Jon Fosse – Scenes from a Childhood

Jon Fosse’s collection of shorter pieces, Scenes from a Childhood, contains prose so dreadful I would be embarrassed to put my own name next to it. I loved Septology and Aliss at the Fire, but the quality gap between those works and this one is titanic. I also do mean that word “quality”, because this blog has seen plenty of works that I did not enjoy grace its (web) pages, such as most recently Handke’s Goalie’s Anxiety, works in which nevertheless I was able to find literary merit and interesting ideas. Scenes from a Childhood is just shockingly bad, however. The words are bad, the style dead, the ideas thin. There’s a chance that in writing this post I might succeed in redeeming the book in my eyes, but I think the more likely outcome is that by seeing the negatives, we might instead understand how to do better.

Scenes from a Childhood is a hodgepodge of prose from throughout Fosse’s career. “How it Started” is a story of first love; Scenes from a Childhood collects various semi-autobiographical vignettes from Fosse’s own life, most no more than half a page; “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” is a revenge fantasy where the narrator’s dog is killed by a neighbour, so the narrator murders the neighbour; “Dreamt in Stone” seems to be about epilepsy and God; finally, “Little Sister” recounts a few events in the life of a very small boy. The collection is not uniformly bad, with “How it Started” being a particular highlight. However, generally, the quality really is this low.

Scenes from a Childhood

We can take a look at Scenes from a Childhood as representative of the bad tendencies here. After all, it has given its name to the collection. Even with just Septology under our belts, we can recognise images and scenes from that work, done here too. (Old sheds, certain cafes and characters, teen bands, a dying grandmother). Unlike Septology, however, Fosse’s prose entirely lacks magic here.

Take a random example:

ASLE WANTS A DOG OF HIS OWN

On Sundays when he was little Asle and his parents used to go for walks. They used to walk past a little house and the man who lived there had a little white dog with black spots. Whenever they walked past the house the dog leaped over to Asle, who patted it and talked to it. Asle wants a dog for himself so badly but his mother says he can’t have one. Asle wants a dog of his own.

I want to make clear from the start that this is not the shortest, nor the simplest of the stories. Many others are worse. This one is representative of them, however, in style. We have here simple sentences, reflecting perhaps the relatively simple consciousness of Asle’s experience (sometimes we have an “I” instead). There is none of that flowing consciousness expressed through run-on sentences which we are used to from Septology or Aliss, just declarative sentences without any energy behind them at all. Those aspects of Fosse’s work that work brilliantly when enveloped in the mystical power of those breath-like sentences in those stories, instead are unexciting here – for example, his repetition of the word “dog”. In normal prose, repetition can quickly become monotony.

And what of the ideas? Asle sees a dog and wants one but can’t have one. Each of the scenes in Scenes from a Childhood is similar to this. Asle rides a bike and likes it. Asle reads a book and likes it. Asle is nervous about playing at a concert with friends. The problem with these stories is that they are flat. There is only ever one idea at a time, one single moment from the narrator’s past which can only be interpreted emotionally: this happened, and this was how he felt. Such an approach means we cannot actually think about these stories, because there is nothing at all to think about.

Rather than, as my blurb claims, these stories showing short prose “occasions some of [Fosse’s] greatest works”, we see that by paring down the stories and depriving them of any length, the result is utterly discardable. There is no accumulation of images to give even the mundane its strength. There’s no rhythm to the prose to let it wash over us. And there is no depth to the content, which after all can be gained in a pinch by letting us look at the same puddle from different angles. Without length, the puddle has to be deep, for we only have one angle to look at it from.

What, we might desperately ask, of the topic? Is this not so relatable? This is the weakest defence a book can have. Indeed, as a child (and now) I have felt anxious, or excited, or wanted things I cannot have. Even, growing up in rural Scotland, a few of the scenarios in Scenes from a Childhood were familiar to me in their specifics. But relatability is never an end, only a means. Relatability brings us in; good literature takes that closeness and does something with that, like revealing some tension or strain under the surface of our lives. Fosse here does not do this. He just writes something we know and stops. The problem is that relatability is easy. It’s how popular music, art, and literature works. Nothing against them, but Fosse needs to do more, both with his prose and with his ideas, than happens here.

“And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me”

“And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” is quite a different work. The novella is much longer than everything else in the collection, and since it involves murder, it is less likely to be something we as readers relate to from our personal histories. However, those of us with pets might not struggle to imagine murdering anyone who hurt or killed them.

