Category: British and Irish Literature

Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

Brideshead Revisited felt like a book written especially for me. I, after all, was raised a Catholic, in a family with some not insubstantial but nevertheless declining wealth, went to a boys’ boarding school and then Oxbridge, and have to deal with the consequences of all of the above every day. The novel is in the form of a memoir by a man called Charles Ryder, of his relationship with another family, the Flytes, in particular the eldest daughter Julia and the younger son, Lord Sebastian. Advertised on the blurb as an Oxford novel, Oxford is only a small part of the larger story. That story concerns first, Sebastian’s attempts to escape from his family and their religion; then Charles’ relationship with Julia, herself somewhat lapsed in faith.  

I always find talking about novels hard; the longer they are, the worse it becomes. We have to latch onto themes, but often the effects are lost when we work with brief summaries. If not themes, we just choose characters, but that too feels cheap and misleading. I loved this novel and think I will end up rereading it many times, but when I say it was written for me it’s not some attempt at placing myself on a pedestal – what I mean is that I don’t think, had I different background, I would have got nearly so much out of the book. One must know firsthand the family dynamics, the experiences, the guilt of class and religion. And to be quite honest, I am not sure I would wish them on anybody.  

Sebastian – and his Drinking 

I ought to begin with Sebastian, Lord Flyte, and his story. He has a somewhat dandyish reputation at Oxford, and carries around with him a little bear, Aloysius – whether as a stunt, or because of a deep immaturity, we are not to know outright. He meets Charles when, after a night out, he vomits through Charles’ open window onto the carpet. They become friends, and he inducts Charles into a world of wastefulness and fun. Charles is what we might call well-off, but he’s not like Lord Flyte, whose elder brother is the Earl of Brideshead, the family home.  

These are important gradations within the British class system that still exist, but they are invisible unless you get close enough to them. For plenty of people, I am the poshest person they know. But my family are nouveau riche – we made our money in the 19th century through actual work. And my limited noble blood comes through my grandmother, not the male line. A friend gently rebuked me when we had lunch together and I acted as if we were in the same place. His family home has more old portraits than mine has plates, and the origins of their significance go much deeper into the past, and are nothing near as shameful as commerce. Money is a certain leveller, but in the end, it cannot get you onto a hunt unless you buy all the land the foxes live on. Whether or not you want to be a part of this club doesn’t change the fact that it still exists.  

Charles and Sebastian do a lot of drinking and revelling, ultimately becoming good chums. Charles visits Sebastian’s home, but Sebastian tries hard to prevent him from meeting anyone from his family. When that happens, all the happiness that had built up, and all the humour of the novel’s first part, collapses. The drinking, which at first is as harmless as it can be (“I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon”), soon becomes mildly concerning (““Ought we to be drunk every night?” Sebastian asked one morning”) and then outright depressing (“I found that sometimes after I had gone back to my college, he sat up late and alone, soaking”).  

It only gets worse. Sebastian’s name is undoubtedly a pun. Lord Flyte wishes for his own flight. We get variations, from characters, on what is wrong with him. At one point he accuses Charles of spying on him for his mother. But, regardless, his drinking becomes worse and worse, and he tries to flee home, running away to get drunk on Christmas, and eventually leaving for Morocco, where he lives a little like how drug addicts are today portrayed, although with enough money arriving each month for him to support himself. He wants to get away. “He must feel free”, as one character ambiguously puts it.  

The treatment of alcoholism within Brideshead Revisited was one of the ways the novel hit close to home. When I was about 10, I started having attacks of depression, almost on a termly basis, at school. They came from the most ridiculous source, for a boy at that age – the thought I was failing to live up to the family name, which had been so honoured by my famous grandfather and great-grandfather. I used to go up to the board in the form room when nobody else was about and try to analyse how I was performing within the class, to see whether I was the best, or whether I was not trying hard enough. I grew out of the feeling, not the depression. But pressures, of a certain sort, have always been there, even when we try to avoid them. 

Language and Silence 

One of the reasons why we lived on a remote estate in Scotland, I think it’s fair to say, is that my father wanted to flee too. With the sale of a painting he’d inherited, he had enough money to buy the estate and become a farmer. But he, like Sebastian, was an alcoholic in his flight and before it. As with Sebastian’s home, I know that at my grandmother’s there is a drinks tray available for whoever wants it. As with my own family, the attitude towards Sebastian’s drinking is utterly repulsive. And we see this in the novel’s use of dialogue and other language, which brings us onto the next topic. Here is what Julia has to say when she hears of her brother’s plight: 

“He’s been drinking in his room all the afternoon” “How very peculiar! What a bore he is! Will he be all right for dinner?” 

