A miscellany
Things whirling past that caught my eye
Things are a bit delayed this week because I had planned to reread Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch so as to prepare a proper essay on it, but was distracted by the arrival of a copy of my grandfather’s memoirs; also, I bought a car, which is a surprisingly time consuming operation.
Three things I can say about Nonesuch without rereading. First, two examples of technical skill: Francis writes astonishingly well about sex, both here, and in the two previous novels. He does so without crudity, although it is always clear who does what and to whom. But he seems to me far superior in this to either DH Lawrence, who is too pompous about it, or Updike, who is impersonal. When Updike describes an act he tells us, vividly, what it felt like to Updike. When Francis does, we know how it feels to his characters, and, bundled with the feeling, what it means to them — and showing how some action shifts the meaning of the world for a character is the reason for putting any scene in a novel.
Second, and relatedly, he writes very well about love, and the way that characters are surprised by it. Here is one scene which seems to me to have the plain unsentimental impact, like a cleaver falling, of C.S. Lewis at his best:
‘Well, I’m not one of those. Or anything like that. I’m just Iris, who loves you.’
The instant she said this, a spasm of panic ran through her: that she might have trapped herself, said something irretrievable, after which she would no longer be her own. Followed by an equally acute confusion. Was this what people meant, when they talked about being ‘in love’? No hearts, no flowers, no moonlight serenade; this awkward, clumsy, sticky, exposed, unbearable, unleavable thing? But Geoff smiled at her, and gathered her up and rolled her over on top of him, so that instead of crumpled sheets in the summer heat, she was lying on Geoff, Geoff, and more Geoff. Outside, somewhere far off south of the river, there was a thudding and a droning, and the world got on with possibly ending. She thought: is it wrong to be so happy?
The last of these quick thoughts is about the Christian character of the novel. So far I have been concerned with the technical, and perhaps the moral, acuity with which the characters are brought to life. But what are the unanswerable questions they must face? Right at the end, Iris, who has been so joyful, brave, and ultimately successful, is offered the chance undo a terrible mistake she had made years before the story opens. She takes the chance, and wakes in another timeline, where — it seems — she never will meet Geoff. And the awful thing is that I found myself longing for her not to undo the past, for Lord Jim to jump again. Put into Christian terms, Francis has shown us that a world without sin is also one without the possibility of redemption, that the first Adam is needed if the second Adam is to come. Now, I’m not sure that I believe this, or even feel I ought to. But at least I understand the proposition now.
Of course, these ruminations will only occur to a mind prepared, or preoccupied, with such questions. The novel can and ought to be enjoyed as a romp. But — as with other uses of the verb “to romp” — there’s a lot going on under the surface.
In other news, my grandfather’s memoir contains much that is shocking today. One should expect this, from a man who joined the Indian Civil Service in 1907, and who believed profoundly that it had been good for the people he ruled over. But 1907 was only fifty years after the Mutiny, as he called it, and in his first year in India he met an elderly man who had been taken by his father, as a ten-year-old, to watch the mutineers being blown from the mouths of cannon. We like to think we have outgrown performative, public displays of cruelty, but it’s not clear to me how that is worse than sharing video footage of people being slaughtered on battlefields in the Ukraine and elsewhere.
Talking of battlefields, I just caught this from Michael Lind, and it’s well worth further distribution:
Post-Cold War America has repeated the strategic mistake of leaders in London in the three decades after 1945, when Britain imagined that it was still a major power because its troops were still machine-gunning natives in places like Kenya and Oman, even as it lost its manufacturing leadership to Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan; Uncle Sam is the new Colonel Blimp.
From Unherd.
A surprise miscellany of musings.