Robert Taubman

The voices in A Chain of Voices are those of 30 characters, Boer farmers and their hired labourers and slaves, in the Cape in the early 19th century. The voices are ‘all different yet all the same’: they have a situation in common, and its main features are oppression and revolt. The novel is a series of interior monologues, which record the events of a local slave rising in the Bokkeveld in 1825, the individual histories of those concerned, and the folk memories that help to explain the situation:

Milan Kundera says of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that ‘it is a novel about Tamina, and whenever Tamina is absent, it is a novel for Tamina.’ He says this in the novel, in which he himself appears and invents Tamina. Modern satirical fantasy, of which this is an exceptionally lively and thoughtful example, gives everyone the same fictional status: the author, his characters, historical figures, angels. Part of the game is to try to tell them apart and sort out illusion from reality. The novel contains seven stories with other stories dovetailed into them, and the stories meet in a dialectical encounter with history and theory. Theories of laughter and of blackbird populations occur, and yet there are no digressions. Everything is beautifully and amazingly in place. He also says ‘it is a novel about laughter and forgetting, about forgetting and Prague, about Prague and the angels.’ Dovetailed into the angels are the opposite, anti-angels: Kundera has double-meanings as well as dialectics in his province. The first of the two stories called ‘The Angels’ is about laughter, an Ionesco play, Paul Eluard, astrology and fear; and the bad and stupid characters end, in this story, by ascending to heaven. It’s not the puzzle of what this means that catches the attention, but the feat of holding the story together at all. One admires the tour de force of linking seriousness and nonsense, the high-speed cutting between them, the play element that lets fantasy have its head and the intelligence that controls it. The autonomy of such a story tends to put it beyond interpretation.

Rabbit novels come out at the turn of each decade, like a series of reports on the state of America. Rabbit is rich, the third and latest, takes place in Brewster, Pennsylvania, from June 1979 into 1980. Rabbit – as Harry Angstrom is still known to himself – runs a Toyota agency; his scene is now the country club, the golf course and the Bahamas on a wife-swapping holiday. The novel is effortlessly informing about time and place; about smart money and car dealing, what they say about Chappaquiddick, TV ads, the contents of a bathroom cabinet. This is a corner of America in a mood of complacence ample enough to admit self-criticism, provoked in particular by the oil crisis and the queues at petrol stations. Flags are at half-mast for the hostages in Iran. God, who used to be present to Harry in his childhood, has withdrawn, ‘giving Harry the respect due from one well-off gentleman to another’: but a consolation is that ‘not only is the Pope coming but the Dalai Lama they bounced out of Tibet twenty years ago is going round the USA talking to divinity schools and appearing on TV talk shows.’ Much scope for criticism of America is offered, but not inadvertently, for the criticism is all made or implied in the novel itself. And Updike’s trend-spotting instincts are not just alert to news-items but sustain whole scenes of social comedy, as in the marriage preparations of Nelson, Rabbit’s son and now his greatest trial. All this, even the dirty talk that grates plausibly on the ear, is so good, so alive, that one wishes Updike would stick with realism and forget about Rabbit and the meaning of life.

Paul Theroux is the author of The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express. He is better-known for these than for his nine novels. The novels are extraordinarily different from each other, and haven’t given a distinct image of Theroux as a novelist. He has set them in Kenya, Malawi, Singapore, London, Dorset, Cape Cod, and now in Honduras; and produced as many different kinds of novel. Graham Greene ranges as widely, but the Greene themes and style impose them selves; and Theroux has written on V.S. Naipaul’s themes. Apparently his own work doesn’t have the same sort of continuities.

With ‘nothing else to do but the impossible’, when revolution breaks out in South Africa, Bam and Maureen Smales accept their house servant’s offer of refuge in his tribal village 600 kilometres from Johannesburg. They are all decent people – the two white liberals, their young children, the trusted servant, the peaceable villagers. All human instinct argues that this is not, after all, an impossible situation. Nadine Gordimer, in her unsparing new novel, suggests otherwise. Her recent Burger’s Daughter, though bleak in its conclusions, was more diffuse and humane; it dealt with an earlier stage in South African history. Set only a little later in time, and in a much smaller compass, the round mud hut roofed in thatch in a village of round huts, ‘its circles encircled by the landscape’, as in a photographer’s view of ‘the single community of man-and-nature-in-Africa’, July’s People reaches conclusions that are not just bleak but hopeless. Community of man and nature is only an irony in a book about the absolute failure of community between men.