Saville by David Storey

As you can see from the date of this entry, it has been quite some time since I last blogged about a Booker winner. Part of that is due to the length of the book: Saville is nearly as long as the three previous books combined. But even so, it shouldn't have taken more than a week to finish David Storey's novel.

The problem was, it was dull. Painfully so. The story of Colin Saville, son of a Yorkshire coal miner, it explores the early years of his life in detail. Excruciating detail. From before his birth, to childhood, to school, to young adulthood, we see every aspect of Colin's life.

That's not bad in and of itself--the problem is that Colin is a character both passive and opaque. There is no insight to what he actually thinks or feels until more than halfway through the book. Page 356 to be exact--it was such a surprise to actually get some insight to his character that I remembered the page number.

Even that brief glimpse of enlightenment turns out to be a bit of a mirage, as after that, he never describes his thoughts or his feelings himself--instead, he only denies whatever words of description anyone else ever applies toward him. "No" is his most-used word.

Though he remains as opaque as ever, he does break out of his passivity--sort of. He transforms from an obliging youth to a bitter, whiny, self-centered young man, always ready to lay the blame onto others. Though I believe the term was not widely used at the time the novel was written and published, Colin appears to be the epitome of the passive-aggressive type.

Essentially, Saville is the story of the tragedy that occurs when a person of limited ambition does what he is told to do, but then finds himself unhappy with his reward. Such a story is certainly worth telling, but Saville isn't it. It's one of those novels where everything interesting happens offstage, and the truly interesting characters are only bit players in the story.

The novel ends with the protagonist finally leaving home, striking out independently for the first time in his life, going beyond the village that he hadn't left before--but the novel stops before he's actually even left yet. That's the story I want to read. I don't want to wallow in the story of a failure--I want to see what he does about it. It's no fun being in the head of a person with no passion. I want to find out what plans he has, what goals he's going to set.

With a completely passive protagonist, the novel is a massive exercise in frustration.

I read a quote from Francis King, who was one of the jury members the year that Saville won the Booker prize. She claims that it won solely because the other two jury members were a committed socialistic poet, and the wife of a Labour Prime Minister, respectively, and because they saw Saville as a piece of Socialist literature. Well, that's as may be, but that hardly seems to be a valid reason for rewarding an author.

Next up: Staying On by Paul Scott.

Postscript: I just want to quote the blurb on the back of the paperback edition that I read:

Against the harsh beauty of a Yorkshire landscape swept up in the turbulent passions of overwhelming social change, SAVILLE unfolds the rich human saga of a gifted young man's fierce struggle to achieve a higher destiny--one that would tear him from everyone he loved.

Colin Saville, coal miner's son, a deeply driven and complex man, fulfills his father's dream and his own consuming ambition when he wins the scholarship that will take him beyond his parents' humble world--and the two women who loved him--to a life they can neither accept nor understand.

What a load of baloney. That sounds nothing like the book I read or the protagonist in the book. What kind of bodice-ripping romantic figure are they trying to turn him into? This is an example of why marketing people are evil.

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Prior to reading this novel, my experience with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's writings was limited to the sole Merchant Ivory film I have ever seen, the tremendously boring A Room with a View, for which she was the screenwriter.

Maybe it did have good acting: it did feature Simon Callow, Maggie Smith, Daniel Day-Lewis, Denholm Elliott. But it was so very, very dull. As I recall, the film lasted most of the 1980's. Probably because of the sheer boredom, I never bothered watching another Merchant Ivory film: they all appeared to be very pretty movies where brilliant British thespians stood around, failing to do anything interesting.

So, I erased any expectations I might have when I began reading Heat and Dust, Jhabvala's slim 1975 novel. I found it to be an engrossing and beautifully written story of cultural seduction.

The novel tells two stories, nearly completely parallel to each other. In the novel's present day, the narrator, an independent young woman from England, travels to India to visit the site where her grandfather had lived. He had been a colonial, born and raised in India, but still completely western in attitude. The main draw for the narrator is the story, only whispered about among her relations, of her grandfather's first wife, who had deserted him to run off with a minor Indian prince. Scenes of the narrator adjusting to life in India--where the mundanities of daily life that had changed little over a half-century--alternate with scenes in 1923, with an India during the waning days of British rule.

I should point out that revealing that Olivia, the young wife in 1923, runs off with an Indian potentate at the book's climax hardly counts as a spoiler, as that information is revealed in the first two pages of the book. The plot is not so important as how the plot is spun.

