My Golding phase has run aground on Pincher Martin. Is running aground, because it hasn't defeated me yet; I'm a hundred pages in, and, like its central character, trying to get a grip - on a narrative, not on his rocky outcrop. A grip - but unlike him, I can find no purchase; the narrative, such as it is, runs on without me. Pages of closely printed prose (in a fifty year old Penguin paperback - what history did it have?, I wonder) like a shut door. His rocky island is my glass mountain.
Naipaul, instead, and on a whim, after idly reading some article or another. I selected A Bend in the River from Waterstone's shelves. The girl at the checkout desk she'd always meant to read Naipaul, and I said so had I. Of course, I'd gone 100 pages into The Enigma of Arrival - what defeated me? A lack of abstraction, I think - a lack of prose doing more than being a perfect, perfect mirror. The prose was too balanced! It made me seasick, those calm, calm waters of prose. The book fell away from my grasp as into a pool of water. Let it lie there forever, I thought.
But this rainy morning, I thought to advance a little further into A Bend, having begun it yesterday in the gym. And I'm almost immediately upset - seeking to open the spine a bit wider, to give myself room to read the end of each line, too cramped against the central margin, I fold it open instead and - it cracks. The glue of the book has failed; it's come apart from itself. A broken book. It seems at odd with its calm, calm prose.
I like narratives in the first person, and like it when it is not the protagonist who is the centre of action, but whose presence asserts itself gently nonetheless. Who is there, with you, the reader, watching it all, reliving it all, for doesn't the narrative depend upon an act of writing, a retelling?
I like the way that voice seems to withdraw back from the story, seems to be much more than a frame. The voice seems to speak from a voice deeper than any reported one in what follows. It becomes an echo chamber, a space of resonance, having hollowed out an unexpected interiority because of the power - a controlled power, very measured, in Naipaul's case - to tell.
But an interiority that is not quite a soul, not a private recess set back from the world. A kind of membrane instead, infinitely delicate. A membrance between inside and outside, and that, as it quivers, speaks of what we do not ordinarily call personality but should - the way the world registers with us. The way it affects us individually, absolutely alone.
This is what gives itself as style. This is what can make a voice, reading a voice, hearing it as you read, absolutely essential. I think of the Richard Ford trilogy, for all its uncertainties (the weak satire in the third volume, the overlong second volume), and, in particular, of The Sportswriter. That voice, that voice, what I wouldn't do to feel close to it again, Frank Bascombe's voice, that membrane between the world and himself that gives itself as style.
Naipaul's narrator is cooler, more distant. I do not feel an immediate love for this voice, and wonder whether it will come. It reminds of Radio 4, of the calm voice of the radio announcer. A calmness not on the side of style, but of a studied neutrality - the stylelessness of a ruling class, of an unchallenged middle class. Certain, self-certain, but so certain it does not need to draw attention to itself. It simply is what it is, calm and unruffled.
Brown prose, I think it's called sometimes. Measured prose. The prose of rulers, resounding with the voice of rulers. Will I finish Naipaul's book? It cost eight pounds, so I will make sure to. Eight pounds! From Waterstones! And this for a paperback whose glue does not hold its page batches to the back cover! But it is not an essential book. Its calm, calm voice is not necessary.
Now, fool, I say to myself. Now - what makes Richard Ford so different? The Sportswriter? Because that space of resonance, that stretched eardrum has a kind of density, I reply, a thickness. It has been infested with itself - it is thick. It has style - or has accrued style to itself, attracted it like a fly to stick flypaper. This is not the style of a ruler-writer. It is in lieu of itself, it looks for itself, as Frank Bascombe lives in search of - what?
I read the three Bascombe volumes after one another. What happiness! I miss them. I miss that thickened voice, looking for itself in the narrative. Looking without knowing what was to happen, what must happen. It knew nothing of plot. What happened - happened. The interminable house-selling episodes in the third volume. The interminable drive in the second. Ah but what happiness in the last chapter of The Sportswriter - a miracle, when the narrator catches a train on a whim to 'Gotham'. A miracle, because here the plot, in its detour, thickens as wonderfully as the prose. Chance, contigency here doubles the contingency of style, style's adventure, as it accretes itself in darkness and silence.
What are you on about, idiot?, I ask myself. What are you trying to find? Sunday morning. The wet yard. Flowers in pots, there for one season only. And a flowering plant - bright light purple. And the trimmed down Hebes. And the big tubs bought for salad, new sprouts poking up. The wet concrete. The bench my sister painted 6 years ago that needs painting again, detritus beneath it in piles beneath the gaps between slats above. A day like any other.
I was reading in the other room. Reading on the bed, as I never do when my Beloved is around. But she's not here and nor is that measure of reality she brings. Am I becoming 'dreamy' as Bascombe says happens to him? Dreamy ... a membrane stretched out like a hammock. A living style, that does not know itself. An idiom that thickens into life. To read is also to write, isn't it? To be written in some way? To find oneself written?