The older brother remarks that God loves drunkards. The fact that they all got drunk enough to be arrested and put in the papers is a matter of amusement to the younger sister, Cordelia, who is admittedly only a child at this point. It takes a long time for the drinks tray and cabinet to be locked away. As so often happens, the approach taken denies the problem exists at all. “Then dinner was announced, and we went to the dining room where the subject was not mentioned.” 

In front of the servants, nowadays more respectfully called “staff”, you are not supposed to talk about such things. But then, nobody wants to talk about them anywhere else. “Sebastian’s stay here has not been happy” is all his mother writes to Charles in a letter, but it tells us more than enough – and not just about him. Silences and evasive language mark the upper classes who are here the centre of the story. Because they barely even acknowledge that Charles is unhappy, they cannot get much into working out why he is or what to do about it. Even the solution proposed at one point, to remove all drink from his access, is itself a concealment. If there’s no drink, he cannot be drunk, and hence we cannot say that we have a problem on our hands.  

The language of the novel can be very funny too – Waugh’s reputation these days is primarily as a comic novelist – but what sticks out is the way that it stops being quite so funny once people start getting hurt. One of the very impressive things about the novel is the way that it manages to transition from being essentially a comic novel set in Oxford, into something much more tragic, almost without you noticing. A character like Charles’ eccentric father, who we meet early on, is quite funny, but the characters who take centre stage afterwards, who are just as out of touch or backward, are anything but. Their inability to face things hurts people, Sebastian most of all. It takes a doctor in Morocco to say the quiet part out loud, that Sebastian is an “alcoholic”. Nobody else seems to know the word.  

Silences don’t just tolerate alcohol abuse – they create other problems too. Most notably, they allow the family’s finances to flounder. It must be said, it’s rather hard not to let your finances fail when you are in the position that the owners of Brideshead are. Away from the world, away from the management of your funds, even if you have reasonably good advisors, you may not know what options you have. That, more or less, is the view of Rex Mottram. This Canadian financier is up-and-coming and marries Julia to keep up the upping. He talks of finances and figures, and for any obstacle he assumes money can resolve it. When confronted with the fact that he has divorced another woman who is still alive, and hence cannot remarry as a Catholic, his solution is rather simple. “All right then, I’ll get an annulment. What does it cost? Who do I get it from?” –  his directness is a breath of fresh air. Except that the air stinks. 

Catholicism 

If we placed the characters of the novel on a chart spanning the earthly and the heavenly, Rex would be underground. Charles would be suspended in the air, Julia and Sebastian (the “half-heathens”) would be somewhat above him, and the rest of the Flytes except the absent father, much higher still. Rex is rough, determined, and brutally clear where the other characters take tangled paths even to say they need the loo. We might be inclined to side with him against the Flytes, but that’s not where the novel goes. I feel that, if the first thing we learn about Waugh is that he’s a comic novelist, near-enough the second is that he is a Catholic convert – so we know that Rex isn’t going to win. Still, it’s up to us to judge how far he loses. 

“I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.”

That last line is so good you have to underline it. And it contains the whole argument, it seems, of the book. Whatever is left out is contained in this quote from on G K Chesterton’s character, Father Brown.

“”Father Brown” said something like “I caught him” (the thief) “with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”” 

Charles is not a Catholic, while the Flytes are. Even Sebastian and Julia, the ones whose faith is weaker, still have a sense that the religion is true, even as they fail to live up to it. Charles is misunderstanding entirely when he says, “It seems to me that without your religion Sebastian would have the chance to be a happy and healthy man.” As an assertion, it rings true. The problem is that once you believe in the truth of the religion you were born with, even as you seek to turn your back on it, it is still your orientation point, even if you are orientating yourself away from it. “You know at heart that it’s all bosh, don’t you?” “How I wish it was!”  

Waugh’s novel, whose goal according to the preface was to “show the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters”, ultimately does just that. Everyone attempting to leave the whirlpool is carried back into it. Whatever the misery that it causes them, they also have much richer lives, internally at any rate, than Rex. And we get a sense that religion saves them in the end, from something truly horrible, even if it is only inside, only in their heads.  

