Trollope on Suspense

I am reading Trollope again. It's Barchester Towers this time, and I am enjoying it vastly. This is quite a pleasant surprise for me, as novels have nearly always been something I took up with reluctance and put down with relief, even if I enjoy occasional passages along the way.

It's not that I've never enjoyed novels. When I was a teenager, I read and re-read the novels of the Irish writer Walter Macken, who did quite a nice line in observation of the everyday, and was also gifted at describing the odd thoughts and tricks of association that flow through a man's brain. (I don't think he ever had a female protagonist.) And in my early twenties I became a passionate fan of J.P. Donleavy, the American-Irish writer of lyrical, farcical, bawdy novels. Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, gave me much pleasure when I was younger.

But I think I've trudged through far more novels than I've actually relished. Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Thackeray, Defoe, Joseph Conrad, George Eliot, Henry James, Kingsley Amis, Anthony Powell, Ray Bradbury, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence...the list of novelists who have, to a greater or lesser extent, bored me is long and lustrous. Even my beloved Chesterton ceases to interest me once he intones those supposedly magical words, "Once upon a time..."

So it's a nice change to gobble up fiction for once.

As with any powerful writer, it's hard to describe what it is I enjoy so much about Trollope. Virginia Woolf (I forgot to add her to the above list) said that reading Trollope gives you the same pleasure that you get from looking out the window. Of course, that begs the question as to why you don't just go and look out the window instead of reading a book...but then again, our modern world of cars and emails seems less appealing to me than the Trollopian world of carriages and hand-delivered notes.

But, even without the emails and cars, the men and women Trollope depicts are men and women who I recognize, even though social mores have changed significantly. They worry about money and status, get bored, gossip, flirt. They have noble impulses and then admire themselves for having noble impulses. They have low thoughts and then feel guilty for having low thoughts. Everybody compares Dickens to Trollope, and to me, the comparison is not entirely in Dickens's favour. The outrageously villainous Dickensian villain, the tediously noble-hearted Dickensian heroine, and the grotesqueries of the Dickensian eccentric are not something I recognize from real life.

But I didn't intend to write a general appreciation of Trollope in this post. I just wanted to comment on one particular passage that delighted me in Barchester Towers. After revealing to the reader that two different men are planning to pay court to a wealthy widow, Trollope goes on to reveal that their designs will come to naught:

But let the gentle-hearted reader be under no apprehension whatsoever. It is not destined that Eleanor shall marry Mr Slope or Bertie Stanhope. And here, perhaps, it may be allowed to the novelist to explain his views on a very important point in the art of telling tales. He ventures to reprobate that system which goes so far to violate all proper confidence between the author and his readers, by maintaining nearly to the end of the third volume a mystery as to the fate of their favourite personage. Nay, more, and worse than this, is too frequently done. Have not often the profoundest efforts of genius been used to baffle the aspirations of the reader, to raise false hopes and false fears, and to give rise to expectations which are never realised? Are not promises all but made of delightful horrors, in lieu of which the writer produces nothing but commonplace realities in his final chapter? And is there not a species of deceit in this to which the honesty of the present age should lend no countenance?

And what can be the worth of that solicitude which a peep into the third volume can utterly dissipate? What the value of those literary charms which are absolutely destroyed by their enjoyment? When we have once learnt what was the picture before which was hung Mrs Radcliffe's solemn curtain, we feel no further interest about either the frame or the veil. They are to us, merely a receptacle for old bones, and inappropriate coffin, which we would wish to have decently buried out of our sight.

And then, how grievous a thing it is to have the pleasure of your novel destroyed by the ill-considered triumph of a previous reader. 'Oh, you needn't be alarmed, for Augusta, of course, she accepts Gustavus in the end.' 'How very ill-natured you are, Susan,' says Kitty, with tears in her eyes; 'I don't care a bit about it now.' Dear Kitty, if you will read my book, you may defy the ill-nature of your sister. There shall be no secret that she can tell you. Nay, take the last chapter, if you please--learn from its pages all the results of our troubled story, and the story shall have lost none of its interest, if indeed, there be any interest in it to lose.

Of course, this is not entirely serious, since Trollope does in fact use suspense to some extent, as all story-tellers must. But, insofar as it is a serious point, I loudly applaud it.

I've never understood why other people are so concerned about keeping the end of a story a secret. I've trained myself, with much effort, to respect their preferences and to avoid "spoilers" when describing a movie or another work of fiction. But as for myself, I very often read (usually on Wikipedia) the entire plot of a film that I'm thinking of going to see. It never diminishes my pleasure (or displeasure) one little bit. Who doesn't enjoy a good movie more, the second time they watch it? Whatever enjoyment rests upon suspense is the lowest and cheapest of enjoyments.

