Robert Taubman

In Shikasta, some months ago, Doris Lessing engaged with space fiction at its most apocalyptic, covered aeons of time and used scores of characters, and left some doubt about her meaning. All is comparatively clear and simple in The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five, which has the form of a fable – one where values are quite explicit, characters few and the action limited to a single episode in history (history at least as it has passed into the archives of Zone Three, whose chronicler tells the story). These Zones are parts of a land mass much like Africa (one imagines), and are inhabited by very unlike peoples – as unlike, say, as Zulus and Bushmen. The fable makes use of such polarities: mountain and desert, light and dark, male and female principles. One day, the fable goes, it occurs to the Providers, who control their destinies, to arrange for the King of militaristic Zone Four to marry the Queen of gentle, intuitive Zone Three, and then in due course to marry the wild, anarchic Queen of Zone Five. These moves carry the suggestion of a game of chess, and they don’t indeed have any very subtle or original meaning: what occurred to the Providers might presumably occur to any tinkerer with utopian theories of human nature. There’s also a marked resemblance – suggested, too, in the solemn tone of the Zone Three chronicler – to an idea Thomas Mann used in his fable The Transposed Heads.

Not long after Ezra Pound, the precocious Djuna Barnes arrived in Paris already equipped with a style derived from the Jacobean dramatists and French post-symbolist poets, and so with as good a claim as any to be counted among the founders of Modernism. In 1936 T. S. Eliot warmly sponsored Nightwood, and one has heard since that her vision of Hell can be traced as an influence in Nathanael West and Malcolm Lowry, and her sort of Gothic fantasy in John Hawkes. In spite of this, when her books reappear it doesn’t seem to be so much in response to a public demand as because the time has come once again for a reappraisal. Has she a place of her own, in or outside the Modernist movement? I don’t think anyone really knows what to make of Djuna Barnes.

‘Sometimes this town remembers its past,’ says Agnes in The Secret Servant, pausing in the gun-play to quote Wordsworth’s ‘Westminster Bridge’. This thriller is about contemporary nuclear strategies and the elimination of agents and double agents. Agnes is an agent herself (from ‘Box 500’, which seems to mean M15), and the hero is no sooner posted to 10 Downing Street than a grenade comes through the front door. The material is that of any hard-core thriller, and very unsympathetic it is, cold-hearted in its violence and cynical about loyalty or affection. Most modern thrillers not only use this material but show a disturbing attachment to it. Gavin Lyall’s talent is for distancing his material. There are homely domestic details: ‘On the way, he stopped at a tiny village grocer’s and bought himself a rough picnic: cheese triangles, potted meat, biscuits and a couple of tins of beer.’ One remembers the bag of ginger biscuits Hannay bought from a baker’s van in The Thirty-Nine Steps. But mainly it’s a sense of the past that gives this story an extra dimension and makes the Wordsworth quotation sit comfortably in place. It’s true that the main reference back is to more violence, a long-range desert patrol in North Africa in 1943, which Lyall brings to life as vividly as Popski once did in Private Army. Lyall has a feeling for battles long ago and knows his World War Two, which he has used in this way before. He could be said to be repeating himself. Certainly he seems to do so in another episode, the visit to a dying colonel playing with toy soldiers in a chateau in the Midi – pretty close, this, to the scene of the man with the gun collection and a secret to sell in Montreux in Midnight Plus One. I very much liked this repetition, as a sign of a writer who has settled into his vein. The vein is more that of the classic adventure yarn than of the brutal modern thriller, though he brings these two things together. It’s not only that a packet of biscuits suggests John Buchan’s Hannay. The older tradition is acknowledged to the point of parody when the Prime Minister’s private secretary is given a family set of rooms in Albany where, ‘coming in off the chilly stone staircase, Maxim and Agnes had walked through a time gate, back seventy-five years to the days when the Empire was built of solid dark mahogany and pictures of dead animals.’

William Golding’s working material, the stuff he lights upon and makes his novels out of – and which he regularly proceeds to subvert or transform to his purpose, introducing levels of meaning unsuspected in the raw stuff – never ceases to retain its importance for these novels. Coral Island, we all know, provided the working material for Lord of the Flies; and if Mr Golding’s purpose was to subvert a favourite myth about English boyhood, he nevertheless chose a worthy myth – one we can still half assent to while half persuaded by the black, reductive alternative. Frank Kermode, while studying the mythopoeic patterns of The Spire, is surely right about the importance for that novel of a particular place, Salisbury, and a particular trade: ‘I don’t know exactly where he got the facts about the mason’s craft, however, and I should like to.’ It is Trollope – substantial, circumstantial Trollope – who counters the symbolism and the hurtful recollections of the transient 1930s in The Pyramid.

‘In this unique fiction,’ say the publishers, ‘word and image meet with a richness scarcely seen since Blake.’ Certainly A Humument is no ordinary novel: but nor is it much like Blake’s engravings, ‘Word and image’ meet in these pages more as they do in a comic strip – in particular, the comic strip as it has entered Pop Art – or as in the single words of type in a Cubist painting. Tom Phillips is a painter who has exhibited earlier versions of these pages as a form of Gesamtkunstwerk, with the Coleridgean aim of ‘keeping the greatest number of things suspended in a unity’. In the past, he has also used other material such as picture-postcards, with the axiom ‘Everything in the world exists to end up as a postcard.’ But everything ends up as a book, in Mallarmé’s original words, and a book comes appropriately from a painter who first found his own voice, in 1965, through ‘chance procedures and the extensive use of texts’. This is what Burroughs and other novelists have been up to. And the sub-text of A Humument’s 367 pages is itself a novel: W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document, in an edition of 1892. Most of this sub-text has disappeared under acrylic gouache, collage or pen and ink, leaving a few islands or isthmuses that stand out to be read as words. If there’s a connection with games played by Max Beerbohm and Joe Orton in ‘treating’ a printed text, A Humument is never merely subversive or facetious, and pictorially is highly effective. There are pages that suggest soil profiles as used by ecologists, or Matisse cut-outs or Pop Art fashions: but brought together in a pocket book they reveal that Mr Phillips has a distinct and pleasant voice of his own.