Nicholas Spice

A Labour victory in the 1987 British General Election would have been a good thing for The Book and the Brotherhood and a disaster for The Child in Time. As it is, with Mrs Thatcher set to complete at least 13 years in office, Iris Murdoch may now be thought to look a little out of touch with the times, addressing herself to a danger – the destructive beauty of the fanatic left-wing soul – that we have, for the time being at least, left behind. Meanwhile McEwan, setting his novel several years into the future of the Thatcherite epoch, that timeless ‘on and on’ of which our leader herself has spoken, seems especially prescient and up-to-the-minute. Such are the risks of writing political fiction in democratic societies. In this instance, McEwan stood to lose far more than Murdoch has in fact lost.’

A novel may have a coherent plot, passably differentiated characters, fluent dialogue, passages of well-turned prose, and still be worthless if it isn’t also about something that matters. In this respect, the contemporary British novelist has a hard time of it, coming to the form when so much has already been said, when the necessary subjects have already been turned into novels many times over. For the African or South American, Indian or Australian novelist, it is easier to command attention, especially in the European market, where ignorance makes the reading of non-European novels a matter of basic education.

There is a certain kind of knowledge – perhaps the most important – that cannot be explicitly taught or diligently learnt. For example, a tribe of Indians on the river Xingu lives on the water. Their houses are built on stilts in the swamps and the inhabitants move from place to place by boat. The survival of the tribe depends on good boats, and the chief task of the men is to make them. The art is handed down from father to son, but without any direct instruction. The boys learn it from the men by watching them, by being around when the boats are being built.

Readers of John Updike’s previous novel, The Witches of Eastwick, will not have forgotten Darryl Van Horne’s bottom: how, at the end of a game of tennis, Darryl dropped his shorts and thrust his hairy rump into his partner’s face, demanding that she kiss it, which she did. In Roger’s Version the roles are reversed. Now it is a young woman – Verna Ekelof – who exposes herself. She is standing only a few inches from where her uncle, Roger Lambert, is sitting, so that when she lifts her skirt above her un-underpanted thighs, he finds himself face to face with ‘her pubic bush’, which he describes as ‘broad, like her face’, and, a moment later, as ‘a sea urchin on the white ocean floor’.’

Shmuel Yosef Czaczes, one of the finest writers of the 20th century, was born in 1888, in Buczacz, a small town in Galicia. Take out a large atlas and look up Buchach. You will find it in the Ukraine, about a hundred miles east of Ivano-Frankovsk (formerly Stanislav) and two hundred miles south-east of Lvov (formerly Lemberg). To the south-west lie the Carpathian mountains, and beyond them Transylvania. To the west and north, the eastern borders of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. To the north and east, the vast expanses of the Ukraine and of White Russia. At the back end of Eastern Europe, well this side of the Russia that tourists are allowed to visit, Galicia is now a forgotten zone, a part of old Europe whose existence we are not aware of and do not even know that we are not aware of. Perhaps it was always like that. In 1888, when Galicia still belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the citizens of cosmopolitan Vienna must have looked on it as the ultimate backwater. It is where A Simple Story is set, most of the novel taking place in Szybusz – Buczacz in disguise.