The modern India that the narrator arrives at is a country that has been independent for a quarter-century, where the standard of living for the average person is much the same as it ever was: in hot weather, everyone sleeps outside, dysentery and other disease are universal, there are more folk remedies than modern medicine. Though the caste system is only referred to in passing, there is still an aversion to one's person being "polluted."

But there are also changes--the westerners still to be found are not colonial masters, but rather pupils--people flocking to the east in search of enlightenment, in whatever form it comes. Most of them are disillusioned by the realities of life in the subcontinent: enlightened India still has robbers and swindler--and most of all, disease, and the twin irritations that make up the books title.

At the same time, the modern Indians are confused, and not a little insulted by the westerners who have everything praising the life of people who have nothing. They may not have much in the way of material goods, but they certainly know when they are being patronized by people with a facile knowledge of eastern philosophy.

In 1923, there is no such fascination with Indian religion among the youth of Britain--though perhaps Olivia finds herself becoming fascinated with this country that is new to her--unlike her husband Douglas, she was not born in India, but England. Much, perhaps most of day-to-day life is frightful. The intemperate weather, the disease, and most of all, the isolation. The isolation is tempered when she comes to meet the Nawab of Khatm, the local prince. The Nawab is fascinated by Europe, or perhaps just the luxuries of European life. He is still inextricably Indian. It may not be his Indianness so much as his charismatic personality that draws Olivia to him.

Her husband refuses to socialize with the Nawab, for reasons he does not reveal. He compels Olivia to snub him, but soon she is seeing him regularly, without telling her husband. She goes so far as to refuse to go to the mountain retreat with the rest of the British wives during the excruciatingly hot months before monsoon season. She says it's because she cannot leave her husband--and she might not be lying. Her feelings for her husband may be as strong as those for the Nawab.

In modern times, the narrator follows the story by reading Olivia's letters, and by visiting the various places that Olivia, Douglas and the Nawab lived and walked fifty years previously. Like Olivia, she finds herself in an unexpectedly complicated situation--similar enough to Olivia's that one begins to wonder if she is trying to live on Olivia's behalf, or perhaps she's simply a very dedicated historian.

Ultimately, both Olivia and the narrator are seduced by the country itself. Olivia is overwhelmed by it, the narrator seems to take it more in stride, though perhaps there's a massive disillusionment yet to come.

Jhabvala finds beauty despite the squalor--sometimes within the squalor, although the squalor itself is never ignored: in a country with many people with dysentery, there's obviously going to be a lot of crap. I like her portrayal of Indians. They are not mythologized as noble savages--there are quite obviously going to be scoundrels among them. They are all very distinct in personality. She does an excellent job in portraying those personalities.

She does indulge in mockery of the hippies who come to India looking for enlightenment, but it's a gentle mockery, and she appears to have affection and even admiration for their drive.

It's a lovely novel with a gripping story, and one of the best novels I've read so far while on this journey through the Bookers.

Speaking of which, Heat and Dust was the ninth Booker Prize winning novel I've read so far out of 45 total, which means I'm one-fifth of the way through. To date, the best novel has been Troubles by J. G. Farrell. Heat and Dust would be the second-best, while Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur and Stanley Middleton's Holiday are also worth mentioning. The only two I really didn't like among the first nine are The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer and The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens.

Next up is Saville by David Storey.

Holiday by Stanley Middleton

On two occasions has the Booker Prize been awarded to two winning novels in the same year. In 1974, Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist and Stanley Middleton's Holiday were the lucky two.

Gordimer's The Conservationist is clearly the better regarded of the two. It is still in print and widely available. Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1991, and The Conservationist was shortlisted for the "Best of the Booker" for the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize. Holiday was out of print for many years and was so completely forgotten that the Times of London sent the novel's opening chapter to 20 different literary agents in the guise of a young author trying to get published, and the work was unrecognized by all of them.

So you won't be surprised to discover that I liked Holiday much more than The Conservationist.

It's a story told fairly simply: there are numerous flashbacks, but not needlessly obscure. Nor are there any effects to estrange the reader from the characters in the story.

Edwin Fisher, employed in academia, is on holiday in a town called Bealthorpe, an old-style seaside resort, rather twee and dusty. There's little more to do there than to take walks, sit on the beach, enjoy the kind of entertainments that were old hat thirty years ago, and go to the pub. And talk.

Edwin talks to many people. He does so almost against his will, because that's what his father used to do, and he is tremendously embarrassed by the memory of his father. But talk he does. "Nature is fine, human nature finer," he quotes more than once.

