Odd Jobs (86 page)

One would feel more diffident in expressing reservations about this novel’s treatment of a topic so momentous and heartfelt had not Mr. Kiely, in the short story “Proxopera” (1979), already handled it consummately. In that fifty-page story, which concludes
The State of Ireland
and is dedicated “In Memory of the Innocent Dead,” the hero, Granda Binchey, like Mervyn a teacher with a mind full of quotations, is, unlike him, a lifelong resident of his tormented village and has achieved all his ambitions there. Also unlike him, he is the protagonist of a dramatic action: with his son, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren held hostage, the elder Binchey is forced to drive a car laden with a time bomb into the heart of town. This action, shown entirely through the old man’s fluctuating observations and resolves, better conveys the agony of Northern Ireland than all the news items, horrific and deplorable though they are, that are strung on the crooked line of Mervyn’s boozy peregrinations. At its most effective,
Nothing Happens in Carmincross
shocks us as a newspaper does: this happens out there. In “Proxopera,” it happens within us, as fiction makes things happen. Compared with the circumstantial, suspenseful flight of the shorter work, the novel rushes ponderously about, feathered in quotations and wildly glowing, like an angel beating its wings but not quite getting off the ground. In this failure to rise we feel the heaviness of its theme.

O
N THE
B
LACK
H
ILL
, by Bruce Chatwin. 249 pp. Viking, 1983.

Bruce Chatwin, an Englishman who worked some years for Sotheby & Company, as auctioneer and director of the Impressionist department, and who then became a traveller into such outré lands as Patagonia, writes a clipped, lapidary prose that compresses worlds into pages.
In Patagonia
, an account of his wanderings in southern Argentina, won high praise five years ago for its witty obliquity, suavely economical descriptions, wealth of curious historical and paleontological data, and perky word portraits of the drunken gauchos and homesick Scotsmen he encountered in this vast, raw region. The one virtue
In Patagonia
did not conspicuously possess was momentum; the traveller so deliberately minimized his personality and obscured his motives that the prose seemed to move on ghostly legs of its own, snacking on scenery and bits of dialogue where it pleased, and hopping about so airily between past and present, between experienced incident and researched document, that the exotic reality was half eclipsed by the willful manners of the invisible guide. Mr. Chatwin writes in such short paragraphs that he seems to be constantly interrupting himself. His narratives must be savored in short takes, like collections of short stories. His third book and second novel,
On the Black Hill
, also skips, scintillatingly, across a vast terrain—a stretch of time: the eighty years that the Jones twins, Lewis and Benjamin, have lived in Radnorshire, a rural county of Wales bordering that of Hereford, in England.

Amos Jones, the twins’ father, is a red-haired Welshman, the son of a “garrulous old cider-drinker, known round the pubs of Radnorshire as Sam the Waggon.” Their mother, Amos’s second wife, was Mary Latimer, the only child of “the Reverend Latimer, an Old Testament scholar, who had retired from mission work in India and settled in this remote hill parish to be alone with his daughter and his books.” This clergyman drowns one day in a peat bog (the first of many violent deaths that stud Mr. Chatwin’s bucolic chronicle), and, Amos having been smitten by the sight of Mary in church, a courtship ensues which overcomes their awkward differences of education, class, and race—for she is English, or as they say in Wales “Saxon.” They marry in the year 1899 and lease, with
money realized from the sale of some of her father’s books, a farm named The Vision, where “in 1737 an ailing girl called Alice Morgan saw the Virgin hovering over a patch of rhubarb, and ran back to the kitchen, cured.” Mary Jones is pregnant “by the time of the first frosts,” and twin boys are born in August of the new century. The boys never leave, for long, The Vision. Two global wars rumble by at a distance, and new machinery enters the world, from airplanes and automobiles to video games, but the important events of the twins’ lives are strictly local, if not familial—the deaths of their grandparents, the birth and eventual flight of their sister Rebecca, the feud with their neighbors the Watkinses, the financial flurry when the Joneses must buy their farm from their aristocratic landlords. Benjamin is carted off to Hereford Detention Barracks for refusing to fight in World War I, and is cruelly treated there, and Lewis makes several attempts to find a woman for himself; yet both return always to the same house, the same chores, the same land. Weather, labor, loyalty, and other people’s scandals make up the fabric of these two lives so intertwined as to be one life. They both live to be eighty, and Benjamin is last seen staring at his own reflection in his brother’s shiny black tombstone.

