another one bites the dust

Yesterday, during my afternoon reading period, I started by reading the novel I had on the go (I always start my reading period with the novel if I'm reading one--which I'm usually not), in this case, The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott. I made in to page 124, then thought, "Nah, I think I'm done with this."

What made me decide to pack it in?

In a word: story. It's not that the story is bad--it's very good. But Scott prosecutes it much too slowly for my taste (and I can tolerate a very slow-moving story). My theory is that Scott, writing in the 1960s, was a victim of the 20th-century reaction against storytelling. With such literary masters as E. M. Forster and James Joyce inveighing against story and the "go-ahead plot", story became uncool--at best a distasteful chore for a serious novelist. Story was for lowbrow, commercial works of fiction.

Lawrence Durrell in his Alexandria Quartet certainly deviated from a straightforward narrative, telling his "story" by means of a kind of collage of images and scenes, which no doubt were thought to be more aesthetic than a lead-footed, sequential reportage of events. I myself, as a beginning writer, inspired by these writers, briefly experimented with a nonsequential approach to narrative in my second "serious" short story (the title of which I can't even remember). Then, inspired by Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, I sought to push the envelope of plotting by creating a story that was complex and farcical.

Those efforts eventually died a natural death, both for me and for other 20th-century rebels against story. When it comes down to it, any movement or idea that's based mainly on reaction or rebellion is necessarily short-lived, lacking any positive underlying purpose of its own. There's something of the juvenile in it, indulging in the luxury of criticizing those who have come before, without offering anything concretely better. One seeks to be avant-garde, different from one's teachers and predecessors. In my view, it amounts to a basic and relatively immature way of coping with what Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence"--the fretful desire of the new writer to get out of the shade of his teachers.

So: Paul Scott. Part One, "Miss Crane", was pretty good from a story perspective--not bad, anyway, since he is narrating the life of an English spinster missionary in India, with tremendously sympathetic insight into her inner world as well as knowledge of the exotic world of India under the British Raj; plus he narrates the exciting event of riots in Mayapore in 1942, and what happens to Miss Crane when she is swept up in this social convulsion. The account is slow (taking us to page 85) but effective.

Part Two, "The MacGregor House", is more a collage of pieces written from the first-person point of view of at least three different individuals. Forty pages in, it has not told much story (we learn that Miss Crane caught pneumonia after her ordeal in the riots, and later burned herself in despair), but rather has given a great deal of backstory about the Indian character Lady Chatterjee and exposition about the stately MacGregor House where she lives. Yesterday, when I found myself reading a passage describing every fixture in the bathroom of the MacGregor House, I thought, "All right, enough already."

The intent, no doubt, is to steep the mind of the reader in the essence of what it's like to be there--to feel and smell the place. But I couldn't help thinking about Stephen King's advice to fiction writers: set a scene by giving three telling descriptive details--three, and only three. Why are we dwelling on this bathroom? Maybe something important is going to happen here, eventually, but do we really need a full page of description of it now?

Scott's ability to describe and evoke his world is powerful. In the midst of that bathroom description on page 119 is this image:

At the opposite end of the bathroom--fifteen paces on bare feet across lukewarm mosaic that is slightly uneven and impresses the soles with the not unpleasant sensation of walking over the atrophied honeycomb of some long forgotten species of giant bee--there is an old-fashioned marble-topped washstand...

The striking, far-fetched, and rhapsodic metaphor of the honeycomb might not be out of place in, say, Gravity's Rainbow, but in my opinion would be much more powerful as the passing thought of a character, say, Daphne Manners, the girl who stays at the house and uses the bathroom. It should be a thought flickering through her mind while she is on her way to doing something--preparing to go out on a date with the District Superintendent of Police Ronald Merrick, say. But Scott takes us on a long museum-tour through the house, with no story in process, which eventually strained my patience to the breaking point.

So there it is. Paul closes up another novel unfinished--a novel he has finished before, and admired before. It's not that I no longer admire it--it's just that, now, I can't seem to finish it.

Battle of the Quartets: Scott vs. Durrell

I don't read much fiction these days, so I feel that when I do, as now, I should probably talk about it. This blog is devoted, after all, to a work of fiction. What are my thoughts about fiction? What am I looking for in a novel?

I've started reading, I think for the third time, The Jewel in the Crown, the first in Paul Scott's four-part Raj Quartet. Kimmie got a Granada mass-market paperback edition of the book in 1986, when the British miniseries based on the books was recent and popular. I'm glad, personally, since the mass-market paperback is still my favorite format of book, even though the contents of most mass-market paperbacks now I find completely unappealing. This copy has a kind of cameo image on the cover of Art Malik and Susan Wooldridge, the actors who played the characters Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners in the miniseries. It was first published in 1966, when the author was 46 (he died in 1978).

Paul Scott's style is grave and meticulous. He himself served in the British Army in India and Malaya between 1940 and 1946--the period of which he writes--and so knows the world of his story at first hand. Each page and each sentence is impregnated with his authority over his fictional world--one mark of excellence in a novel.

The book, 576 pages long, is divided into seven parts. Part One is called simply, "Miss Crane". Let's take a look at the first sentence:

Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar Gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of, standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south.

This sentence, 75 words long, is also the whole first paragraph. Its size and complexity signal that this work will make certain demands of the reader, and in fact I find the sentence somewhat involved and hard to grasp. I always have to read it two or three times to get the meaning from it, which, in my opinion, tells against Paul Scott as a stylist. There is a heaviness, a portentousness, a certain sense of the juggernaut of history trundling forward, ready to crush all in its path.

