Patrick Parrinder

The folks that live on the hill? It’s not exactly what you’d expect of a Kingsley Amis title, but in another two years the old devil will be 70 and perhaps he is beginning to mellow. John McDermott remarks in his appealing study of Amis’s novels that the hero-as-shit, at large in a world of mutual animosity and obsessive self-interest, is one of their most characteristic figures. In The folks that live on the hill the hero-as-shit has given way to the hero-as-patriarch. Harry Caldecote, a retired librarian, heads an extended family of the weak, the lost and the habitually drunk who constantly turn to him for assistance. Harry feels mysteriously responsible for his tribe of feckless relatives. Outside his family, he is fondly regarded by the shopkeepers, bartenders and minicab drivers of Shepherd’s Hill, his chosen patch of North London. Folksiness in Amis’s new novel is only intermittently an object of satire.

Christopher, the new Columbus, is conceived on a beach at Acapulco at the beginning of 1992. Mexico’s overseas debt stands at $1492 billion, soon to rise to $1992 billion, and the Yucatan peninsula has been ceded to the Club Mediterranée in the vain hope of paying the interest. The population of Mexico, or Makesicko, City has reached thirty million human beings and four times as many rats. Further north, the greater part of the old republic has been annexed by the United States, and further north still the Last Playboy Centerfold Contest is being held in Chicago – perhaps the one cheerful prophecy that Carlos Fuentes has to offer. Meanwhile, Chile is struck by a catastrophic earthquake, so that the whole country together with General Pinochet (who is still its leader) dissolves like a sugar lump into the sea.’

‘Stirrings’ are, among many other things, what poetry can cause in us, as I.A. Richards once noted. In a notorious passage in Practical Criticism, Richards suggested that a good test of a poem’s sincerity would be to meditate for a while on the following topics: 1. Man’s loneliness (the isolation of the human situation). 2. The facts of birth, and of death, in their inexplicable oddity. 3. The inconceivable immensity of the universe. 4. Man’s place in the perspective of time. 5. The enormity of his ignorance. The poem should then be recited, slowly and silently, and, Richards thought, ‘whether what it can stir in us is important or not to us will, perhaps, show itself then.’

Driving across America, one of the characters in Richard Powers’s new novel remarks that the whole country has become a gigantic theme park. The same impression might have been gained from reading American novels, or from going to the movies. From Oklahoma to Mount Rushmore, and from the Devil’s Tower to Zabriskie Point, the activities of being on the road and imagining being on the road feed into one another, as one might expect. More generally, the principle of growth in American fiction has often coincided with the search for new places to mythologise, which is why the Science Fiction of galactic empires is such a typically American form.