Even Charles himself is not living well, and he borrows Julia’s image of a part pretending to be a whole to describe himself later on in the novel. After Sebastian disappears to Morocco, time passes, but Charles’s life as a painter of increasing importance, his marriage and two children, ultimately receives little attention. “I took it to be youth, not life, that I was losing.” But he was living more richly when he was with Sebastian and the Flytes, even though most of the time he was miserable. It’s that classic problem – meaningful misery or empty apparent contentment. Charles decides that his marriage and worldly success were not contentment after all, and his affair with Julia, herself in an unhappy marriage, brings the novel into its final section.  

Convincing us that Julia and Sebastian return, in their ways, to the faith of their childhoods, is easy enough. But Waugh goes further, and his novel is sneakily the story of how Charles – a committed atheist – finds himself slipping into a position where faith becomes necessary. It all happens at the end, but it’s rather well done. Bizarrely, plenty of people on Goodreads seem to have missed it. Even the novel’s full title gives us a large, flashing clue: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. God left out the hook, and Charles unknowingly took it. And good for him.  

Conclusion

For many of the rest of us, the novel’s ending will be immensely frustrating. Charles and Julia divorce their unfaithful partners to be with one another, but then come to accept that to do so would be to “live in sin”. And so, instead, they part out of deference to God and never see one another again. Their faith, it turns out, is mighty. But it makes for resignation and a denial of emotional satisfaction that is a real challenge to nonbelievers. I can imagine many of us will have thrown the book across the room in annoyance. But that’s faith for you. Though they do not set themselves on fire, in Brideshead Revisited we have people who make you feel they are serious about their beliefs. We can only accept that and close the door on their story without being too rude about them behind their backs.  

For me, though I went to mass at school every week, and was raised moderately Catholic, I remain still some distance from Julia and Sebastian. I don’t see the same necessity as they do to act the way they do. But I am close enough that I could respect their decision, even if I thought it was ridiculous. Regardless, the ending is one of those brilliant ones which will change with us as we grow ourselves, a bit like the end of Wharton’s Age of Innocence (another book with a challenging ending). Though I did not need yet another excuse to want to re-read it, there’s one right there for you.  

Ideas of Goodness in Small Things Like These and Foster

We can say, not unreasonably I think, that the concern at the heart of Irish writer Claire Keegan’s two brilliant novellas, Small Things Like These and Foster, is a religious one. It is a concern for goodness. We are all able to consider goodness, but here the opposition seems not so much between good and bad (a secular concern), nor even between good and evil, but between what is merely good enough and what is supernaturally, miraculously good.

That higher goodness is inevitably the thing most needful. Authentic goodness as opposed to the sham goodness of the fraud is not the main problem here either, though it crops up. Rather, it is true goodness against the merely good enough. From this, we can see that we also have a problem with language here. The philosophers have the word supererogatory – going beyond what is necessary – which we can use to describe the goodness these novellas contain. Maybe that is the better word, but still a wrong one, because such goodness should be everywhere; it just is not.

Both of these novellas centre around a single good deed, the saving of a soul. In Small Things Like These, the merchant Bill Furlong decides to rescue a woman trapped within a kind of domestic slavery under the Catholic Church at what were called the Magdalene Laundries. In Foster, meanwhile, the Kinsellas, husband and wife, decide to take on the daughter of a relative and treat her as they would their own child. What these novellas do is contrast these actions with a host of other actions and persons who are not given the same kind of goodness. In this way, Keegan shows how special the truly good are. She lets their goodness illuminate them against the murk of the everyday.

Foster

In Foster, our narrator is a young girl who is being passed on to relatives for the summer. Her voice lets us hear what another narrator might be unwilling to admit, so the initial pages are full of distances noticed between what is done or said, and the real situation the girl has left behind. On the first page, we have a reference to a cow, lost by her father while gambling. Then, when she and her father arrive at the Kinsellas’ home, we learn of the months of poor weather for farming that have passed. Then we also see how her father, prideful, pretends things are otherwise, saying the barn at home is full.

