Literary Review - December 2005 / January 2006

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FICTION

O PHELIA F IELD

ECOLOGY AND EXISTENCE

G ET A L IFE

★By Nadine Gordimer (Bloomsbury 187pp £16.99)

G ET A L IFE is not about one life but four: it examines two marriages in South Africa, that of an ecologist named Paul and his wife Benni/Berenice (alternating names for the alternate ways in which she is viewed from one sentence to the next) and that of Paul’s parents, Lyndsay and Adrian. In his thirties, Paul discovers he has thyroid cancer and may die. It says everything about Gordimer’s talent that the scene in which this news is delivered is so throat-tighteningly sad even within the first ten pages of the book. Paul’s treatment is discovered to require doses of radioactive iodine, which will leave his body radioactive for sixteen days. To avoid exposing his wife and young son, Paul spends this period at his parents’ house, and there he has something of an existential crisis. That he has such a reaction to a mere sixteen days of quarantine is never entirely plausible. Gordimer’s verb tenses try hard, in the face of facts, to suggest that he is serving a much longer sentence, and in this way the first half of the novel feels like a short story stretched beyond its natural length. It would be more plausible, perhaps, to have explained Paul’s crisis as due not to the stranger-than-fiction ‘emanation’ and the metaphorical apartheid it imposes, but to the fact he may be dying. Gordimer once wrote that ‘a novelist does not give answers but asks questions’. In this, her fourteenth novel, many of the broadest questions are the familiar ones of her earlier work. How the personal and political coexist, for example, is asked in relation to how Paul’s ecological activism is compromised by domesticity – in particular, being married to an advertising agent whose company has contracts with ecology-blind developers. Paul both questions and tries to explain Berenice’s lack of political convictions: ‘What is it? A terrible lack. A kind of awful purity? A virginity; or underdevelopment.’ His soul-searching is caused not only by the quarantine, but by the ironies it exposes: the fact that radiation is saving his life (paid for by his wife’s advertising salary), while it risks polluting others – the contaminated paper plates he throws out may be handled, he fears, by poor

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children scavenging on rubbish piles. His medical treatment only exaggerates the general truth that each of our contributions to the earth’s pollution does unseen damage. Before the cancer, Paul had in fact been opposing the development of a pebble-bed nuclear reactor – a campaign which, like those against a toll road through the Pondoland Wild Coast and the damming of the Okavango Delta, has been a real environmental cause in Southern Africa, borrowed by Gordimer for service in this novel. Another broad question that is implied, if never directly asked, is the relative weight of different varieties of disaster. How does the impact of one’s own cancer weigh up against environmental destruction, the Aids epidemic, or the list of other problems remaining in post-apartheid South Africa? Gordimer depicts the black characters – Paul’s parents’ housekeeper and his colleague Thapelo – as oddly dismissive of the risk of contagious radiation, as if it does not register on their own Geiger counters of risk and hardship. It emerges that Thapelo once spent seventeen months in solitary confinement under the apartheid regime – a hardship which, perhaps even more than the author intends, casts a critical light on Paul’s sixteen-day emotional meltdown. Paul’s mother, meanwhile, is in the grip of belated guilt about a four-year extra-marital affair. This affair has become an ‘artefact’ of memory, which she now regrets as an interruption in the ‘historical continuity of life’, whatever that may be. What connects her story to her son’s is the theme of mortality, the realisation that there is only a limited number of choices per lifetime. More, Gordimer’s four main characters each come to feel that they are fundamentally alone. Unfortunately, this philosophical realisation seems to make them all behave rather alike, with an ultra-liberal laissez fairethat diffuses any drama. Gordimer’s prose is becoming both knottier and less muscular with age. It is sparing with signposts, such as punctuation, and therefore one can more clearly appreciate the skill with which she conveys whose head one is inside in each sentence, whether words are thought, spoken or written, and whether they are meant to be in past or present. There is also a lyrical circling back to certain words – ‘nuclear’, ‘avocation’, ‘susurration’, ‘self’. These stylistic demands on the reader’s orientation skills would be fine if it were not for the fact that the plot loses its way in the final quarter. The environmental issues start to rise like muddy, illexplained floodwaters and almost submerge the four main characters, about whom – strangely – one cares more at the beginning of the book than at the end. To order this book at £13.59, see order form on page 78