It opens with a direct address to the reader, emphasizing the literary, "told" quality of the work. I personally find the use of the word then, after Imagine, to be kind of artificial--trying to inject a sense of being in the middle of a story, rather than at the beginning. As though the narrator were retelling the story from a different viewpoint--something like that.

The sentence contains drama--"a girl running in the still deeper shadow"--but drama seen from a detached, godlike perspective. The narrator seems to be stressing not the girl running, but the "immensity" and "distance" of the landscape on which she runs, and perhaps, by extension, on which we all run.

In short, for me this sentence has problems. Nonetheless, if I were encountering it today for the first time in a bookstore, I would keep reading. It more than passes my first-sentence test. Why? I think for two reasons: 1) the content of the sentence is not trivial or frivolous, and 2) the author is addressing me as an equal, showing respect for my intelligence. That's more than enough reason for me to keep reading.

I was going to comment on a certain quality in the sentence of being overwrought, over-precious, and over-subtle, and perhaps try to blame that on Scott's seeming admiration of Lawrence Durrell and his Alexandria Quartet; but when I pulled out my copy of Justine, the first of the Alexandria Quartet novels, here is what I found as the opening paragraph:

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes....

The longest sentence here is 24 words. It is not ponderous or portentous. Scott's writing has the quality of a deep, searching report, but Durrell's narrator here is first of all a poet. His choices of word and phrase are fresh, original, and striking at every turn. I remember when I first read the phrase "A sky of hot nude pearl", knowing I was reading a writer of the top class. It's as though Durrell's narrator is searching for a way to convey how intoxicated he is with the sensuous deliciousness of the world.

Paul Scott is no poet. But for all that he is, in my opinion, a better novelist than Durrell, or anyway one more able to sustain my interest and attention. I remember being excited at how vivid and sensuous this opening of Durrell's was, only to find that my attention flagged in a welter of short scenes that did not add up to a strong story. Scott clings tenaciously to his thread, sticking with it for dozens of pages on end, which tenacity communicates a sense of confidence in the importance of his story. He's never in a hurry, because what he's talking about matters.

I became tired of Durrell. His aesthetic rhapsodizing wore thin. Now, 80 pages into The Jewel in the Crown, I'm finding depth, subtlety, and continuity. Those things will keep me reading.

the task: concentration

After the relief of finishing chapter 28, back to square 1 with chapter 29. By "square 1" I mean the gathering-together of materials and thoughts, working toward creating the critical mass that will trigger the writing of the actual chapter.

In a simple-minded, clerical way I go through some of the reference works for which I've created Word documents, and copy and paste sections into my Notes document for the current chapter. As I have thoughts or ideas based on what I read, I type these in the free section at the bottom of the document, where I begin each day by typing the current date before pushing ahead with my notes. Then I go through the previous day's notes and highlight any "keeper" ideas.

At the beginning of this process I feel a certain helplessness, baffled at the task of finding stuff for my characters to do. There is anxiety involved: no guarantees that I'll find anything, or that it will be interesting. What will it be like for the eventual reader, who gets to flow through the story uninterruptedly, rather than the author's laborious trek through a wilderness, where I can barely remember what happened three chapters ago, written sometime in my ever-receding past?

In a certain sense, all work is concentration. By that I mean not mental concentration, but the more physical act of sorting things and bringing together the most valuable--concentrating them. Just like Kimmie preparing her lunch this morning up in the kitchen: while I poured our second cup of coffee, she stood at the counter, patiently cutting the less-desirable parts of lettuce leaves away, and dropping the still-fresh parts into the plastic box that would hold her eventual salad. She took some aging lettuce leaves and, by applying work, created a nice salad for herself.

Where is this thought-train taking me. I think about placer mining: panning for gold. That is the classic effort of physical concentration. The gold is out there, but its value cannot be realized unless it is concentrated into once place. So the miner patiently washes sand, finding the glinting flecks mixed in with the endless silica.

Also: the more valuable a commodity, the rarer it is, meaning the more dross or sand you have to go through to find the nuggets. It's possible that the great effort I'm going through of sifting through all this research material is a sign that the "nuggets" I seek have extra-special value.

Lately Kimmie and I have been watching the 1984 British miniseries The Jewel in the Crown, based on Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. Excellent. The adaptation was done by Ken Taylor, and he did a fantastic job with a more than usually difficult task, because Scott's tetralogy, inspired, I'm sure, by Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, is written in a nonlinear way that makes it hard to perceive the exact sequence of events. Taylor had to find that sequence, and then dramatize it. On the plus side, the underlying story and characters were wonderfully drawn in the original work, making the task very worthwhile.

As I watch the show, the scenes, the speech and actions of the characters, flow with a naturalness and logic that I don't naturally question as a viewer; I simply enjoy them. But as a writer I ask myself how and why the choices were made, first by Paul Scott, and then by Ken Taylor, to realize the drama before me. Why this scene? Why these characters? Scott will have wrestled with these questions, and the very quality of the final product tells me that it was hard going. Now I get to enjoy the company of these finely drawn characters, taking them for granted as I take for granted real people as naturally complex individuals, because that's what people are. But the "people" created by an artist are not naturally complex--they have to be made that way through art, by someone who knows what he's doing. And even if he knows what he's doing, it's hard.

As I think of it, the Raj Quartet is a modern epic: it features multiple heroes or protagonists embroiled in a large political problem: the struggle of India to shrug off the yoke of British rule.

Hmm. Maybe it's time to poke my nose into the Raj Quartet again. Time to read some more fiction?