“I wonder why my father lies about the hay,” our narrator thinks. The Kinsellas themselves see through this, of course, providing him with extra food from their garden to take home. And he, for his part, “forgets” to give the girl her clothes when he leaves – she has many brothers and sisters at home. The scene is an elaborate performance that we see, as the narrator too sees, with sad confusion. These are the outward problems – the poverty of her family home. This is contrasted with the girl’s excitement and apprehension at the first hot bath of her life, for example. And the confused joy at so much food.

But there is another side to this, and here her own knowledge is lacking this time, or else not fully revealed. There is the way she wets her bed, a common sign of abuse, and the way she crouches in fear when expecting Kinsella to hit her. “I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end: to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder, some big gaffe, to break something, but each day follows on much like the one before.” The girl has overheard her mother and father discussing her before she left home in words they should not have dared use, the kind that makes her seem worthless to them.

Simply put, it is a bad home that our narrator escapes. And it is a good one that she enters. The Kinsellas feed her, buy her clothes, and give her money for snacks and books. I do not want to call this a novella of healing, because that seems to me trite and cliché, but certainly, it could be an appropriate term here. Our narrator learns to live without fear that summer. Eating Weetabix and having warm baths and helping outside and so many other moments of little joys are wondrously powerful through cumulative effect.

But it is a little later where this question of goodness truly comes into the fore – when we meet the ordinary Irishmen and women of the area. On a trip to town, our narrator is asked “whose child I am, who I am belonging to?”, and Mrs Kinsella quickly ends the conversation. “God forgive me but if I ever run into that woman again it will be too soon,” she says later in a rare moment of negativity.

Then, following a man’s death, a woman from the village offers to take the narrator home while the Kinsellas stay to help. What appears a good deed is soon revealed to be motivated by cynicism and a desire for gossip – the narrator is pelted with questions, and eventually discovers the truth about the Kinsellas – that they lost their own child in an accident.

Yet what the novella goes on to show is that this fact is of no importance to the Kinsellas’ treatment of our narrator. She is their daughter because they love her, not because she fills a space left empty by death. They care for her not as a replacement – at first she wears their son’s old clothes, before getting her own – but as a person in herself. In a moment of real beauty, Mr Kinsella and the girl go for a walk at night on the beach, and we experience the kind of tenderness that we might have foolishly believed is possible only between parents and children. But it is not limited in this way. This is a thing we see in Small Things Like These too – that there are no real limits to human goodness except those set by the hardness of a human heart.

The Kinsellas are not special. The man gambles too, albeit moderately, and his wife is too trusting. But unlike the other characters we briefly encounter in the novella, they allow their inner kindness to place a barrier before curiosity and all thoughts of difference. They simply love the girl. That for them is enough.

Small Things Like These

Small Things Like These is longer than Foster, and seems in many ways the deserving kin to Joyce’s novella The Dead, sharing a Christmas setting and state-of-the-nation sweep. Bill Furlong is another fostered child, in his way. His mother is rejected by her family after she falls pregnant while in the service of a Protestant widow and landowner, Mrs Wilson, but the child and mother are taken care of by the old woman, rather than cast out. A single kindness helps shape his life.

Furlong grows to become a coal and timber merchant with many workers in his employ. He marries and has five daughters. Life is, as it is for Ivan Ilyich, “pleasant and respectable.” Yet Furlong is aware that something might be missing in it. He has his moments of introspection while driving or sitting by the stove at home, when he wonders at his life and its course. When he comes to speak of this, he discovers he is more alone than he had thought:

“But aren’t we all right?”

“Money-wise, do you mean? Didn’t we have a good year?”

…

“I’m not sure what I mean, Eileen.” Furlong sighed. “I’m just a bit weary tonight, is all. Pay no heed.”

But the next thing he thinks, the very next line, pays heed indeed. “What was it all for? Furlong wondered.”

Furlong’s introspection is not a total rejection of his life, but it comes and goes like the tide. It worsens when he has his first encounter with the nuns of the laundry where he has his family’s things washed. Arriving too early, he discovers the girls imprisoned there in shabby dresses and suffering. They ask him to help, but his instinctive response is to excuse himself: “Haven’t I five girls and a wife at home?” But how pathetic is this compared to the response: “Well, I‘ve nobody – and all I want to do is drown meself.” The respectability of family against the void. Fortunately, Furlong is rescued when a nun arrives and swiftly deals with him.