In any case, the novella is strange, and if nothing else a feat of imagination, at least it appears so. The man’s dog is shot, and one neighbour says it was another neighbour. When the man goes home, he sees his dog, dead, on the porch. At night the man gets on his boat, rows to the other neighbour’s house and stabs him with a pitchfork dipped in manure, before returning home. He digs a grave for the dog, speaks with a few neighbours, and then the story finishes with him admitting to the initial neighbour who told him of the murder that he did it.

If this sounds exciting or tense, it is not. As with the stories in Scenes from a Childhood itself, the dominant note is monotony. The dog dies, and the narrator is filled with a murderous rage. For the next twenty or thirty pages this is the single emotional note of the novella. We see quickly how little variety there is in such an emotion. “That fucker’s gonna die tonight” is repeated, over and over, until the neighbour does indeed die. No images of rage, no torrents or torments, just hate directed towards the neighbour until (and after) he is dead. It is actually not very exciting, and again – we sit there wondering if there is anything at all to interpret. There’s no motivation for the dog’s murder, just as there’s no complexity to the revenge. As a reader, you’re faced with the uncomfortable thought that there’s nothing to think about as you turn the pages.

Once the murder is complete the narrator behaves irrationally, failing to bury his dog and answering questions from his other neighbours in a way that would immediately throw suspicion upon him. There are moments of tenderness towards the dead dog, and moments of madness where the narrator seems confused about where the dog went after he has buried him. The tenderness is touching, and almost hints at a kind of metaphysical aspect to the story which the rest of the text does not really cater to:

“…I’m standing with the dog in my arms and rocking him back and forth like a baby and I say you have to go away now, far away, but it’s somewhere where it isn’t cold, it isn’t freezing, you need to go away now and I have to go now, I can’t stay standing like this, I have to just go, now, you’ll wait for me, I’ll be coming soon, you’ll be excited and wag your tail when I get there, because I’m coming too, soon now, it won’t be long…”

In general, however, the story just does not withstand any inspection. There are no motives to analyse, no nuances to the narrator’s emotions and only limited rationality to his actions. As far as literary murders go, it just does not do anything interesting. The prose has its moments, but that is the best I can say for it.

“How it Started”

The story I liked best in the collection is “How it Started”, which has much in common with Scenes from a Childhood. What separates them is the prose, which is vastly more musical, and which also gestures towards far more than does that other work. “How it Started” is about the first flush of teenage love or infatuation. Other stories covered the same, but merely described the scene. Here, prose and theme merge:

…when we ran up to the big attic, lay down on the floor, and when the others came running in, when the girls came in, when that girl in particular came in.

When she came in.

When she came in from break…

Here the repetition is conscious, rather than the result of (apparent) laziness. It reflects the shock and the butterflies in the chest, the break in the world’s continuity when someone we so earnestly want to notice us has come in and we can no longer sit idly but must take ourselves and be our best.

The prose also now flows:

When she came in from break, from all the breaks when you’d seen her, when she came in with her long hair, those small breasts just barely visible under her shirt, when she came running up the stairs and you knew that you’d never dare talk to her, as you wrestled and shouted there on the floor, playing with Geir or another one of your friends, when she came in you calmed down, you stopped kicking your legs, you stopped fooling around, joking, shouting, you calmed down, you were a bit embarrassed, you got up from the floor and suddenly you didn’t know where to go or what to do with yourself, your heart grew troubled because now she was there, she was near you, with her hair, her body, she was just a few yards away from you, so close, and you couldn’t talk to her even though she’d sent word to you two days before, even though one of her girlfriends had come up to you, giggling, and said she was supposed to say hi to you from her, from her, from her, the girl with the long hair. When she stood there, calmly, talking to one of the other girls, up in the half-dark attic at the pastor’s farm, with the other kids who went to youth group, and we all did, almost all the kids in the area went, when she stood there with her new breasts, her long hair, and she smiled at her girlfriend, and you stood there, stood there alone while the others wrestled, and felt a sadness grow large inside you, that was probably when it actually started.

That was when the music came to you.

There and then it came, and it’s never left.

I’ve quoted generously because this is finally good prose. It reflects a consciousness – anxious, excited. And it also shows more than just a scene by giving a sense of consequences – “that was probably when it actually started”. I presume this is the ability to write (as music standing in for creativity in general), but it might just as much be simply love. Either way, we have a sense of something higher, some significance stretching beyond the scene.

This nervous enraptured consciousness envelopes the prose. It brings us closer to the narrator and his struggle. For the first time, we have tension, which can grow over the story’s length because rather than a single paragraph we have five whole pages. We also, finally, have a sense of perspective, by which I mean that we can look onwards to higher meanings and consequences for a whole life. “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” might have had this, but instead the narrator’s mind is so focused on revenge that there’s no opportunity for any kind of thought or reflection. Here is how “How it Started” ends:

That was how it started, in the dark, the rain, on a road along a shore, there were waves always beating, and skin that grew bigger and bigger. Her kiss was a mark on my skin, it was like it entered into my body and stayed there. She’s married now, her kids are grown, she’s a housewife and she usually goes to village parties with her husband. They were there the summer we played at the village party. She was there, but her body is more shapeless now. Her hair is short. Her breasts have grown much bigger.

This is magic prose because, like the kiss, it sticks with us. There’s more than what I’ve quoted, of course, but I hope here is enough to give a sense of the power of that moment when they kiss in the dark, and how that moment becomes indelible even as time passes.

Conclusion

All of this raises awkward questions, however. If the only thing separating “How it Started” from Scenes from a Childhood is long flowing sentences and a few ambiguous phrases that point towards something of higher significance, then doesn’t that almost devalue Fosse’s whole work? Or, at least, doesn’t it say that we can just do the same by taking anything mediocre we write about our own lives and removing the full stops to whip it into something Fossean with no difficulty?

In that case, of course, it would be obvious who we are imitating. Originality counts for something, so that most modern autobiographical prose seems just waiting to have “Sebaldean” slapped on it, and any kind of ranting prose at all will forever be indebted to Bernhard for blazing the trail. The precise way that Fosse builds up his rhythms and repetitions is not just casual or the work of a hack, and combining long sentences and repetitions with hints of the higher requires talent well deserving of the Nobel Committee’s praise.

From the perspective of someone looking for what to read, however, this collection is clearly not where Fosse’s talents are best displayed. Most of the stories here really do seem too easily written and too lacking in depth. 

Strange Ways of Making Real – The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a novel that I cannot imagine leaving any of us cold. It is a bag of tricks with multiple endings and a chatty modern narrator who refuses to let his characters be. Yet from its title onwards we are also led to expect something Victorian. That John Fowles delivers something much stranger than just another bulky Victorian monster is the cause of either our joy or our dismay. At first, I was in the latter camp, bothered by references to Henry Moore, taxpayers, and public loos that did not at all make sense with the novel’s 1867 setting. Later, the only words I had for my readerly experience were “breathless”, “excited” and “inspired.” The novel does something any writer can be grateful for – it shows that novels can still be novel, and that there are new games to play with readers while telling important stories.

For this post, my interest in the novel concerns its relationship with character and reality construction. Fowles takes some major risks with his storytelling, pulling us out of the narrative repeatedly through epigraphs, a digressive narrator who isn’t sure of his characters’ hearts, and through being inconclusive by providing readers with a choice of conclusions. Yet though Fowles is clear that this is a work of fiction, he is also clear that these characters are no less real for it. Our own lives, he points out in one chapter, are full of delusions and fiction. Yet we are sure they are real.

I want to argue that Fowles achieves the extraordinary here. For me, the artifice of the novel, with its postmodern flourishes, makes its story and people more real, at least to me. While spoiling much of the novel’s plot, I hope to explain what I mean.

The Story

First, though, the plot, so that I might contextualise at least somewhat the games and tricks of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. In Lyme Regis, gentleman Charles Smithson is spending time with his betrothed, Erestina Freeman, when they come across Sarah Woodruff, a “fallen woman” and the French lieutenant’s woman of the novel’s title. (He seduced her and then left her). Charles falls in love, though it takes him time to know it, and has several coincidental and then less coincidental meetings with Sarah, before finally breaking his engagement with Erestina.

While breaking it off, however, Charles loses track of Sarah and struggles to find her for the next two years while drifting around the world as a social outcast himself. Eventually, he does – the former governess is now an artists’ assistant, and has given birth to Charles’ daughter. Depending on the reader’s preferred ending, Charles and Sarah either make up, or Charles leaves to continue with his wandering. The novel’s other ending, some time earlier, is the one where Charles breaks his relationship with Sarah to be with Erestina and has a boring domestic happiness, or thinks he has, anyway.

