The Modern Library (22 page)

It is unwise to consult any British person about this novel sequence, which, in the manner of Proust, recounts the life and experiences of Nick Jenkins, a denizen of the English uppermiddle, if not aristocratic, class. The English disease of fussing about class has long prevented Powell from receiving the universal acclaim which is his right.

In Powell’s world the Establishment meets Bohemia. Nick Jenkins begins his narration before the First World War and ends in reflective old age, his companions a kaleidoscope of eccentrics, musicians, sluts, women ferocious and loving, men in love or in drink, generals, politicians, necrophiliacs – the cast is as large and as real as life itself. These are comic novels, classical in composition, interweaving sexual entanglements with intricate negotiations for power, with world wars and high matters of state, contemplating always the mysterious nature of love, most particularly of friendship
experienced
, lost, grieved over. Time dances – and it takes a heavy toll.

There are few masters of English prose with Powell’s command of irony and elegance of language. These are tender, amusing, pervasive novels; they remain in the memory. It is unnecessary to read the twelve together, but once begun …

A Pritchett sentence is unmistakable. ‘She was a smart girl with a big friendly chin and a second one coming.’ ‘What the unconverted could not forgive in us was first that we believed in successful prayer and, secondly, that our revelation came from Toronto.’

Such words chivvy us into the Pritchett world of shopkeepers, barbers, sailors, small businessmen, religious Nonconformists and women who are much more than a match for any men who come their way. Pritchett delights in writing about human bodies, their shape and protuberances, about marriage, love and everything that leads up to, and away from, marital irritation. His women are powerful creatures, bold-nosed, full-breasted, large-eyed and, quite often, on the rampage. These are not enclosed English people. They often skip overseas and greet foreigners with feisty poise.

Pritchett is the great chronicler of those quotidian institutions which actually keep the wheels of England turning: seedy hotels, small houses, trains and a great deal of rain. His ordinary things are full of vim and bounce. Pritchett is the greatest English short story writer of this century, combining love of the English character with an inquisitive wit. This book, a choice of his best stories, shows his exceptional powers of observation and his effortless command of the use, as well as the beauty, of the English language.

The narrative method here is original, quirky, unforgettable, and so too are the characters. The style is brisk and authoritative, as though this was the only way that the story could be told. There is no nonsense; scenes are short. The author has no interest in heroics, or fine descriptions. The novel is full of details: boatbuilding, housebuilding, knot-making, bad weather, good weather,
journalism
. No one is perfect.

The place is Newfoundland, where our protagonist – it would be hard to call him a hero – Quoyle, a journalist down on his luck, comes with his aunt, a very tough old bird, and his two daughters. The atmosphere is awash with salt water and conversation and work half done. The sea and the wind and the vagaries of the human heart in equal proportions fuel the narrative. Slowly, Quoyle and his aunt, whose ancestors have come from this place, start to fit in with life in Newfoundland, becoming immensely lovable and credible characters. Proulx has the ability to make the most ordinary moments in their lives shine with a luminous grace, at times a mild incandescence. She keeps the novel moving in scenes which are constantly unexpected and original.

In writing about the Sicilian Mafia at home in the playing fields of the USA, Mario Puzo created a universal fairy tale in which, crossing Greek gods with Robin Hood, he produced a new race of heroes, criminals of honour, murderers with a sense of justice.

Such are the Corleones, ruled by Don Vito, the Godfather, a man who protects all who belong to him. Within his kingdom he is omnipotent, capable of arranging for the decapitation of a horse and its insertion into a recalcitrant’s bed whilst tending tomatoes in his back garden. When we meet him, just after the Second World War, the Mafia are on the point of change; drugs have entered the scene, and ritual warfare breaks out between the Mafia families. Corleone’s sons, the rumbustious Sonny and the deceptive Michael, move to centre stage, encircled by a gallery of Mafiosi men and women, following the descent into open warfare like the chorus in an opera. And indeed, in its viciously orchestrated finale, this is what
The Godfather
is seen to be – a grand opera, in words and action, its voice reaching the heavens.

One of the reasons
The Godfather
, the movie, is one of the best ever made is that this novel bursts with Puzo’s romantic
characterization
and unfailing verve for storytelling; it is one of the most popular ever written.