At home, he asks his wife about what he saw but receives a run-on sentence of excuses in turn, the gist of which is that he should not meddle. “What do such things have to do with us? Aren’t all our girls well, and minded?” So, for Furlong the choice is clearly stated – a care that limits itself to family, and should be satisfied. Or a more expansive care, whose limits he cannot apprehend, but which seems more true to his inner spirit.

Not long later he comes across one of the poor laundry girls hiding in the laundry’s coal shed, but rather than helping her, he returns her to the nuns. This time the pain of his decision is obvious, and it sets Furlong up for the novella’s finale. Here he runs into the same girl in the shed again, but this time he takes her home with him. Going down the street with the limping child, he willingly submits to the gaze of respectable members of Irish society, letting himself be an example of an alternative way of being, which in the context of Christmas seems overwhelmingly the one that society supposedly supports, but in reality, turns its back on.

This is Furlong’s supernatural good deed. He saves a soul. Like the Kinsellas he is not perfect. Many of the women in the laundry were those who had become pregnant out of wedlock and been cast out. There is an interesting scene in the middle of the story where Furlong himself encounters an attractive young woman and notices her breast. He too, is a human being, not immune to the same desires that have filled the convent, desires which in fact led to his own birth. But unlike the others in the story, he does a good deed that breaks the evil of the laundry and challenges the world’s hypocrisy. He does not solve the problems, but he makes them visible. That, for now, must be enough.

He also solves his problems. For although in the paragraph above I said he saved a soul, this is surely a mistake. He has saved two souls – the girl’s, and his own. For life is not about those dull repetitions, year after year, that he rightly comes to mistrust. It is about the kind of goodness that redeems and answers such a life by putting it in touch with the infinite. And that goodness is what he discovers and makes his own.

In essence, those are the shapes of the two novellas.

Doubling and Standing for All

In any story where there is a contrast, we can expect to see doublings. In any story where there is change, there is always the shadow image of the world left behind, which could still have been born. In both novellas, too, I have come to see doubling and its counterpoint – the refusal to differentiate – as a key part of their moral argument.

Both Foster and Small Things Like These make use of mirror images to emphasise their dynamics, with it being most obviousin Small Things Like These. Furlong is divided in two, with his outward person obliged to family and respectability, and his inner one striving towards a “something more” which only becomes clear when he encounters the girl in the coal shed. We know that because suddenly we see two Furlongs after this, when the mother superior has him in for a cup of tea to smooth matters over. “In some of the hanging pots Furlong glimpsed a version of himself, passing.” This builds upon a distinction made a few pages earlier, between “the ordinary part of him” and the part of him that wants to do the right thing. The laundry is located next to a girl’s school, providing an actual mirroring of circumstances as well.

If doubling is a reflection, providing a contrast, then its opposite is when everyone stands in for every other. And this is part of Furlong’s development, that he comes to see things like this. “But what if it was one of ours?” Furlong asks Eileen, his wife. Just as he realises that he could be any of the men responsible for a girl ending up in the laundries, he realises that any young woman could be his daughter. By taking the girl home, he is effectively adopting her. As he walks with her down the main street, people stop to talk to him, assuming he is out with one of his daughters, but when they come closer and see the girl’s rags they realise this is not the case and retreat in disgust. But Furlong himself no longer sees this distinction – for him, the girl is his daughter. He has broken through the view that he must care mostly or only for his family, and instead now has a willingness to aid all.

In Foster, we also see a doubling dynamic. For one, there are two sets of parents, the one cold and uncaring, and the other warm and open, and two sets of houses. What is remarkable is the loosening of expectations, where what is “home” is the uncomfortable, secretive place, so that we see with the narrator that home is a moveable concept that might go against what society would claim to be the case. The narrator fetches water from a well, and sees her own reflection in it – and thereby the difference between what she was, and what in the loving Kinsella home she is becoming. It is the central image of the story.

Doubling and unrecognising differences also play into the treatment of goodness here, as it does in Small Things Like These. Just as goodness in the other novella was ultimately about refusing to see a distinction in humanity, so too here is Kinsella’s goodness in refusing to see a distinction between the child they lose and the child they gain. Both receive love; both deserve nothing less.

The Language of Goodness

Keegan is an Irish writer, and so she has a second language to draw upon in her writing about her homeland in the way that we poor Brits generally do not. In fact, the film of Foster, The Quiet Girl / An Cailín Ciúin, is shot mostly in Irish. Thankfully for us, Foster and Small Things Like These use only a single word, but it is perfect. The word is “leanbh”, which I took to be “dear”, but is more correctly “child” and is used in a way that either would be a good translation. Furlong uses it with one of his own daughters when she is scared of Santa, but he also uses it with the girl in the coal shed. It is an almost secret word for when true tenderness is needed, rather than just ordinary care.