Less an Unreliable than a Poor Narrator

Writers claim, from time to time, that their characters get away from them and do their own thing. (Iris Murdoch, I think, said charmingly if tellingly, that she kept them locked up and deprived them of even the slightest freedom from her plans). John Fowles seems the only writer to claim it from within the bounds of his own story – for The French Lieutenant’s Woman has a strange narrative voice. Or perhaps “startling” is a better word. The narrator is speaking to us of 1867, but from the perspective of 1967, talking freely about the sexual revolution ongoing in his own time, mentioning artists and other figures born long after the novel ends. How, we might wonder, can such a voice create characters who feel real, when it so openly notes that they are fictional, and does not even pretend to be from their own time? (“This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind.”)

Certainly, we know that these are fictions, just as we know that we are reading fiction. But what is true of all the techniques I mention in this post is that somehow they work in a way contrary to what we might expect, by bringing us closer to the characters and making them more real. The narrator claims he does not know what Sarah thinks at key moments. He leaves blanks and decides which of the final two endings we read first by a coin flip. He seems, on the whole, out of control.

So, who is in control? If it is the characters, that only makes them more interesting and real to us – they then have their own lives, their own emotions driving them. Even if we disagree with the narrator’s assessment of his abilities, the whole novel seems like it has been ripped open so that the inner machinery is visible to us. Instead of reading from afar, we are made to identify with the narrator as we too try to construct the story and its world inside our heads. We can think of there being three layers of participation in a story – one is as a character, one is on the level of the narrator, within the story but yet also with a certain distance and perspective, and the final layer is of a disinterested observer who can leave at any time. This is the reader. Therefore, if we are with the narrator, we are already closer than we normally would be.

We might think that we are closer to the story when we just read a straight narrative. It might seem more like it actually happened, if it is written well and we are of a believing bent. But only here do we feel close enough to it that the narrator can reach out and tap us on the back. Only through an honesty about the story he is telling – a piece of historical fiction with his contemporary narration – and by making the fiction obvious as he constructs it, does the narrator put us beside him. At the same time, by relinquishing obvious control over the characters’ destinies, he does make it seem as though they are acting for themselves – fictional beings, yet with real autonomy. With readers getting so close to him, we are more likely to trust his words about his lack of control, compared to if he were just pretending to lack control at one key moment. It feels more authentic.

Epigraphs

Each chapter in The French Lieutenant’s Woman is headed by at least one, and quite often two, epigraphs, a practice I most associate with Middlemarch, but which is by no means unique to it. Fowles quotes poets and writers like Hardy, Tennyson and Arnold, and also thinkers like Marx and Darwin, and social documents and historians. Such epigraphs set the tone of the chapter, for example by informing us that this one will be about duty, that one about the pressures on young women to marry, and still the other about Darwin’s theories of evolution. They show, undoubtedly, Fowles’ deep knowledge of the period – never amiss, when trying to write a kind of historical fiction.

But how does this relate to creating real characters? After all, you can research all you want, but that does not always mean you have the faintest idea of the true soul of a period or a people. If anything, at first glance at least, the epigraphs are a problem. They draw us out of the fantasy by reminding us we are reading a novel every time we start a chapter, rather than letting us race along with the narrative, and by giving us some guidelines on how to analyse the story (with Marx, for example, encouraging a Marxist reading) rather than just leaving us to it.  

Yet what this ultimately does is help the reader to become more involved. If we see the epigraphs and know we can use them to analyse, we will start analysing as we read. As we will see in this post, all of Fowles’s tricks we can understand as aiming at making the reader get herself engaging with what she’s reading. Instead of blindly turning the pages, now we are forced to think – about class, about gender, about duty. This focusing of attention means we get closer to the characters. They become more real to us as we question their motives and their correspondence to the epigraphs provided. Just as at school, reading a book closely for an exam means that often years later, sadly or joyously, parts of it will remain with us, so too does Fowles repeat the exercise in miniature by ensuring we do our own close reading for him.

There is another point here, related to the historical quotes and Fowles’ reading. He points out at one point that his goal is not to make the reader believe their narrator is from 1867, merely that the narrative is set then. By showing his reading, and being honest about his modern perspective looking back, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is marked by a kind of authenticity that other historical fiction lacks. It is a small point, sure, but not entirely immaterial that when reading it we do not have that sense that we are reading a pretence or lie, which we may do, in the backs of our minds, as we read something else.

