT maniacs’ like to call it) is a prime example of ‘franchise fiction’ – spinning off, profitably, into computer games, comics and sponsored competitions. Later titles were promoted by ‘Internet Hunts’, in which experts could navigate twelve riddling websites to win their prize. There is also a ‘theoryland’ website devoted to exegesis of the finer points of Jordanology.

In early 2006, Jordan announced on his Dragonmount blog that he was suffering from cardiac amyloidosis, that it was fatal, and that he would not live more than four years – if that. He stated, gallantly, that he would keep writing to the end and that he would fight the disease. New treatments for Jordan’s rare ailment proved unavailing and he died a few months later. His huge collection of knives and swords was sold on eBay, including such favourites as the Nepalese Kukuri, the Japanese Katana, the Cold Steel Magnum Tanto and an Applegate-Fairbairn fighter. His cycle was completed by a disciple.

Sometimes I think I’ll never quite escape my early reputation.

Ian McEwan was born in 1948, a dreary year, in that dreariest of garrison towns, Aldershot. His father, David, was a senior NCO, later an officer, in the British Army. A pen portrait of him is given as a motorbike dispatch rider in
Atonement
, in the Dunkirk section. He was, his son recalls, ‘very handsome, erect, with a dangerous look about him. A hard-drinking man, quite terrifying. He was a great stickler for all the spit and polish of traditional army life, and at the same time he adored me as I grew older.’ A Glaswegian, David McEwan lied about his age to sign up in 1933 (an even drearier year than 1948) to escape the dole and see the world. Both he and his mother, McEwan recalls, ‘were rather frightened of him’. She was a fourteen-year-old school leaver who had gone into service; he was a child of the post-war ‘bulge’ – as significant, demographically, as being an Indian midnight’s child. It meant, after some time in postings abroad, a good boarding school education, while his parents continued to follow the pipe and drum across the shrinking Empire.

Vivid flashes of McEwan’s childhood found in the fourth chapter of
The Child in Time
(1987) – his father, for example, slathering Brylcreem on his son’s pomaded,
then short back and sides, sticks in the mind. As an adult, while he still had it, McEwan’s hair would run very wild. At school he read widely, was ‘rather lonely’, and toyed with science A-levels before being redirected to literature by a charismatic teacher. L. P. Hartley’s
The Go-Between
is cited as lastingly influential and could, one suspects, furnish an interesting Ph.D. on the topic of juvenile treachery – a favourite theme of both novelists. On leaving school, McEwan went to Sussex, one of the ‘new’ 1960s universities built to accommodate the ‘bulge’ and the previously excluded cohort liberated into higher education by the 1944 Education Act. The syllabus was flexible and cross-disciplinary. It suited him well. The boundary between science and humanities has never been an insurmountable obstacle for Ian McEwan.

He marks out 1970 as a turning point. He had heard something about a new MA course at another new university, East Anglia. It was the first creative writing course in the country, founded by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson. As McEwan recalls, ‘I phoned the university and amazingly got straight through to Malcolm Bradbury. He said, Oh, the fiction part has been dropped because nobody has applied. This was the first year of the program. And I said, Well, what if I apply? He said, Come up and talk to us.’ It was an ideal nursery for the young would-be writer. His first instinct, under Bradbury’s cosmopolitan influence, was to move away from the pervasive ‘greyness’ of English fiction towards what was being done in America. In this frame of mind he composed ultra-gothic short stories which, while he was still a student, were picked up by little magazines in the US and the UK. Connection with Ian Hamilton’s
New Review
brought him into social contact with other young writers in Hamilton’s merry Soho stable: Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Clive James. He saw himself as Aesop’s country mouse come up to town. He was still in his early twenties and very much on his way.

After UEA, McEwan dropped out to do the hippy thing, wandering as far afield as Afghanistan. He was not, one suspects, smoking Woodbines (his early characters, such as the couple in
The Comfort of Strangers
(1981), enjoy a relaxing joint after the day’s business. Thirty years later, in
Saturday
(2005), it’s fine wine for the McEwan hero – precisely vintage-checked). He had inherited his father’s work ethic and after six month’s hippydom he dropped back into a full-time career in writing. Jonathan Cape, under Tom Maschler, the dominant patron of up-and-coming novelists, took on his first two collections of short stories,
First Love, Last Rites
(1975) and
In Between the Sheets
(1978). Abused children feature centrally in these collections. The opening story of the first volume, ‘Homemade’, for example, climaxes on an elder sibling complacently raping his young sister. It ends: