Tag: British Literature

Body and Soul – David Szalay’s Flesh 

Flesh, the Booker-prize-winning novel by the British-Hungarian author David Szalay, is many things. So is its central figure, the Hungarian István, whose rags-to-riches-and-back tale covers more ground than many of us can expect to experience in our own lives, from soldiery in Iraq to bouncing at nightclubs in London and finally hobnobbing with politicians over billion-pound property developments. The mere accumulation of believably rendered scenes, however, is not what makes this interesting as fiction. Instead, it is Flesh’s rendering itself that is exciting. Through a bare, pared-down style, which is especially visible in its shockingly direct dialogue, the novel is a brilliant example of saying without stating and showing without quite telling.

 The work’s title sets out its thematic scope right from the get-go. István is a man who appears to be someone wholly devoid of interiority or reflection – all body, no mind. He spends much of the book in a kind of passive role – things happen to him. Those things, often as not, involve sex. Whether that’s his sexual initiation at the hands of an older woman or the affair with his boss’s wife that sets off his rise to the upper reaches of British polite society, interlocking bodies are almost always involved. Despite his taciturnity and passivity, István succeeds in life. At least to a point. This result raises questions about whether such things as interiority and reflection are really necessary and has allowed some commentators on the novel to turn it into a kind of guide to practical stoicism.  

Such a view is wrongheaded. If the novel shows that a man can reach the top of the world without interiority or reflection, that fact reflects poorly upon that world. So much is possible, certainly, except what truly matters – mainly, in this case, love. The view also downplays those little, quietly articulated, developments within the novel, that show István changing even as the world does not. The growth of his imagination and empathy, for example, and his attempts to move from passivity into a certain kind of activity. That none of this is ultimately rewarded says nothing against him. Instead, after so much time spent meditating on flesh, we are left wondering how the world and people might change if we wanted to value mind also.  

Plot  

István comes from relative anonymity in small-town Hungary and ends up, briefly, at the top of British polite society. During his rise, two things stand out: the role of chance, and that of his own relative passivity. An older woman begins his introduction to sex as a teenager, less with his consent, than with his compliance. When the affair is discovered, István and the woman’s husband fight, with the young man accidentally killing the older in a brawl. After his release from a young offender’s institute, István loafs. An attempt at intimacy with his uncle’s stepdaughter leads to him being rebuffed, but it plants the idea of joining the army in him. After a tour in Iraq and therapy for PTSD, he becomes a bouncer in the UK, where one night he comes across a man being attacked by a mugger. István doesn’t rescue him so much as make it impossible for the mugging to continue by crying out. Nevertheless, it’s enough.  

The man saved, to István’s good fortune, runs a bodyguard service. After training, István receives as his clients a very wealthy Scandinavian couple, the Nymans, who divide their time between London and the countryside. The much-younger wife, Helen, begins an affair with István, which comes into the open after her husband’s death from cancer. For a few years, they enjoy their life openly. But her son from her marriage, Thomas, is destined to inherit everything from his father upon reaching the age of twenty-five. Thus István’s stint at the top becomes time-limited. The novel sketches out the shape of its arc early enough, even if the exact shape, the clicking together of the pieces of the decline, retains its capacity to surprise.  

Chance and Passivity 

The role of chance is so important within the novel because of István’s essential passivity, or at best reactivity. The older woman begins their affair by unexpectedly asking if she can kiss him. As for the heroism that fends off the mugger late at night, it’s described like this:  

“Help,” a voice says.  

The voice sounds strangely normal, like someone just neutrally saying the word. 

Maybe it’s for that reason that he does nothing for a second or two. 

Then he starts to move towards it, past the weakly lit display windows of the bookshop. 

“Hey!” he shouts. 

Which seems to be enough. 

At key moments like these, István’s actions have been prompted by external stimuli, and always with delays, as if he is a simple, slow, organism. His PTSD centres upon his failure to rescue a friend from a burning military vehicle in time – for too long, he simply watched the flames in shock, he thinks. Even his language is reactive: “Sure, thanks.” “Okay.” I remember making a mental note when I first saw a sentence of dialogue from István which required a second line in the book – it was so unexpected.  

Yet in spite of this essential reactivity, István’s ascent is meteoric. As a bouncer, then later as a bodyguard, he is in roles where his passivity and silence become virtues. Even with the women who fall for him, such as Helen Nyman, it seems that his reticence is taken by them as a sign that he can be trusted for a clandestine affair. Later, once he moves into British polite society, his lack of personality means that he can easily “fit in.” His interests, such as they eventually are, appear to be expensive cars and watches. He does not rock the boat. He barely makes it bob, stepping in.  