Multiple Endings

The French Lieutenant’s Woman has three endings, and this too, strange to say, seems to add to its verisimilitude. In the first ending, Charles receives the address of the hotel Sarah is staying at in Exeter and chooses, as he passes through that town, not to see her. In the second and third endings, Charles does see her for a night of passion, has his years of wanderings, and finally meets her again. In one ending he and she reunite in love, in another he condemns her and leaves her alone.

Within the novel Fowles’s narrator is keen to stress his lack of control, even at times his lack of knowledge. The use of multiple endings only furthers this point. Placed in the position of the narrator, readers do not know what the characters will do. Normally, disengaged, we trust the writers to lead us along a logical path. But by presenting us with three endings, readers are forced to place themselves closer to the action as they determine which ending they consider more likely.

Reading is an active process, unlike watching a movie, because we have to imagine the characters. But where much of the time we can get away with merely visualising action, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman we are forced to imagine motive. Not from what is said explicitly, but from the cumulative impact of so many chapters. We must decide for ourselves whether Charles surrenders to the pressures of his age and chooses to marry Erestina, whether he and Sarah come together, or whether he finally rejects her. To come to such a decision, we need to think and imagine. It is a gamble, as everything in The French Lieutenant’s Woman is. If we do not care for the characters, we will dismiss it as a trick. If we do, however, then suddenly we are placed in the same position as the author who finds his characters acting in ways he does not expect. And if the characters seem real to the author, they will seem just as real to us, in his position.

The pair of ultimate endings, where Charles and Sarah meet again, is interesting in another way from the perspective of characterisation. Here we have an explicitly doubled chapter, where the characters behave in opposite manners which are yet consistent with their prior depictions. The emphasis, inevitably, is on Sarah, and why she does not reach out to Charles after he puts so much effort into tracking her down. Unlike Charles, who the narration mainly follows, Sarah is the central figure of the story, whose image at the pier in Lyme first inspired Fowles to write it – and whose character is something of a mystery. Generally, we might think that consistency makes for good characterisation, but real people are anything but consistent. Sarah’s two behaviours in the epilogue make her more mysterious and inconsistent, yet more curious to us, more real.

It seems that using multiple endings like this is not a cheat for establishing an interesting character or someone real, but rather a way of emphasising certain types of figures beyond what is possible in a novel’s normal bounds. It makes them, the mysterious ones, more real. But readers must first be engaged, otherwise playing with endings will sooner leave them enraged.

Conclusion

If the thoughts here can be summarised simply, that’s more a reflection on how much sleep I am getting, and not on Fowles’s novel, which is really exciting. Fowles is far from the only writer to understand that making your reader work works brilliantly, provided they can be bothered to put the effort in, in creating a more engaging narrative. By making us choose endings, analyse the text with the help of the epigraphs, and fill in the gaps in characters’ motivations when the narrator claims not to know, readers play a far more active role in The French Lieutenant’s Woman than I am certainly used to doing.

Still, none of this would mean anything if the characters did not themselves have a baseline of realistic characterisation, and characters worth knowing about. What we see in this novel is not a replacement to all that, but a way of bringing us still closer to the fictional world – but only once we’ve first written it and written it and its people well.   

The Language of War and Peace

At last, my strength has failed me. For two years, almost exactly, I have been trying not to return to War and Peace. This book has everything, even now, especially now, when Russia is at war again. The good and the bad, the power and the glory, the vanity of all that, and the despair and darkness of senseless destruction. Pretty much every book I have read since the full-scale invasion began has been chosen with the war on my mind, whether to avoid thinking about it or to engage obliquely with it. Yet it is also the one subject that I try to avoid talking about directly on this blog, even though I feel like I can write seriously about it, and perhaps have a moral responsibility to do so. With War and Peace, though, I actually was not trying to understand my war. I was trying to understand how Tolstoy wrote his war.

Today’s post comes from only the first of the four volumes. I have already been through the whole epic once, but that was a few years ago. Back then, I was so overwhelmed I could not write about it. Yet it is part of Tolstoy’s magic, which I will try to describe here, that I still remember vividly certain moments, certain fates, when entire books fade from the memory as if they were never there at all.

Here I want to describe some of the technical features of War and Peace that struck me, because I or we might learn something from them. The translation is Anthony Briggs’ – I have the Russian at home, but alas I do not quite have the time for it at the moment. I propose to take a few sentences and describe briefly how they seem to work.

A practical post, perhaps, but one I hope will hold interest for people beyond my fellow Tolstoy fanatics.