Meanwhile, in Foster, the word is used just once, by Mrs Kinsella when she invites the narrator into her home. It marks the beginning of the kindness that she will receive –the first tender word she will hear in the place that will become her home. It contrasts with the coldness of the language of her family as she remembers overhearing it, as they talk about what to do with her: “can’t they keep her as long as they like?” Mrs Kinsella also calls her “girleen”, another sweetly Irish way of showing her affection for the girl. The conclusion we can draw is that these moments of Irish come out for the truest of good human feelings, where English for the characters simply won’t do.

The Conspiracy of Silence in Small Things Like These

In Small Things Like These we have a constant sense of society in a way that Foster does not. At the beginning of chapter 2, when we learn about Furlong’s past, it is presented thus: “Furlong had come from nothing. Less than nothing, some might say.” This word “some” is key for establishing society’s presence as a regulator. Where Foster’s badness is an unkind family and thoughtless strangers, in Small Things Like These we have an entire society engaged in a conspiracy of silence, concealing the evil in their midst. This is most obvious when we are introduced to the convent and laundry when the narrative voice itself reflects these assumptions and their unquestionability:

the laundry had a good reputation: restaurants and guesthouses, the nursing home and the hospital and all the priests and well-off households sent their washing there. Reports were that everything that was sent in, whether it be a raft of bedlinen or just a dozen handkerchiefs, came back same as new.

There was other talk, too, about the place. Some said that the training school girls, as they were known, weren’t students of anything, but girls of low character who spent their days being reformed, doing penance by washing stains out of the dirty linen, that they worked from dawn til night. The local nurse had told that she’d been called out to treat a fifteen-year-old with varicose veins from standing so long at the wash tubs. Others claimed that it was the nuns themselves who worked their fingers to the bone, knitting Aran jumpers and threading rosary beads for export, that they had hearts of gold and problems with their eyes, and weren’t allowed to speak, only to pray, that some were fed no more than bread and butter for half the day but were allowed a hot dinner in the evenings, once their work was done. Others swore the place was no better than a mother-and-baby home where common, unmarried girls went in to be hidden away after they had given birth, saying it was their own people who had put them in there after their illegitimates had been adopted out to rich Americans, or sent off to Australia, that the nuns got good money by placing these babies out foreign, that it was an industry they had going.

But people said lots of things – and a good half of what was said could not be believed; never was there any shortage of idle minds or gossips about town.

What is interesting about this extract is that the truth is there, sandwiched between reports. The local nurse has a real experience of the conditions the girls are subjected to, but she is drowned out by so many idle speculations that we would overlook her on our first reading of the story. Then comes the next paragraph, where all is dismissed. We see, in short, society self-regulating to remove any sense that there is something wrong – because then there is something that would need to be done.

Our sense of the wrongness of society in Small Things Like These grows after Furlong starts asking questions, and we get a sense of just how deep the rot is. Mentions of the Gardai (Irish police) by the mother superior made me think of a story like The Wicker Man, where we initially misread the world we enter, expecting traditional sources of goodness, or at least justice, to be the same as they are elsewhere. It is unlikely the police would be of much use to Furlong, and the book’s note at the back indicates just how challenging it was to get any kind of justice for the victims of the laundries.

Whoever he talks to, whether wife or friend, they all give him no ear. And they suggest that in asking questions he is already harming his business and his daughters’ futures – schools in Ireland then were controlled by the clergy.

Limits to Goodness

Furlong saves the girl from the laundry, as do the Kinsellas the narrator of Foster. Yet it’s hard not to notice that in both good deeds, there is something not entirely satisfactory. One daughter is saved among many people living in the narrator’s old home, just as only one of the girls from the laundry gets to leave. The novellas are illuminated by their moral spirit, but they are also the records of the limitations of such goodness. We cannot individually save everyone. But if nobody saves anyone, we cannot get close to this. That seems to be the message these books put forward.

