Beware Remembrance Sunday
Tim Parks
- Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift
Picador, 353 pp, £18.99, June 2011, ISBN 978 0 330 53583 0
Perhaps the finest piece of storytelling in this novel has to do with the death of a dog. Three characters are involved: Michael Luxton, a taciturn dairy farmer; Jack, his elder son, aged 26; and Tom, his much younger son, approaching his 18th birthday. The old sick dog, named Luke, was originally just a farm dog, then for many years Jack’s close companion, but now more recently Tom’s. The events are remembered by Jack, from whose point of view, although in the third person, most of the novel is narrated.
Letters
Vol. 33 No. 13 · 30 June 2011
From Dai George
Tim Parks criticises Graham Swift for letting characters in his new novel, Wish You Were Here, use words such as ‘inducement’, even though they are meant to be ‘poor with words’ (LRB, 2 June). Parks goes on to wonder whether Swift ‘can only write about his own mindset if he imagines it in these “ordinary” folk, people as different from himself as possible, even at the risk of the story’s not seeming entirely authentic?’ This could be a useful guess about Swift’s personal pathology, but I’m not sure it supplies us with a good rule for how novelists should treat their ‘ordinary’ characters. Swift would hardly be alone in giving his characters inner monologues they would find difficult to express in reality. Reading Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency recently, I’ve been struck by the highly sophisticated thoughts of its children, housewives and suburban adulterers, many of these thoughts couched in language that the narrator himself might use. The same could be said of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, a saga of provincial family angst that has plenty in common with The Northern Clemency.
To allow yourself a wider vocabulary than your characters, even as you grant the reader access to their interior lives, is not to disrespect their authenticity; it is simply to acknowledge a complexity of thought that outstrips the character’s eloquence. We all have notions and feelings that we can’t express. Part of what a good novelist does is to bring these to the surface and give form to what remains outside consciousness for the vast majority of people.
Dai George
Harrow, Middlesex
Vol. 33 No. 15 · 28 July 2011
From Tim Parks
In a review of Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here I suggested there was a discrepancy between Swift’s description of his main character, Jack, as ‘poor with words’ and the man’s constant and sometimes highly nuanced internal monologue (LRB, 2 June). Dai George rebukes me, claiming that ‘part of what a good novelist does’ is to ‘bring to the surface’ thoughts the character entertains but cannot express (Letters, 30 June). The question is a fascinating one. Is thought that is expressed in words in an interior monologue the same as thought which finds no words and perhaps doesn’t look for them or want them? Can certain ideas and forms of lucubration be entertained at all without words? If they can, is there a way of evoking them in a novel without confusing, as I believe Swift does, the articulate mind suffering from the pressure of an articulate language-driven monologue (Bernhard’s characters, Beckett’s) and the equally complex figure whose mental life is perhaps largely free from language. In his recent collection of short stories, The Empty Family, Colm Tóibín lovingly evokes the lives of Pakistani immigrants in Barcelona, using close description of movement and body language, dialogue and narrative detail to suggest a rich inner life without ever supposing that this has become an internal monologue. D.H. Lawrence was a master of such suggestion. The temptation for the novelist, who lives so much in language, is to imagine that all thought is expressed in words, words like his or her own, and indeed that word-driven consciousness is somehow superior. Perhaps the real achievement when evoking the inner life of a character who thinks of himself as ‘poor with words’ would be to suggest how rich he is without them.
Tim Parks
Milan
Vol. 33 No. 16 · 25 August 2011
From Joe Kerrigan
Tim Parks writes about the discrepancy in novels between the way a character is described and the way his interior monologue sounds (Letters, 28 July). I’ve always been puzzled by how someone as idle and ill-informed as Bertie Wooster is able, as ostensible narrator, to deliver, in subtle and nuanced prose, novels as perfectly and painstakingly constructed as, for example, The Code of the Woosters. I don’t know whether one can call up at Colindale, for the purpose of comparison, the copy of Milady’s Boudoir in which Bertie’s only piece of journalism, ‘What the Well-Dressed Young Man Is Wearing’, was published. I suppose the readiest explanation is that Jeeves did Bertie’s writing, as so much else, for him.
Joe Kerrigan
Huddersfield