The novel opens in London towards the close of the Second World War. A shadowy intelligence department discerns a statistical correlation between American GI Tyrone Slothrop’s sexual
encounters
and V2 rocket hits. The implicit pun – cockup or conspiracy? – is typical and encapsulates one central unresolved theme of this complex novel. The wider canvas of the book is a phantasmagoric vision of Europe at melting point, a teeming zone where national borders and fixed identities of every kind have dissolved into a shimmering chaos of aggressively competing interests. Everyone is a displaced person. But out of the chaos the future is embodied in multinational corporations which transcend old boundaries and variously exploit, encourage, depend on and serve the demands of emerging technologies. As the secrets of the rocket are gathered and assembled, the autonomous human subject is disassembled: Slothrop literally disintegrates as a character. There are vast numbers of other characters and emblematic presences and set pieces idiomatically based on literary and film genres and cultural forms. Mysticism, drug culture, political history, pornography, cabaret, slapstick, comic books and gangster movies all provide frames of reference. Pynchon’s sympathies are clearly with the underground, the alternative and the unofficial.

Linguistically,
Gravity’s Rainbow
is extremely inventive, its densely textured, hallucinogenic prose keeping us off-balance and engaged, as well as entertained and astonished.

Antoinette Cosway, the first Mrs Rochester, is the madwoman in the attic at Thornfield Hall who haunts Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre.
Wide Sargasso Sea
is set in Jamaica in the 1830s. Antoinette tells us of her childhood on the lush island, with its superstition and troubled colonial inheritance and, hovering over her family, an expression of the decadence of the white community, madness. Antoinette is an heiress and is married off to Rochester on his arrival in Jamaica. Fragile and unloved, she has little to seduce him with except the spells and magic of the island. The cadenced words Rhys uses, breathing the winds and smells of the islands, have a seductive, languid force which cruelly exposes Antoinette’s failure.

But the first Mrs Rochester is no more than an imaginative starting point for Jean Rhys to imply larger meanings. In all her novels she is the great chronicler of the unprotected. Here, in dreamlike, exquisite prose, she recreates an experience of madness which is one of the most affecting in literature. Antoinette’s fate resonates, it is symbolic. For Rochester can never discover the secrets of the islands; Rhys reveals them to be the forces that lie dormant in the weak, fluttering, disregarded beneath the political, racial and sexual tyrannies of the strong.

There are very few popular novels as strange as this one, in which Anne Rice began her journey into the world of vampires, beings of beauty and horror whom she uses to tell us about how and what we are.

Interview with the Vampire
famously begins with a boy in a room in San Francisco, listening, with a tape recorder, to the life story of Louis, since 1791 a reluctant vampire consumed with anguish for his lost mortal world. For two centuries he has endured the life of a vampire, awake only at night, nauseated that he must kill human beings to survive. New Orleans is the setting, and in that ravishing city Louis’s longing for redemption conflicts with the outrageous enthusiasm for evil of his companion, the vampire Lestat. Vampires live – and love – and drink blood for ever, so the story Louis tells moves out to encompass other vampires’ extravagant experiences.

Anne Rice imagines her erotic and mysterious tale in prose which is luscious, decadent, rueful. The reader is transfixed by writing of intense sexuality, conveying desire and desperation with vehement force. With Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
and Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
, this is one of the great tales of the supernatural, a mythic exposition of the meaning of good and evil.

It is the 1960s. Jake Hersh and his large Jewish family have moved from Montreal to London, where he sets about making his career as a film director and raising his children. This novel is about the fate of being Jewish, male, ambitious and Canadian during those years. Jake’s wallet and his penis, not to speak of his conscience, also play important roles in the novel. He is constantly under siege from producers; from his father; from his shadowy cousin who flits about the world as gambler, singer, horseman, rake and freedom fighter; as well as from the taxman; from an old friend who is slowly becoming rich and famous; and from his own mortality. He has broken his father’s heart by marrying the beautiful Nancy, who is a gentile, and now he has also broken his mother’s heart by being accused in an obscenity trial. This does not prevent her arriving in London to be by his side: she is nosy, racist and aggressive, and she drives Jake and Nancy out of their minds.