In life, we want a simple and fast solution. We wish for Furlong to save everyone at the convent, just as we wish the Kinsellas could adopt the narrator’s entire family in Foster, but it doesn’t work like that. Even to save one person is really hard. Furlong will take the girl home, and it is hard to assess whether even this will be the right action, taken alone. His children will struggle in life, his family will be cast out. He will certainly lose business. But it’s the only way to begin the process of bringing justice into the world.

We can only wish that we ourselves might be so brave.

The Guiltless Gliding of Amis’s Time’s Arrow

The success of a gimmick lies in whether it makes any messages in the story more effective, or whether it distracts and annoys us more than anything else. With a subject like the Holocaust, we certainly do not want the latter result. And yet the Holocaust has been the topic of many novels that have used non-standard forms and structures to deliver their messages. From this we might conclude that with such a serious topic the standard narrative approaches simply will not do.

Among others, we have that reconstructional striving we encounter in the works of W.G. Sebald, where characters seem determined to walk and read and effortfully remake the past, scrap by informational scrap. We have the cyclicity of Günter Grass’s Cat and Mouse, where the story can never end because the protagonist can never quite admit their guilt. We even have the time-skips of the thoroughly mediocre The Reader.

Time’s Arrow shares with these works an unusual approach. Martin Amis’s novel is told backwards, from a man’s death to his birth. I can only think of Delillo’s Underworld as having done something similar, and I cannot recall it adding anything there. But here, given the subject matter is a doctor at Auschwitz who successfully flees to the United States before dying of natural causes, we might assume the guilt component to be more prominent. The way, that is, that an earlier mistake might shape the life that follows, and then also how earlier decisions must have made that most mistaken of careers possible as well. This thread of interest must be enough for us, because all tension is removed when every beginning is really an end.

We follow the life of Odilo Unverdorben, who is first an old man alone in the US with the ridiculous name Tod Friendly (though Unverdorben is also dire – it means “untainted” in German), then a doctor both in New York and further afield, before heading to Europe shortly after the Second World War. We spend time in Auschwitz, then watch as he trains to become an SS Officer and courts his wife. Then he becomes a boy and re-enters his mother. We do not have access to Odilo’s thoughts, only to his emotions. We are trapped inside his body with another, unnamed person, the narrator, who may be Odilo’s soul. “Passenger or parasite,” that is our role.

This character – the narrator – is quite odd. He seems deliberately restricted in his access to information in a way that I found unsatisfactory. He knows all about Jews, for example, but nothing about the Holocaust or history. He’s essentially given a random assortment of knowledge, such that he can appreciate the world, while still being utterly bewildered by it. At no point, for example, does he realise that things are going backward. He just comments on how bizarre it is that things are the way they are.

For unlike Delillo’s novel, which is a series of vignettes in reverse chronological order, in Time’s Arrow the narrative is actually reversed. We read dialogue in ordered English, but the end of the conversation comes first. The same is true of actions. Doctors, in this world, cause damage and throw people, bloodied and broken, back onto the streets. Relationships begin with tearful and angry departures. We regurgitate our food and retrieve things from the rubbish. The narrator cannot believe this, it is all so desperately odd to him.

So now the question is, what does all this add? Is it worth it? On a basic level, this approach is excellent for making us pay attention. We need to read each conversation twice to really get the meaning. Various transactions are involved here – whether for sex, for health, or anything else – and by shifting the transfers into reverse we pay more attention to what is actually going on, and whether it makes sense. It is also used for humour, although not in a particularly exciting way. The narrator complains that Odilo checks out women by beginning with their hair and face, and only then going to their body. We, however, are winkingly aware that Odilo is far less chaste than such a sequence assumes. There is also the way that he seems to gain all of his strength for the day by absorbing excrement each morning from the toilet.

But its primary purpose is to confuse our moral compass. Doctors hurting their patients seems bizarre, especially when they are paid for it. People regret things, and then do them anyway. Relationships begin badly, but end with the sweetest of romances. This just doesn’t make sense, as our narrator never tires of telling us. It doesn’t make sense until Auschwitz. There, the doctor is at last healing people. Thousands of thousands of people are created in gas chambers and furnaces, or brought back to life on electric fences, or given miraculous life-giving injections. As the narrator remarks innocently, this is the only thing he has yet seen where things actually make sense.