A Plea for Proportionality in Fiction

Since I was writing about fiction and stories in my last post, and since I have something to add on the subject, I may as well continue on the same theme. Obviously my mind is running that way.

For most of my adult life, and indeed well back into my teens, I have harboured a certain assumption about stories which nobody else seems to share, but that which seems reasonable enough to me. The assumption is that there should be some sort of proportionality involved in the choice of subjects and motifs for stories. The world of stories-- of all the stories being told at one time-- should, in some manner, be a reflection of the real world.

This is an example of what I mean. I find myself irritated at the amount of thrillers and fantastic tales in which the literal end of the world is at stake. Imminent apocalypse is a very rare thing. As far as we know, and apart from all the possible close encounters with asteroids which we may have survived over the last few billion years, it has only really happened twice; in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and the incident in 1983 where one Stanislav Petrov refused to panic when a Soviet radar malfunction made it look as though an American nuclear missile had been fired at Russia. The end of the world as we know it doesn't really come along very often, and it seems a device grossly overused in books and movies and comics.

Now, you may say that such a reaction is ridiculously literal-minded, that humanity has always been haunted by apocalyptic visions and that it is inevitable our stories would draw on them. And I acknowledge this. I do accept that having only two End-of-the-World stories, to correspond with the couple of times the thing actually happened, would be ridiculously restrictive. I don't object to twenty. I don't object to two hundred. I don't even object to two thousand. But when the thing becomes as common as the common cold, I can't help feeling that Armageddon has been rather devalued.

Besides-- it's such a cheap source of drama, when you think about it. Why do we always have to ramp everything up to the max? I remember the late and great film critic Roger Ebert, in a review of the French film The Chorus, complaining that the mysterious music teacher turns out to be The World's Greatest Conductor. "I would have been better pleased if he had merely been a Really Great Conductor", he wrote. I agree. There is nothing really imaginative about superlatives. I think they rather show a lack of imagination than an abundance of it.

Similarly, it bothers me that the same scenarios and settings and social circles are so remorselessly overused by story-tellers, rather than drawing on the vast reservoir of actual human experience. Now, I realize that some themes are simply more dramatic than others, and will therefore tend to appear more often. Murder is a very dramatic situation and it is inevitable that it will be over-represented in fiction. But do we really need a whole industry of murder mystery novels, and of crime novels in general? Why should directors and authors flatter themselves on finding a new "twist" for the crime genre? Why not just "twist" out of the tiresome genre and onto the vast tracts of human experience that don't involve Detective Inspectors or DNA tests?

What about the fantastic, you say? If our stories are going to reflect reality more closely, should we simply leave out the fantastic?

I don't think so. First of all, many people (myself included) do believe in ghosts and other supernatural occurences, and the world is full of claims of actual ghosts, doppelgangers, poltergeists, and so forth. To this extent, having a myriad of supernatural tales does not contradict my principle of proportionality in fiction.

Besides, the fantastic element in fantastic tales is accepted as fantastic. The question of probability does not come into it because it is accepted that it is, not only improbable, but not necessarily possible at all. I simply wish that the non-fantastic element in fantastic tales would not show an excessive concentration upon the superlative, the global, the exclusive. Why does every science-fiction story have to be about a world conflict, and feature Presidents and billionaire business-men and Nobel-winning scientists? Can't we have a swords-and-sorcery tale entirely confined to one obscure village, far from palaces and castles?

Viewed from this perspective, I think the disdain that is so often heaped upon "chick-lit" is unfair. I am not a reader of chick-lit, but, to my mind, it is has this advantage over more "manly" fiction such as thriller novels and spy novels (which usually enjoy more critical cachet)-- that it draws upon universal experience. Chick-lit is mostly about romance and family and working life, and those are experiences common to most people. In the same way, "TV movie" is a term of disparagement, but why should it be? Why is a housewife battling with alcoholism or the life of a wheelchair-bound college student a less worthy theme than scientists battling to stop a pandemic from bringing about the one millionth End of the World?

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century by C.S. Lewis-- a Wonderful Book

I've been going through a tough time in the last few weeks (all prayers very welcome), but I have been taking some solace in the book I'm currently reading. As I mentioned in a previous post, I am working my way through The Faerie Queene, but I have taken a breather from that (and it's tough going) to read English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, by C.S. Lewis. I actually picked it up to read the chapter about Edmund Spenser, but after that I found myself drawn to start back at the beginning and read through the whole thing.

It was C.S. Lewis himself who wrote, "You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me". It's a deliciously cosy quotation, and I wish it applied to me, but it doesn't-- apart from the tea part. (And even then, really good tea is a rarity, unless you make it yourself-- the tea in cafés and pubs is barely tolerable.)

It's rare indeed for me to come across a book that I enjoy so much that I simply don't wish it to end. But English Literature in the Sixteenth Century is such a book. Even feeling its thickness in my hands is intensely satisfying, in the same way that we relish being surrounded by miles of open countryside as far as the eye can see.