The author lays out this tale of country narrowness in a mosaic of sharp and knowing small scenes. Though Mr. Chatwin was born in 1940, the details of daily life early in the century seem an open book to him. Here is how a sleeping farmer looks to his young wife in 1900:

It is “the pink dimple left by his shirtstud” that seems miraculously recovered. Here is how a recruitment speech sounded in 1914. Colonel Bickerton, the local squire, eases himself to his feet after a patriotic slide show climaxed by “an absurd goggle-eyed visage with crows’ wings on its upper lip and a whole golden eagle on its helmet”—the Kaiser—and orates:

We learn that the hall—the Congregation Hall of the Rhulen Chapel—is heated by a coke stove, that the squire’s daughter wears a hat bearing a “grey-pink glycerined ostrich plume,” and that there is considerable resistance on the part of the Welsh to fighting in behalf of the English, whom they still see, after centuries, as enemies and occupiers. Mr. Chatwin tells us what this bygone world is made of: the oilcloth hoods of the horse cabs, the reek of Jeyes Fluid in the Town Hall committee room, the sable coat Queen Mary wears onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace on the “drizzly November morning” of Armistice Day. So, too, persuasively and solidly enough, are rendered the accents, the sermons, the festivities, the gossip, the types of conflict and satisfaction in a Radnorshire whose “leafy lanes [were] unchanged since the time of Queen Elizabeth.” To be sure, one is reminded of Hardy. As if to placate the spectre of his mighty predecessor, Mr. Chatwin has Mary Jones read Hardy: “How well she knew the life he described—the smell of Tess’s milkingparlour; Tess’s torments, in bed and in the beetfield. She, too, could whittle hurdles, plant pine saplings or thatch a hayrick—and if the old unmechanized ways were gone from Wessex, time had stood still, here, on the Radnor Hills.” And if Radnorshire out-Hardys Wessex, a long scene of the Rhulen peace celebrations seems self-consciously to out-Flaubert, for satire and counterpoint, the agricultural fair in
Madame Bovary
. Yet by and large Mr. Chatwin re-creates the past out of what seem not paper souvenirs but living memories, with an understated mastery of period detail and a loving empathy into the inner lives such detail adorned.

To what purpose? Why undergo what Henry James, in a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett in 1901, referred to as the “inordinate” difficulty, the “humbug” of the “ ‘historic’ novel”? Mr. Chatwin might answer, “In order to display at full length the lives of my heroes, my magical twins.” The Jones twins are his centerpiece, and the mysterious, infrangible connection between them somehow his moral. From toddlerhood on, they share the same sensations, and Lewis, the older and stronger, feels
the pain that mishaps inflict upon Benjamin. Their earliest memories are identical, and even in old age they can dream the same dream. When Benjamin is at Hereford Detention Barracks and Lewis is still at The Vision, “from the ache in his coccyx, Lewis knew when the N.C.O.s were frog-marching Benjamin round the parade-ground.… One morning, Lewis’s nose began to bleed and went on bleeding till sundown: that was the day when they stood Benjamin in a boxing ring and slammed straight-lefts into his face.” Whenever Lewis, who likes girls, ventures into sexual experience, Benjamin telepathically feels it, and hates it, and does what he can to discourage the attachment. He succeeds; Lewis remains single, and after their mother’s death the two sleep together in their parents’ bed as they had slept together when children.

