In keeping with my new found status as person up-to-speed with modern literature (see posts passim) I have read The Sense of an Ending, Barnes' winning novel. Tony, a man of middle years, divorced, seeing old age approaching, recounts his friendship as a young adult with Adrian, and with Veronica, his first serious girlfriend (NB Spoilers coming). He and Veronica split, and Adrian writes to ask Tony if he'd mind if the two of them got together. Tony remembers replying facetiously; but it then turns out, many years later, that Tony wrote a rather different letter, and we are invited to believe that this led to a series of awful consequences for which the elderly Veronica cannot forgive him.
I found myself uttering a series of increasingly exasperated Paxman-like "Oh for God's sakes!" as the faintly melodramatic denouement of Barnes' book unfolded. For it to be effective - and for the novel to work - we have to accept that Tony's letter led to those awful consequences, whereas in fact a moment's reflection would convince us that they would probably have happened anyway; we would have to accept that Veronica, a clever woman, was incapable of perceiving this; and we would have to accept that Tony, himself a clever person, rather than meekly accepting his guilt, would not have the wit to utter a rather tart "Get over yourself" to Veronica and get on with his retirement. Moreover since what Hitchcock used to call the McGuffin of the story is that we all create our own histories, blurring the past, it seems strange that this should happen to everyone in the story apart from Veronica, for whom the reverses of the 1970s appear to be as painful as when they were fresh. If we as readers find any one of these things implausible (and I found all three so) the novel collapses.
Once more I found myself saying exasperatedly to my friends in the Males from Hale, a book group, "But people just don't behave like that!" I find myself increasingly hamstrung by the divergence of some art from observed behaviour. We watched Atonement the other day at home, and I was reminded anew of my exasperation with Ian McEwan's novel. You have to believe that the Keira Knightley character, caught in flagranto with the gardener's son by her sister, would have said nothing when the sister denounces him to the police, another guest having been sexually assaulted in the grounds. Yes, McEwan really thinks we will meekly accept that the Knightley character would rather have watched her lover go to prison than stand up for him. Oh, and that the victim of the assault in the grounds will one day marry her attacker. Folks is strange, but not that strange. "It's only a film", says my wife. "It's just not a very good film", I reply. Or novel, for that matter. Both Barnes and McEwan write beautifully; but no amount of beautiful writing can camouflage an unbelievable plot.
One advantage of magical realism is that it matters slightly less whether authors get this kind of thing right. When normal rules of physics and taxonomy cease to apply, one is inclined to be a bit more forgiving of aberrations of human psychology. I have also been reading Ali Smith's The Accidental, in which Amber, a woman, unbelievable in naturalistic terms, intervenes in the lives of a seriously dysfunctional family, with dramatic effect. We accept that it's not naturalistic and accept what Smith tells us. Smith makes Barnes' book feel plodding, and McEwan look like a navel gazing coin polisher. She has more talent in her little finger than either of them.
Of course the disadvantage of magical realism is that it makes us all the more aware that we are being manipulated by the author, and that it's the author's decision to make the characters move in a particular way. Good novels make it seem inevitable that, say, Sidney Carton should give up his life for his double, and it's only if we stand back and think about it that we realise Dickens could have done it differently. When Alan Breck gambles away his money in Kidnapped we are blissfully unaware that it is Stevenson who is making it happen. It seems to happen because that's what Alan Breck is like. It's the fact that we don't think about the alternatives when we're reading that gives a good naturalistic novel its peculiar force. It seems to me as a non-novelist that that's too important a quality to throw away.
Although Smith's book was wonderful, I found myself thinking afterwards about its ethos. Thanks to the wonderful Amber's intervention in The Accidental, the four members of the family are liberated from their various unhappinesses; or rather all are bar the truly unpleasant father, Michael. In particular the mother, Eve, embarks on a liberating journey in America while the others remain at home.
I would be willing to bet that Smith, Scottish and a lesbian, is of the bien-pensant Left. In case we had failed to work out how horrid Michael is, we are told quite early on that he supported the Iraq war. How ghastly! And yet the tone of the book is one in which the pursuit of personal freedom leads to fulfilment. I find this a surprisingly right-wing, even libertarian, outlook. One of the reasons so many of us lead lives which, from the outside, appear no doubt stultifying and conventional is that association with others (spouses and children in particular, but other people too) brings with it responsibilities which require that one's own personal freedom is constrained. In The Accidental Eve's Thelma and Louise-like Odyssey is described in some detail; the effect on her children, abandoned in London with their asshole father, is glossed over. Everything we know about these dysfunctional kids tells us that they will be lost without their mother. But Smith more or less ignores that. After all, gritting your teeth and getting on with family life doesn't make much of a story, does it?