“Eh bien, mon prince”

Where Anna Karenina is memorable for its opening lines, War and Peace just throws us in there with this. Isaac Babel apocryphally said that if the world could write itself, it would write like Tolstoy. Unfortunately, Tolstoy only had time to do a small fraction of the world from 1805 to 1813, but such a beginning makes us think he had already been writing his story for years and with some arbitrariness chosen now to let us in. The opening is memorable by taking us immediately into history more than into the dynamics of characters. The first paragraph, reminding us of Napoleon’s conquests in Italy, gives us a sense that world politics is as much the book’s theme as the ‘little people’ novels normally only bother with. Part of the tensions in the novel, we sense at once, will come from men before maps, just as much as the plain passions of the human spirit.

It’s also notable, though Briggs chooses to translate it here, that the novel begins in French. That too – being so inconsiderate to one’s readers – takes a certain bravery as a writer. (My girlfriend still complains at every foreign word that creeps into my posts). But the novel dramatizes, amongst so much else, the partial rejection of French as the primary medium of communication for the Russian upper classes. As the novel goes on, French is used less and less. We find something similar today, in the millions of Ukrainians whose primary language was once Russian, but who now refuse to speak it at all. I will have to steal Tolstoy’s idea on that one.

“…this aunt, who was unknown, uninteresting and unneeded by anyone.”

One distinguishing feature of Tolstoy’s writing, I realise, is its harshness. He speaks clearly in his narration of the unpleasant realities that we might try to gloss over. An uninteresting aunt at a party is just that – and people do not want to talk to her. We neither hide her from view nor pretend she is anything but an obstacle to enjoying the evening. In general, a certain cynicism is an emotion he allows his characters. One of the officers, Zherkov, is all about taking advantage of the war for his own advancement. Boris, one of the younger characters, is determined to use all the networking skills he and his mother have to raise himself up out of relative poverty, but in his thoughts, we see quite unpleasant envy towards Nikolai Rostov, his richer friend.

The things a writer allows herself to say about the world and the people in it are the clearest path we have to her worldview. By including too much cynicism, we end up with a sense of the world’s misery. On the other hand, the easiest way to put forward an optimistic view of things is simply to give the characters the right only to positive emotions. Ultimately, both approaches can seem overwrought and fake. Writers are often scared of us disliking their characters, over whom they labour and love, so they do not allow them the nastiness that makes them real. But people really are cynical at times, not as monsters but merely as human beings, and by including both cynicism and heroism of spirit, unevenly distributed though it be, Tolstoy creates a world that seems more real for the fullness of human nature he puts in it.  

“His smile was not like theirs – theirs were not real smiles”

I mean this is just great. As with the cynicism problem above, what we have here is directness. Society’s falseness is typically revealed in novels gradually and tragically, as with the character of Innstetten in Effi Briest. In such cases, writers adhere faithfully to the principle of “show, not tell”. But just as showing is important, so too is telling as a supplement. Telling here functions to make even more impactful what is shown, because language offers opportunities both in showing and in telling, which are not shared between them. Specifically, showing sentences soften up the victim to create the opening through which the knock-out punch of a perfect telling sentence can come. Without that softening up, the telling sentence can be easily deflected or blocked. One of Tolstoy’s many gifts is knowing when to tell, and when to show, and not shying away from one or the other.

“Suddenly there was a great rattling sound on the bridge, like a scattering of nuts”

For the greatest writer in the entire universe, Tolstoy does not do much of that image-making we typically associate with great writers. He mainly describes how things are. He is good at the telling detail, such as what people wear or eat, but really this is just the fruit of the gigantic research he did before writing War and Peace. What happens in the novel is simply the onrush of history. Characters, places, everything changes, but because so much is dialogue or simple description, because there is so much movement, the entire text is extremely engaging. We feel close to people because nothing gets in the way. Writing like Tolstoy is simple, if only you pay enough attention to the world to write it down just as it comes.

Yet on rare occasions, he does do images, and this image of a cannon’s grapeshot is one that you simply have to underline. At another point, blood pours from Prince Andrei’s wound “like liquid from a bottle”. These images are so rare because they are hardly ever needed. It’s not as if any of us have experienced the lives of the Russian high aristocracy around 1805, it is just that we are humans and so are they, so that Tolstoy need only describe them properly and we will find ourselves standing there alongside them. With war, it seems to me, he does find himself using the occasional image, because our experience of the battlefield is less widespread. Here, the images make us see clearer. What writers might want to take away is that in realistic narratives most of the images we try to introduce just get in the way, like frosted glass.

