D.A.N. Jones

Would we buy a used car from Norman Lewis? He certainly seems to know a lot about them. There is a picture on the dust-cover of the young Lewis (he was born in 1918) proudly at the wheel of a Bugatti, and he describes, too briefly, his dangerous experience with such a machine at Brooklands in 1939, his last adventure in serious motor-racing. In the Thirties he used to buy second-hand cars in Italy, to be done up and sold in Britain. We might guess, from his novels and travel-books, that Lewis would make a persuasive salesman; but this ‘Autobiography’ might also persuade us that he is inclined to exaggerate. He has often written in a cool, unsurprised, almost entertaining way about gruesome events in four continents – like a Martian anthropologist, sometimes. It comes as a relief when he expresses astonishment or indignation: his traveller’s-tales are made more credible.’

Marguerite Duras describes a crowd in French Indo-China (in 1930): ‘The clatter of wooden clogs is ear-splitting, the voices strident, Chinese is a language that’s shouted the way I always imagine desert languages are, it’s a language that’s incredibly foreign.’ This impression is familiar to me, from National Service days in Hong Kong and the British New Territories. Yet, at the same time, Chinese poetry does sometimes seem to translate more readily into English than French poetry does, partly because its beauty does not depend so much upon the sound. Chinese ‘ideograms’, as the dictionaries put it, ‘symbolise a thing or an idea but not a particular word or phrase for it’. When Cantonese audiences watch a film in Mandarin, they have subtitles (printed vertically, on either side of the screen), for they cannot understand the sounds: but they share the same ideograms for the things and ideas. This fact about the Chinese language, or languages, has a bearing on both the style and the subject-matter of Dai Houying’s impressive novel about modern China in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution: the poetry is in the things and ideas, the clash of ideograms in challenge and response, not in sounds, echoes, national resonances. Stones of the Wall, though deeply concerned with love between men and women, is quite remarkably different from The Lover – and ‘goes into English’ more easily.’

Security is the problem that exercises both Philip Roth and Raymond Williams. The sort of ‘security’ I mean is the sort that spreads a feeling of insecurity – a fear of surveillance, bugging, secret cameras, interrogation, the false smile of Mr Nice and the sincere snarl of Mr Nasty. Security men are sometimes clumsy and might cause us inconvenience through their category mistakes. For instance, in the Middle East last year, I decided not to post an urgent letter to a man in America whose Germanic name ends in ‘berg’: some conscientious Arab policeman might hold up my letter for careful, stupid scrutiny, assuming (like an Arab terrorist) that ‘berg’ equals ‘Jew’ equals ‘Zionist’. This is the kind of insecurity that Philip Roth explores in The Prague Orgy. His American hero, the famous Nathan Zuckerman, spends a few days in Czechoslovakia in 1976, is bugged the whole time and finally ushered out of the country by a passport officer with the courteous farewell: ‘Ah, Zuckerman, the Zionist agent. An honour to have entertained you here, sir.’ When Zuckerman is talking to a Czech who wishes to marry him, she gestures toward the bugged chandelier and passes him a note: ‘You cannot trust Czech police to understand ANYTHING, even in Czech. You must speak CLEAR and SLOW and LOUD.’’

A girl and three men are riding westward from London when a fifth rider joins them, a man in a red coat and dragoon’s hat. The year is 1736 and they are on horseback. Arriving at a Devonshire country inn, they tell the innkeeper and an intrusive parson about themselves and the purpose of their journey, but we suspect them of lying. They are an odd set, by the standards of both 1736 and 1985.

It is obvious that Isabel Allende’s novel about Chile, The House of the Spirits, has something about it that appeals to women readers: but I cannot imagine what that something is. ‘Magical realism’ is the vogue-word: but this seems to me a farrago of fantasy-triggers. I was astonished when Marina Warner asserted on television that the book ‘gives you an astonishing understanding of a political situation’. On the same day, Marilyn Butler was equally effusive on Radio 3 and Hermione Lee assured us in the Observer that the author has ‘impeccably heroic socialist and feminist credentials’. My daughter-in-law brought home Cosmopolitan with a long extract, prettily illustrated, and an astounding comment from Emma Dally: ‘Although it is not a “women’s novel”, the strength of the female characters is quite astounding.’ Isabel Allende herself on television has described these figments as ‘strong women who are somehow opposite to violence and torture, all this male world’. They had struck me as rather ineffectual ladies.