Philip Horne

Lisa St Aubin de Teran’s The Slow Train to Milan and Clare Boylan’s Holy Pictures share a subject – girls growing up to a world whose language is new to them – which demands close attention to the register of words and sentences, a measure of novelty and an enactment of surprise. Many of their sentences glint with recognitions, giving back a fine pleasure out of the often painful misunderstandings and reverses they render. In their careful sense of a vanishing past, their evocation of innocences not quite departed with the loss of ignorance, the best passages of both books offer a firm, affectionate hold on formative passages of life.–

In his book on Flaubert and Madame Bovary, called The Perpetual Orgy (1975) – the title is a phrase of Flaubert’s for the life of writing – Mario Vargas Llosa says what he likes in novels: ‘the greatest satisfaction a novel can give me is by stimulating, as I read, my admiration for some act of rebellion; my anger at some stupidity or injustice; my fascination with those histrionically distorted situations of excessive emotionalism that … have always been part of literature, because they have probably always been part of life; and my desire.’ This checklist of stipulated affects, to be brought on by ‘revolt, violence, melodrama and sex’, recalls, by its candid crudity, Sam Fuller’s striking definition of a film, early in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou, as ‘Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word … Emotion’. Vargas Llosa’s highly-coloured set of preferences is explicitly presented as a matter of temperament, something to be dealt with and built on, and he takes for an epigraph in The Perpetual Orgy the remark of Flaubert’s friend Louis Bouilhet that ‘our admiration is only complete for works that satisfy both the temperament and the mind.’ What happens in this recently translated novel (which came out in Spanish in 1977, two years after the Flaubert book) is that Vargas Llosa excitingly turns his mind to this temperamental predilection, both in himself and others, by a double plotting of the ‘pure’ melodrama of radio soap operas against the real texture of ordinary life – a process designed, as he has said, ‘to discover in that real life, in that version of ordinary life, the melodrama of a soap opera’.–

The order in which we read the short stories in a collection makes a difference. Our hopping and skipping out of sequence can often disturb the lines or blunt the point of a special arrangement, lose us the pleasure of seeing large intentions emerge. Jumping to the end of Joyce’s Dubliners to get at ‘The Dead’, for a familiar instance, would considerably obscure the generous force in that story’s sympathetic pressing of its attention beyond and away from the social medium of public occasions on which its first half, like the three preceding stories, works – and into a tenderer, more private world. A successful sequence can build up different sorts of unity and we need to be careful not to run the pieces together into a single work like the chapters of a novel, and at the same time, in the case of a single author, to look out for the coherence of a sensibility, the various achievements of a style. A Nails on the Head, a first collection of stories by the Irish writer, Clare Boylan, whose admirable first novel, Holy Pictures, came out in February, satisfyingly gives us a dramatic logic of sequence without renouncing the particularity of each of its 15 elements: patterns of recurrence and variation set up a creative tension. For example, when it creeps up on the reader that the stories are beginning to have mad central characters, the exciting sense that each tale is a fresh start is enjoyably qualified by an ominous suspense. A great deal of one’s pleasure in such a collection, and such a connection, comes from the way in which its inter-relatedness renders a critical interest over and above that of the sum of parts we are permitted formally to count on.–

Perhaps because of its concentration on people’s circumstances and constraints, the novel is often concerned with freedoms under threat and forms of liberation. The generality ‘freedom’ is much bandied about in the world at large, of course, mostly with a bland or fierce prejudice in its favour: misapplied, it can lead to terrible blunders. An aspect of the value of the novel is therefore its power to examine the conditions of freedom in particular cases, to refresh our sense of what this tortured word can mean. In proportion as the novel brings us into contact with the pressures of a particular predicament, moreover, we may feel ourselves liberated from the generalising entrapments of ‘freedom’ into a consciousness of urgent special dilemmas from which catchwords can bring no real release. The freedom of the imagination is not necessarily greatest in imagining freedom: or rather, as in Ann Schlee’s novel and George Konrad’s, it is where social and psychological pressures are most intense that we get from art our purest expressions of freedom.

Television recently showed a likable young man from Florida who had committed an atrocious murder giving evidence in court against his ‘accomplice’, whose trial had been thrown open to the cameras. The photographs of the victim’s wounds were sickening, but the softly-spoken young man went back over the sequence of incompetent brutalities which produced them with unbroken equanimity. Interviewed outside the courtroom, he was deferential and polite in explaining why it had been sensible for him to turn State’s Evidence; and as he talked, he coughed, his hand went demurely up to cover his mouth, and he murmured: ‘Excuse me.’ Looking for a qualitative deviation in the murderer’s demeanour, a frightening glint or a nervous tic by which to know him for different, we were baffled by his ordinariness; anxious not to be thought ill-mannered, he held out no greater token of a need for forgiveness than this piece of social small-change.