The books I enjoy the most are all works of prose non-fiction. I do read poetry and fiction and drama, and I often enjoy them, but I only derive a glow of straighforward contentment from books where the author is addressing me directly-- and not obliquely, as is nearly always the case with a poet or a narrator. The feeling of distance in the latter case is too alienating. It's like listening to someone who never makes eye contact.

I sometimes feel guilty about this. I feel guilty especially for not having any appetite for novels or for short stories. The enchantment that works on other people is simply lost on me. I cannot get wrapped up in the story. Even the layout of a page of fiction makes me groan. It seems like a waste of paper, a waste of a book, a simulacrum of a book. It all seems as tiresome as those painful role-playing exercises in training courses.

I can't help feeling there's something unnatural about novels. Stories are magic, yes. There is something in every human heart that craves stories, that thrives on stories. But are novels really-- stories? What organic relation is there between a fireside tale and a four-hundred page novel full of subtle psychological observation, direct speech, and detailed description? How can something so flaccid and abstract be related to an actual anecdote-- which is always compressed, urgent (even at its longest), and which involves a teller, a listener and a setting? It does not seem to be the case that the novel is an elaborated or heightened version of the orally-told story-- it seems as though it is something entirely different, a Frankestein's monster of ink and paper. And, especially in more "literary" novels, with their preference for suggestion and obliqueness and unreliable narrators, I find myself getting frustrated. Why won't the writer just get to the point and tell me what this is all about? What kind of arrogance keeps a guest standing for so long?

I dearly love listening to people telling stories, especially their own stories. I love, for example, the show on the Catholic TV channel EWTN, The Journey Home. On this programme, one guest each episode talks for an hour about his or her conversion to the Catholic faith. The narrative here (or in any example of a person telling a story they know and care about) is always unforced, effortlessly artistic, and incomparably more vivid than (I think) the unreal narrative of a novel. A real-life narrator telling a real-life story will indeed dwell upon details, and often these are the most delicious part of the tale-- I remember one woman on the show described how she watched a bird flying outside her window, and compared it to a plane visible in the same sky, marvelling at the God-created beauty of the one and the comparative ugliness of the other. Such little vignettes or images are an almost universal features of real-life storytelling ("I can still see him sitting there with that look on his face..."). But in novels, we get detailed description of almost everything, no matter how insignificant. And the narrative plods painfully through its chronology, feeling obliged to give some kind of sense of time's passage, unlike a man telling a story in a pub, who will blithely and wisely skip over weeks and months and years in a moment, if the story requires it. Real stories have no filler. But novels are mostly filler.

My point about urgency should not be misunderstood. I absolutely don't mean terseness, or economy for its own sake, or sparseness. Think of somebody telling a story he passionately cares about. Will he be inclined to leave out a single detail that strikes him as important or interesting? Not at all. He may well embellish. He may well spin out the best parts. He will dwell lovingly on the parts that seem most interesting to him. He will digress. But he will certainly not spend minutes on end atmosphere-building, or scene-setting, or character-painting, or any of the other dreary stuff so beloved of novelists. He won't leave out any of that if it's really necessary-- "What you have to understand about my supervisor, he was the kind of guy who..."-- but it will be integrated into the tale.

(Please don't accuse me of being one of those grimly purposeful people who are only interested in finding out what happens next, or in discovering how the story ends-- somebody who doesn't understand the concept of a "grace note", as it is termed in music. A story told with the urgency I describe can be full of incidental details. I've often had the experience of hearing a story-- perhaps an old man's childhood memory, something that happened fifty or sixty years ago-- in which some incidental detail made such a strong impression on me that it's as though I had seen it myself. But such incidental details are only striking, only work, when they come naturally, and are used fairly sparingly-- certainly not the three or four pages of "colour writing" which the novelist exults in.)

Well, I don't expect anyone to agree with such a diatribe against the novelistic format, and really I am just being provocative and grumpy. I agree that there's no demonstrable reason why novels should be a kind of natural development of oral story-telling. And besides, I have the opinion of mankind against me. The most popular novels are those that are least like a fireside yarn. The novels on supermarket and airport racks are usually hundreds of pages long and revel in detailed description. I am perfectly happy to dismiss Booker Prize panels and English Literature professors, but I defer (without irony) to the readers of John Grisham and Celia Ahern books.

All the same, it is non-fiction which speaks to my own depths, especially non-fiction of an extended esssay type. And the more I read of C.S. Lewis, the more I admire him. His prose is balanced and judicious without ever being dull or impersonal. And (in the book I am discussing) he re-animates literary and religious and cultural debates that are centuries old, so that the reader finds himself caught up in them.

