Patrick Parrinder

‘Fear is a powerful stimulant,’ says Offred, the heroine of Margaret Atwood’s chilling tale of the near future. Trained at the Rachel and Leah Centre and habited in red, Offred belongs to a quasi-religious order of ‘sacred vessels’, ‘two-legged wombs’ whose task it is to produce the next generation of the ruling élite in the Republic of Gilead. Gilead is a Puritan tyranny set up, after the assassination of the President and Congress of the United States, in breakaway New England; Offred herself is confined to the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the university is closed and the football stadium is used for public executions, now known as Salvagings.

Now that the three-volume novel and the circulating library are dead,’ I imagine someone as saying around the year 1900, ‘novels will have to be shorter, sharper, more up to date. The future lies with an Associated Press dispatch, not with the slow unfolding of generations. Nobody wants to read elaborate descriptions of things that might have happened, but didn’t, decades ago.’ The fact is that no prediction of the shape of the modern novel could have been more misleading than this one. Nor is it just a question of writers like Proust and Mann, who may be said to belong to the last flowering of the 19th century. In the 1980s the tradition of setting a certain kind of novel ‘one generation back’ in time remains as vital as ever. We are accustomed to the paradox that most people’s notions of the texture of life in, say, the 1830s are derived from George Eliot’s novels, written more than thirty years afterwards. Yet it is strange to consider that – after all the instant histories and TV documentaries – the versions of the 1940s and 1950s with which future generations will be most familiar may still be in process of construction.’

Is there a law of gender among fictional narratives, according to which some types are characteristically male and others characteristically female? This question – posed by some recent critics – is answered almost too neatly by the first two novels under review. Alan Sillitoe’s Life goes on is a rampant adventure-tale of a male rogue, or rogue male, on the loose between two marriages. Mary Gordon’s Men and Angels shows a happily-married heroine struggling tenaciously, in her husband’s absence, to preserve her own integrity by defending her home and children against an intruder.’

Like The Virgin in the Garden (1978) to which it is a deeper and darker-toned successor, A.S. Byatt’s Still Life has the classical English narrative setting of a generation ago. Apart from the prologue, which evokes the Post-Impressionist exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1980, the events here take place in 1954-7. Further sequels are promised, though it seems likely that this chronicle of middle-class English life has reached the half-way stage. Already its scale and substance begin to rival the sequences of C.P. Snow and Anthony Powell. Byatt’s view of the middle class centres on the Potter family: Northern, Nonconformist, and professionally preoccupied with teaching, writing, and caring for others. The poor, in this view of England, are unthinkable except as marginal presences, the objects of teaching and pastoral care. The rich come on stage from time to time to make casual, scarcely articulate raids on the Potter girls’ friendship and sexual favours. Both the narrator and the main characters testify to the centrality of what remains, in our society, of the old Puritan conscience: a continuing activity of mental exploration, a commitment to active relationship with others, the positive and forceful employment of one’s gift for words.

We name things in order to have power over them; but we must also name them to cower before them in worship. Novelists in particular are aware of the paradoxical magic of naming. To the narrative theorist, stories are made up of simple structural units, like biological cells endlessly replicating: but the novelist, who takes possession of the story by giving names to its narrative agents and formulae, is like Glendower conjuring spirits from the vasty deep but not knowing if they will come at his call. The novel is distinguished from the ancient sagas and epics by the freshness of its specification and nomination, which stamps the author’s signature (but not, in the everyday sense, his ‘personality’) on the narrative. Not only are the names in a novel its recognised trademarks, but each kind of novel embodies a different habit of nomenclature. And where names are bestowed, they may also be artfully concealed or withheld. The greatest of all novels begins with a hero of disputed name in a small village of La Mancha which the author refuses to name.