Now, Mr. Chatwin, a demon researcher, must have a basis for these supernatural connections that the twins enjoy and suffer; but this tale of what Michel Tournier has called “the super-flesh of twins” feels allegorical, and strains belief. Their twinship is in fact a homosexual marriage, with Benjamin the feminine partner and Lewis the masculine. Benjamin’s love is painted plain: “On days when he was too sick for school he would lie on Lewis’s half of the mattress, laying his head on the imprint left by Lewis on the pillow.” “Benjamin loved his mother and his brother, and he did not like girls. Whenever Lewis left the room, his eyes would linger in the doorway, and his irises cloud to a denser shade of grey: when Lewis came back, his pupils glistened.” “At nights, he would reach out to touch his brother, but his hand came to rest on a cold unrumpled pillow. He gave up washing for fear of reminding himself that—at that same moment—Lewis might be sharing someone else’s towel.” Lewis’s feelings about towel sharing are less clear, and Mr. Chatwin’s ingenuity at posing obstacles and long blank intervals is fully needed to suppress our wonder that a robust and prosperous male goes eighty years with no more than a few scratchy and aborted romances. Stranger still is the mother’s role in this celibacy:

Since Mary has been portrayed as as happily heterosexual as one could be with a sometimes brutal husband, and her character in no way perverse but instead kind, lively, patient, and perfect, the devil that possesses her in regard to Lewis’s mating may be an imp called in to enforce a fundamentally implausible conceit.

Nevertheless, the apparition of the linked twins chimes with much else that is slightly fabulous in their Welsh surround; we seem to see through them into a hilly, antique landscape drenched in flowers—dozens and dozens of botanical allusions are woven into the text—and overshadowed by dramatic clouds. There are many paragraphs as vividly atmospheric as this, at the moment when the twins’ birth begins:

Though weather and growth pursue timeless cycles, culture and history irrevocably unroll, and this novel begins in the era of the horse and ends with the “electronic warbling” of a computer game in a pub and the sight of men hang-gliding from a Welsh precipice: “A stream of tiny pin-men, airborne on coloured wings, swooping, soaring in the upthrust, and then spiralling like ash-keys to the ground.” A sense has been conveyed—and this only a novel to some degree “historic” can do—of the immensity of time a human life spans, a span itself dwarfed by the perspectives of history. Proust piled up his volumes toward this abysmal sensation, this visceral realization of the abstractly known, and Lampedusa achieved it in
The Leopard
, and Anne Tyler last year in
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
. It is a measure of Mr. Chatwin’s compression that
On the Black Hill
achieves it in less than two hundred and fifty pages. His studied style—with something in it of Hemingway’s determined simplicity, and something of Lawrence’s inspired swiftness—encompasses worlds.

T
HE
R
ADIANT
W
AY
, by Margaret Drabble. 406 pp. Knopf, 1987.

This novel forms a panorama, in its glancing way, of life in England from 1980 to 1985. Beneath its many personal incidents we feel not so much the triumph of Thatcherism as that dubious triumph’s underside, the decline of the Labour Party—the ebb and fall of an idealistic socialism that for generations of British intellectuals and workers served as a quasi-religious faith.
The Radiant Way
titles not only the novel but a television series produced by one of its characters, Charles Headleand, way back in 1965—a “series on education … that demonstrated, eloquently, movingly, the evils that flow from a divisive class system, from early selection, from Britain’s unfortunate heritage of public schools and philistinism.
The Radiant Way
was its ironic title, taken from the primer from which Charles had learned at the age of four to read at his mother’s knee.” At the novel’s revelatory climax, there materializes an actual copy of the primer called
The Radiant Way
, discovered by Charles’s ex-wife, Liz, on her mother’s shelves—“She had no recollection of it, at first sight. She gazed intently at its jacket: two children, a boy and a girl, running gaily down (not up) a hill, against a background of radiant thirties sunburst.” The children running down the hill, while “behind them burned forever that great dark dull sun,” symbolize not only the mortality of each individual life but some innocent educational hope left behind by the nation. Education, both the enforcer and surmounter of the English class system, lies at the novel’s heart: the novel’s three heroines—Liz Headleand, Alix Bowen, Esther Breuer—all met at Cambridge, as bright scholarship girls, and in adult life Alix teaches English to young women in prison, Esther lectures on Italian art, and Liz is a psychiatrist, dispensing self-knowledge.