I had to pull out some of the plumbs of this pudding for my good readers. Here they are, pretty much at random:

"Modern paralells are always to some extent misleading. Yet, for a moment only, and to guard against worse misconceptions, it may be useful to compare the influence of Calvin on that age with the influence of Marx on our own; or even of Marx and Lenin in one, for Calvin had both expounded the new system in theory and set it going in practice. This will at least serve to eliminate the absurd idea that Elizabethan Calvinists were somehow grotesque, elderly people, standing outside the main forward current of life. In their own day they were, of course, the very latest thing...It was the creed of progressives, even of revolutionaries. It appealed strongly to those tempers that would have been Marxist in the nineteent-thirties. The fierce young don, the learned lady, the courtier with intellectual leanings, were likely to be Calvinists....Had the word "sentimentality" been known to them, Elizabethan Calvinists would certainly have used it of any who attacked [Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion] as morally repulsive."

"Your father, your grown-up brother, your admired elder schoolfellow all loved rhetoric. Therefore you loved it too. You adored sweet Tully and were as concerned about asyndeton and chiasmus as a modern schoolboy is about county cricketers or types of airplane. But against what seems to us this fantastic artificiality in their education we must set the fact that every boy, out of schoo, without noticing it, then acquired a range of knowledge such as no boy has today; farriery, forestry, archery, hawking, sowing, ditching, thatching, brewing, baking, weaving, and practical astronomy...They talked more readily than we about large universals such as death, change, fortune, friendship, or salvation; but also about pigs, loaves, boots and boasts. The mind darted more easily to and fro between that mental heaven and earth; the cloud of middle generalizations, hanging between the two, was then much smaller." [Note that Lewis, writing in 1954, spells "generalization" with a "z", which today gets one accused of perpetrating an Americanism. And Lewis, though actually Irish, was about as English and donnish as they came. I'm going to go on using my "z"s.)

"Dunbar and his contemporaries seriously believed that such entertainment awaited in the next world those who had practiced (without repentance) the seven deadly sins in this. They believed and (doubtless) trembled; yet they also laughed. The mixture of farce and terror would be incredible if we did not remember that boys joked most about flogging under Keate, and men joked most about the gallows under the old penal code. It is apparently when terrors are over that they become too terrible to laugh at; while they are regnant they are too terrible to be taken with unrelieved gravity. There is nothing funny about Hitler now."

"In the comic parts of Sir Thomas More's work we see [the satiric spirit of the late Middle Ages] transformed by a real genius for drollery. Skelton and Heywood are better representatives, though Skelton at his best is too good to be typical. It is a different thing from the Scotch ribaldry of the same period-- the work of heavier men, men who take a long time to get tired either of a moral platitude or a slap-stick joke. A steamy smell of large dinners seems to pervade it all; if worse smells sometimes intrude, that is part of the joke."

[On a translation of Froissart by Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners]: "It is the sort of writing which, as W.P. Ker said, "is free from any anxiety or curiosity about rules of good taste because it had good taste to begin with." The tempation is to describe it negatively, to say that it is never clumsy, never affected, never strident, and thus to produce the very false impression that it must be like the style of Defoe. In reality it has none of Defoe's workday quality. Its smoothness resembles his as little as the smoothness of springy turf resembles that of a well-laden wooden floor. It is half-way to poetry; full of the author's relish for bright colours, his never-wearying admiration for noble deeds, and his spontaneous tenderness. It is, in one sense, like conversation; but like a conversation in which both tears and smiles may occur and in which there is no check on enthusiasm because it is taken for granted that we all understand one another and that no boorish persons are present."

I could go on and on. I have never read most of the authors Lewis discusses in this book, and I have never even heard of a great many of them, but that doesn't stop me from relishing the great man's prose.

I spent hours this bank holiday weekend reading this book in the Bagel Bar in the Omni Shopping Centre, Santry, drawing my cups of tea out as long as possible to save money, looking up every now and again into the foaming fountain at the centre of the mall. The sounds of life-- the fountain, voices of children and adults, piped music-- echoed in the air. How odd it is that we never seem so receptive to our surroundings as when we are immersed in a book.

One final thing. I can't help relating the fact that Lewis's style is so lucid, calm, humorous, trenchant, common-sensical and sane to the fact of his Christian faith. It seems to me a funny paradox that the most sane and balanced people in this world are often the very people who believe that a man in the ancient Middle East walked on water and came back from the dead. But I would contend that this is so. I think this is because Christians have a perspective upon the universe that makes sanity (and cheerfulness, and graciousness, and appropriate sobriety) possible. Christians believe that they stand above the current of the physical world and are not simply eddies within its stream; they can look at it with a certain irony and detachment. Christians believe that there is a purpose to existence and an artistic design to the universe. They can be serious, because they know life matters, and they can laugh, because they know evil is not the last word. One of the reasons I am a Christian is because, looking at human life from that vantage point, it seems to be a landscape and not a chaos.