“Then he suddenly felt there was something dangling on his numb left arm that shouldn’t be there.”

Here we have almost the opposite to the comment above. The art, which Tolstoy mastered, is knowing what to say, and what not to. Here we have something imprecise, but precisely because of its imprecision and the knowledge we have of the actual fact of the injury, Nikolai Rostov’s own confusion at his (ultimately minor) wound becomes heightened for us. Gaps in knowledge create tension – Tolstoy does not take us for fools.

“Next day the troops were on the march, and Boris had no opportunity of seeing Bolkonsky or Dolgorukov again before the battle of Austerlitz. For the time being he would stay with the Izmailov regiment.”

The same thing happens here, at the end of a chapter. We know, as the characters do not, what Austerlitz means – a crushing defeat. Multiple chapters end while mentioning it is coming, but the characters meanwhile get on with their lives as if they are on holiday. The contrast is unbearable but brilliant. The one mistake Tolstoy makes is that he does mention the battle will be a defeat before it begins. That makes the ominous shape of the coming battle coalesce into something more prosaic, weakening the tension. You have to have history be familiar to fully enjoy this tension, but Austerlitz is so famous as a battle that Tolstoy cannot be faulted for expecting us to remember it.

“She clomped in”

Ultimately, as with Dickens, we can read Tolstoy to try and work out how to make vivid characters. Whereas Dickens’ characters gain power from his mastery of caricature, Tolstoy’s come from the details that he uses for them, in particular repetitions. Prince Andrei is at several times referred to as “indolent”, so that the word is associated with him in our minds. Now, this is worth giving more attention to. Normally, in creating and introducing characters, we dump the information on the reader all at once. We learn perhaps their history, their personality, their appearance. But I tend to forget this all myself – it’s too much, especially when detached from the world.

Character is shown in Tolstoy’s fiction as in life – one element at a time. Yet we need something solid, more than just a name, to attach the character’s traits to. Telling us too much is like making a clay statue and forgetting to fire it, so that it melts when left out on the mantlepiece. Tolstoy gives us very little, repeated over and over, with the result that we have something solid that we cannot possibly forget about a character. And thus everything that the character does after that is memorable too, because we have something structural to pin it onto, rather than just a mush. Andrei’s wife, the little princess, (already her name is a memorable thing), has a “downy lip”; Andrei himself has his indolence; Pierre has his glasses, Sonya her inner kitty; Berg has his inability to talk about anything but himself, Vera her crap personality.

It’s utterly staggering that I can just reel these things off. With Dickens, the people are so flamboyant in their personalities that we have to remember them. But Tolstoy’s people, real as you or me, are just described effectively from a technical standpoint. He finds their essence, and never lets us forget it.

Which brings us to “clomped”. The way we walk, like all the things we do with our bodies, is memorable. They can form the foundation for the rest of the novel’s description of them. Andrei’s poor, poor sister, “clomps”. That tells us all we need to know about the success she has had in her life, her confidence, and the distance between her hopes and her realities. If she did not clomp, if we did not know she clomped, we would not feel the full pain and sadness of the line when meeting the handsome suitor Anatole Kuragin: “She tried to be nice to him and didn’t know how.”

It’s brutal, but also not nearly as ambiguous as it looks when taken out of context. Marya clomps. She is not failing to be nice because she’s an unkind person – in fact, she’s one of the novel’s moral centres. She’s failing to be nice because her life is simple, sad, and cramped, living with her insane father on their estate. In other words, she can’t be nice because she doesn’t know how. And, of course, she doesn’t know how – she’s the kind of person who clomps.

These walking words are surprisingly useful for a writer, so it’s a shame few of them take full advantage of them. Characters always have to move around, so if we can find a way of describing their movements while also describing the innermost nature of their soul – why not kill two birds with one stone?

“And the three voices, hers, Mademoiselle Bourienne’s and the giggling Katya’s, blended into a kind of happy babble like birds twittering.”

What’s interesting here is how we get to the image. Images, even striking ones, are as I noted above, not necessarily an unambiguous good in the writer’s arsenal. They can get in the way of the scene, being a barrier rather than a path. Here we have a rare non-war image, but now read it again. Here we don’t just have the image – we have its creation. The voices blend, and then they become this babble which is like birds twittering. Images are annoying because they slow things down – we need to stop and work out how they relate to the scene that we expect to see in our heads. But here, because we see the scene become the image, via that word “blended” and the “And” at the beginning, the sentence retains its vigour. We catch the image in its becoming, so that we take it in while still running to the next page.