This could have been extremely tasteless, and it’s a testament to Time’s Arrow’s quality that it is not. The absence of anything but positive judgement on the part of the narrator coupled with our own absolutely certain knowledge of what is truly taking place successfully amplifies a horror that is already almost unbearable to the imagination:

“There they go, to the day’s work, with their heads bent back. I was puzzled at first but now I know why they do it, why they stretch their throats out like that. They are looking for the souls of their mothers and fathers, their women and their children, gathering in the heavens – awaiting human form and union… the sky above the Vistula is full of stars. I can see them now. They no longer hurt my eyes.”

The scenes in Auschwitz are the highlight of the book, if we can call it that. Everything is so repugnant, but also so impactful thereby. The breakdown (or build-up) of Odilo’s relationship to his wife and his childhood are all that remains. Here there is not much excitement. Odilo suffers from impotency relating to his systematic murder of undesirable people, and chronologically before that also develops strange sexual proclivities. This affection for sadism and domination in the bedroom is something Odilo shares with Hanna in The Reader. As we go back, Odilo simply becomes less and less interesting as a character, as Amis seemingly decided he needed to tick off the serial-killer-psycho trait list just in case readers did not believe Odilo could actually have done the things he does.

Not that Odilo was ever very interesting. “I’ve come to the conclusion that Odilo Unverdorben, as a moral being, is absolutely unexceptional, liable to do what everyone else does, good or bad, with no limit, once under the cover of numbers.” Basically, he’s one of those brutes Adorno complains of in “The Meaning of Working through the Past” and elsewhere.

Yet that’s not entirely true. We still have the entire first part of Time’s Arrow, set in America. This can’t all be for nothing. Armed with a lot of gold, taken from the dead Jews, Odilo uses contacts in the priesthood to get himself into New York and set himself up there as a real doctor, the type which heals. In these conversations we get a brief view of Odilo’s heart, which is otherwise well-hidden from us: “I have sinned, Father… I still want to heal, Father. Perhaps, that way, by doing good…” So now we have a motive which sits fairly uneasily with the sheer scale of the horrors that Odilo is guilty of. He has had a change of heart. One which comes about only after his camp is set upon by the Soviets, and his family has abandoned him.

In another passage, earlier in the book, when Odilo has to leave New York, he says to his helper “all I ever wanted to do was help people.” This is quite frankly a load of bollocks. It may be true of his time in the States, but it would require extreme mental contortions to consider the administration of lethal poisons in concentration camps “helping”. And because we so rarely hear Odilo speak, and certainly never get into his mind, this approach – where we explore Odilo’s delusions – simply cannot work. As it stands, such statements just make him look a bit silly.

I am a big fan of redemption narratives, of course – it is the religious side of me. But Time’s Arrow cannot be this because we meet Odilo at his end first, and it is impossible to say whether he actually expiated his guilt or not. He donates money to the church, helps prostitutes, and has healed thousands of Americans. Whether we consider that adequate to washing away the sins of Auschwitz is a personal question. As for whether Odilo himself feels that he has worked through it all, without access to his head, it’s impossible to say for certain. All we get are occasional visions of a man who feels shame, who seeks crowds to “shed[…] the thing he often can’t seem to bear: his identity.”

All of this is to say that the decision to go through this narrative backwards both works and doesn’t. It makes us stop and slow down, and it certainly enhances the horror of that central topic – the systematised slaughter of Jews, those with disabilities, and all-too-many others – by portraying it in a way that makes it seem so morally positive. On the other hand, it takes the weight out of nearly everything else. Odilo’s relationships all end badly, so we cannot really enjoy them while they last – there can be no hope, after all, that this time he’ll crack it. As for his guilt, once we know his secret, we cannot really assess whether he feels like he’s successfully redeemed himself or not. Learning that he was hit as a child or mistreated Jews while at school adds nothing except reasons to dislike the person we are stuck with.

The narrator says, in the novel’s final words, “I… came at the wrong time – either too soon, or after it was all too late”. Earlier, he had remarked about his situation, how he had “(effectively) no will, and no body anyway through which to exercise it.” We might think about how all of this relates to the question of guilt. We, too, are in the narrator’s position. As readers, we can only perceive guilt, but never rectify it or prevent the actions that led to its coming. Especially in this story, where everything is so deterministic. Why, then, do we continue to read about these things? Perhaps because, in questions of guilt and responsibility, which are among the most important ones we may face in our own lives, the more approaches to these problems we have, the more likely it is that we may be able to do whatever it is we must to save our own souls.