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FICTION

S EBASTIAN S HAKESPEARE STINGINTHETALE

N OTHING T HAT M EETSTHE E YE : T HE U NCOLLECTED S TORIESOF P ATRICIA H IGHSMITH

★(Bloomsbury 464pp £20)

T HIS BOOKIS a treat. Most of the twenty-eight stories here have never been published before. Others have appeared in a variety of recherché journals, such as German Playboy. Patricia Highsmith made her name as a crime novelist with her debut, Strangers on a Train. It was published when she was twenty-nine and was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. Her five Ripley novels cemented her reputation. However she tended to hide her short stories under a bushel – her first collection, Eleven, did not appear until 1970 – and she destroyed many ‘rotten, old stories’ that did not meet her exacting standards. When she died in 1995, unappreciated in her native America, she left behind a huge archive of papers that stretched 150 feet in length. It is a tribute to the editors of this volume that they have ploughed diligently through her files and rescued these tales from oblivion. Two or three of them stand comparison with her best work. The fourteen early stories, which date from 1938 to 1949, show she had a remarkable facility for the shortstory form from an early age. They are complex psychological tales masked by a deceptively simple style. Graham Greene commended her as a poet of apprehension rather than fear. This book provides ample proof of his dictum. She can instil foreboding with just a stroke of her pen. An empty restaurant is described as ‘a cemetery of white-clothed tables’. A tramp’s ear is ‘a daub of white flesh like the opening of a balloon tied with string’. In Highsmith’s fiction the Devil is in the detail. Her characters are middle-aged men and women who lead unremarkable lives. They tend to be oppressed by routine and city life. New York, the backdrop for many tales, is ‘unfriendly’ and ‘its cramped fury seemed like a disease’. People are as insignificant kitchen matches or candle wicks. A post-office employee fantasises about murdering his fellow workers to escape his daily drudgery. A man props up a bar day after day waiting for someone to walk in and rescue him. Hopes are raised and cruelly dashed. A shopkeeper is left a huge financial bequest and then loses it all overboard a ship. The stories are by no means faultless. There are quite a few duff lines (‘the ponderous sun that staggered throbbingly upward’ – have you ever seen the sun stagger?) and rather too many melodramatic denouements. ‘A Girl like Phyl’ is about a man who recognises the daughter of an

old lover on a plane and invites her back to his hotel room without letting on about his previous dalliance. The girl ends up propositioning him. It is a wonderful conceit but the story is marred by its contrived ending. Too often the tales conclude in murder or suicide. The conventions of the crime genre were clearly hard to shake off. Paradoxically, it is the quieter tales that create more of an impression and linger longer in the mind. ‘Where the Door is Always Open and the Welcome Mat is Out’ features a neurotic New Yorker being visited by her sister in her noisy, confined apartment. Far from being an occasion of joy, the visit only compounds her sense of failure. The women in this volume are given more depth and poignancy than their male counterparts. Mrs Blynn on her deathbed reflects that life ‘is a long mistaken shutting of the heart’. The strait-laced Mrs Robinson looks on at a pair of lovers in the park with a mix of longing and pride: ‘the blond girl had seen the glance, seen in it for all its fleetness the ancient and imperishable look that one woman gives another she knows is well loved, a look made up of desire, admiration, wistfulness, of envy and vicarious pleasure, unveiled for an instant and then veiled again’. It’s the veiling and unveiling of emotion that Highsmith captures with such scrupulous accuracy. In the opening tale, ‘Mightiest Mornings’, ‘the train crept on northward, carrying into nowhere the prints of his ten fingers on its gritty sills’. Luckily, the prints Patricia Highsmith left behind are still with us. To order this book at £16, see order form on page 78

S AM L EITH

SEX AND SENILITY

M EMORIES OF M Y M ELANCHOLY W HORES

★

By Gabriel García Márquez (Jonathan Cape 115pp £10)

A S OPENINGLINES go, it’s undoubtedly an eyecatcher: ‘The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.’ Lord alone knows what they put in the water in South America, but I want some. Consider, though, aside from the goatish premise and the gentle self-mockery of ‘wild love’, how that sentence sets out Márquez’s stall. That phrase: ‘give myself the gift’. It implies, first, that there’s nobody else to give the narrator a present; and it hints too at his extraordinary self-absorption. Also, there’s the suggestion of a transaction – the adolescent virgin’s participation in the festivities is, as it were, in the narrator’s gift. She’s a sure thing. She’s a whore. Márquez’s nameless narrator – who enjoys the advan

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