“My, how you’ve changed”

One of the problems a writer has is that in the two to three hundred pages allotted them by the gods of publishing, there’s only so much space we have for the forking paths of destiny. A novel is not a novella, which is lightning-focused on a particular plot and character or small group of them; still, things are short and simple enough that we can “see where things are going”, ultimately taking the tension out of the work after a certain point. Then there’s the problem of worldviews. With only a few characters, it’s hard to avoid the writer’s views of how things are. There is no space to explore alternatives, so that the universe presented often ends up seeming quite simplistic.

Tolstoy does not have this problem in War and Peace. There are so many characters and so many pages that we simply do not know what is going to happen or when. We know the history, but not how it will be told or what role our little people have to play in it. The characters we expect to meet again, like Boris, from early on in the book, may turn out to have relatively minor roles. The general tension is greater not just because of the war, but because people can be replaced on a narrative level. In fact, one major character does die long before the novel’s end, and the epic just keeps going.

If characters were simple and only replaceable, there is a great danger – we might feel like we could choose not to care about them. The opposite is the case. Because there is space, we know that they have time to grow, so we care about even the ones we don’t like at first. This is doubled by the fact that so many of the characters – Nikolai and Natasha, Pierre and even Andrei – are young. With all respect due to my older readers, young people change much more over a given time period than older folks do. By focusing on young people growing up, we get a situation where we are truly invested in people’s fates, not just whether they live or die as in a normal story, but what kind of person they will become. At my own advanced age (26), I recognise this as a great pleasure from coming into regular contact with younger people – I want to see what they will make of their lives.

So, this is another part of the magic of the book – the wave of characters that, thanks to the characterisation skill described feebly by me above, are all distinctive and exciting to read about. They and the history itself form part of the drive of the work.

“The same night, after taking leave of the war minister, Bolkonsky was on his way to rejoin the army, not knowing where to find it and worried about being captured by the French on the way to Krems.”

We end the piece on a simple one: the beginning of volume I, part II, chapter 13. The conclusions we might draw from this blog post are as follows – detail is key, not quantity; showing and telling must work together; images are not as important as we might think; cynicism is a human emotion as much as any other; a sheer quantity of characters, provided they are made using the principles above, is only a gain for tension and engagement.

This final extract does not correspond to all of these lessons, but it shows how narrative works in War and Peace, and that’s important too. What we have is very simple – time, place, person, and purpose. It provides the minimum for us to keep going. With so many stories and personalities, Tolstoy needs to be on top of his transitions or else we will get lost. And he is. And what’s surprising is how simple this is. The sentence above is not technically complicated. We can write our own, taking it as a model, or have that time/place/person/purpose as a kind of checklist on the door of our fridge. But we must write it. If we do, we too can take readers running through our imagined worlds.

What I might be trying to say is that War and Peace is actually quite simple. It may be one of the greatest works in the entire world, but that’s because it is simple, not because it’s complicated. The challenge in writing it, aside from the deep knowledge of human nature that Tolstoy had, is just the research and the planning. If you know exactly who is going to be where, and when, and why, you too can gradually build up something similar from scratch. Tolstoy wrote this novel in his thirties – it’s not actually the work of a great and aged sage so much as of a rich young man who had the money and time he needed to devote himself fully to his research project. That might give us hope that we may yet imitate it, correct lottery numbers forthcoming.

Unfortunately, though, it’s not that simple. Great literature has no formula, neither in general nor even in its specific instances. There is something missing in my attempts so far to write in a Tolstoyan manner, whether it’s the impetus that the sense of history gives or the quality of my characterisations, I don’t know. Somehow, no matter how prosaic it is, I am swept up and along by War and Peace. I put the novel down after finishing the first volume and haven’t read it for a few weeks, but just going over it again for this blog post I am already raring to get back into it. There is some hidden force here, something almost mystical. Is it merely my interest in characters’ destinies? But I know them already – I remember it all. There is no tension of that sort, no illicit love affairs like in Anna Karenina.

But still, like a raging torrent, I cannot read this book and not be carried by it. What is the force? I must return and see if I can find it, or drown happily in the attempt.

If you are still interested in Tolstoy’s language after this piece you can try to track down Henry Gifford’s elusive essay “On Translating Tolstoy”, which delves further into the topic. If you find a copy, please consider sending one my way!