Edwin is married. He's at the resort alone. Why is he alone? Where is the wife? Everyone asks him this, and he never gives a straight answer. We learn that there has been some trouble. The marriage is over. And Edwin discovers, to his chagrin, that his in-laws are visiting that same resort town.

During his holiday, he splits his time between negotiating with his parents-in-law over what it would take to reconcile, and being both friendly to and standoffish from the people he meets--his fellow hotel guests, some bikinied girls on the beach.

We see more and more flashbacks of Edwin's marriage to his wife Meg. Her reactions seem outlandish and dramatic, though it's probable that they are simply thrown in sharper relief by Edwin's tweediness. It's very possible that he's an unreliable narrator.

Ultimately, the novel seems to be the story of a man who has lived such a male life in such a male world, that he simply does not find himself able to live with someone who does not seem to respect masculine primacy. Edwin Fisher may be the 60's/70's British version of the modern man-child. Unlike the TV show and toy obsessions of today's man-child, Edwin occupies himself with nostalgia and quotes, a pat on the head, and a half-crown to go to the pictures with.

Middleton's prose is beautiful and clear, and he paints a vivid images of a long-gone England that was so very old even back when it was relatively new. He creates characters who can talk, who like to talk, and who like to talk with people who like to talk.

If there is any flaw, it is that the novel ends a bit too quickly, that the ending is just a bit too pat and convenient to fit what we know of the flawed and broken characters.

But then again, by that point, the holiday is over, and there isn't further time for sitting around.

Next up: Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

This was a hard novel to read. Not hard in the James Joyce sense--Nadine Gordimer didn't make up words (though there were a handful of Afrikaner terms that sometimes took some puzzling or looking-up). Quite a lot of it was written in a stream-of-consciousness style, and what made it harder was the difficulty in deciphering whose consciousness is being streamed. Eventually, I had to give up trying to figure whose thoughts or words were whose at any given moment, and simply take in the novel as a whole, and try and sort it out later.

So: Nadine Gordimer is a South African writer and liberal. During the old apartheid regime, some of her works were banned in her native land, and she was a member of the illegal ANC. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. The Conservationist was published in 1974 and was a co-winner of the Booker Prize that year.

The protagonist, Mehring, is a rich and successful South African businessman in his 40's. He lives a life on the road, mostly for business, flying to Europe, Japan, Brazil. When he's back in South Africa, he spends his weekends at a farm he bought in what is apparently an attempt to bring back--what? His youth? Not really--his memories of youth seem primarily centered around his first seduction, that of a married woman more than twice his age during the war years. An idealized home for a family? Except he's extremely divorced and completely detached from his only son. Eventually, he uses his farm as bait: an idyllic getaway and trysting site for whatever woman he's currently pursuing.

It's hard to tell the women apart, actually. There is a female voice, very strident and liberal (and privileged) throughout the novel that is never explicitly identified. His ex-wife? Or perhaps a consolidation of all the women he's ever lusted after?

Except that "lusted" implies passion of some kind, and Mehring does not appear to have any. Virtually the only passion he shows is anger at black children collecting the eggs of guinea fowl on his farm: he hates to see the fowl disappearing.

While the majority of the book is told from Mehring's approximate point of view, others do come to the forefront occasionally: Jacobus, the farm overseer, who handles the day-to-day running of the farm, Jacobus's family members and underlings, the Indians who run the local general store. All of these people live in the margins of society, most of them surviving despite illegal working status due to bribery or anonymity.

Perhaps the key to the book is the dead body that is discovered at the beginning of the novel. A black man is dead, quite possibly murdered. The police claim to have limited resources and are unable to take care of matters immediately, so they take the extraordinary step of burying the body, with the intention of digging it up again later and investigating it at some unknown point in the future. Of course they never do, and Mehring would submit a strongly-worded complaint to the authorities--but he can't be bothered. Ultimately, the only matters he takes an active hand in is chasing after women far younger than himself--or perhaps he only seemingly is the active party in those cases, and is really drawn in, irrelevant of his own actions.

Gordimer is a wordsmith with a poetic use of language. Her descriptions of people and places are also vivid and beautiful. More's the pity that reading the novel is such a frustrating experience. Everyone is passive, waiting for the end, possibly a destructive one--perhaps this was a novel that had a greater impact prior to the end of apartheid, since we now know that the system ended relatively peacefully via reform rather than violent revolution.

In the end, a difficult read that was more of a chore to get through than any other novel so far on this journey. It was possible to take pleasure in some of the detail, but the larger forms did not seem worth the effort.

Next up: 1974's other Booker Prize winner, Holiday by Stanley Middleton.