The World Attained 

By all of this I read Flesh as having a clear moral implication. If so much of our world is achievable without much thinking or conscious action, what does that say about the value of our world?  

István gets to his position without friends of any sort, without any extended dialogue. He is addicted to cigarettes, then later adds alcoholism, while Helen’s son Thomas eventually has develops a heroin addiction. The only changes for István between rags and riches is the quantity and brand of what he’s smoking. At one point, after Iraq, in one of the novel’s most memorable moments, we learn about the development of his habit: 

When he went to Iraq he smoked ten to twenty cigarettes a day. 

Now it’s forty. 

There is something gleeful about the narration here, a kind of revelling in self-destruction. It’s shocking to me because normally in our stories we expect our characters to be moderately rational, to want what’s best for them, to grow in positive directions. Instead, here, Szalay has István only get worse. And we could not expect for things to be otherwise, or hope for that, because István lacks the kind of interiority that might make such a thing possible. Yet in spite of that he still “grows” socially and financially, time and again. 

The sex of the novel ranges from exploitative to hateful, and only rarely does it seem loving or a meeting of two minds and bodies in mutual recognition and respect. But that it happens over and over, especially within the contexts of infidelity, also becomes an argument of sorts. The world, as it comes to István at least, is full of unhappy people, trapped in unhappy situations. He can give them sex, but it is hard to say if he can achieve anything more. The material success of the Nymans has clearly not saved them, in any serious way, from the unhappiness that seems to afflict most of the characters of Flesh. The novel’s willingness to indicate a change in material conditions, especially through brand names for cars, watches, and cigarettes, is contrasted with this lack of any kind of change to the people consuming them – still sad, whether they know it or not.  

We can also think about the dialogue again in connection with this world-critical angle. Taking a page at random, here’s a snatch of dialogue between Helen Nyman and her sister-in-law Mathilde, while Helen’s husband is in the hospital for cancer treatment: 

“And how are you?” Mathilde asks her. “Are you okay?” 

“Yes I’m okay.” 

“You need to look after yourself.” 

“I know.” 

“You mustn’t let yourself go.” 

“I know,” Helen says. 

This dialogue is above all really strange. It is the right words, perhaps even the real words, but on the page it’s startling, as is all of the dialogue of Flesh. There is a distinct unliterariness to it – instead of flowing, the end of each line is like a cliff edge we must carefully lower ourselves down on to reach the beginning of the next. That awkwardness is the point, of course. Here are two people not really communicating to one another. They are, like the many-jobbed István, playing roles. They are also, deliberately, consciously, not connecting. The clipped speech makes it seem that they are all acutely, painfully conscious of the possibility of being hurt and choosing to give the slightest possible opening. Even if István’s own speech lacks this sense of self-protection, it certainly contains its sibling – the self-retention. “Okay” is one of the hardest replies to find an answer for, after all.  

This dialogue relates the other topics, the sex and the material aspects of the world, by being another reminder of this world’s shallowness. Certainly these people could say more. They have, as the novel eventually reveals, more inside them. But the world as it comes to them, by and large, does not bring these things out. A bad world makes for bad dialogue, just as it makes for bad sex. Everyone here is trapped, without even the words to escape their cages.  

The World Missing

f Flesh were merely a parabola of a man’s life, without growth or change, with merely an implied judgement on the world, it would probably still be reasonably good. However, what elevates the novel is the way that it also offers an answer, or at least a hint, of what is missing, and what it looks like. These missing things are threefold – love, imagination, and goodness.  

Love is the first. Flesh is a book that is all about sex, but love is quite clearly absent, most of the time. This is further emphasised by the way that the majority of István’s sexual encounters, indeed his sexual relationships, are infidelities by the second person against their husbands. But from the beginning, with his relationship with the older woman, István is at least aware of love and its importance. He tells her he loves her and she tells him he does not know what that means. He protests that he does, but there is no evidence that this is the case. This show of emotion disturbs the woman and precipitates the end of their affair shortly thereafter. 

Love does come back onto the page until István’s relationship with Helen, half way through the book. This time it is she who confesses her love to him. He does not know how to react, and she even forbids him a response. But she brings the idea of love back into the book, so that when István has a chance to show his affection, and what she means to him, following an accident, he does it. Even if that showing is still just a restrained, pained, retreat into alcoholism, it is a sign of real emotion, however poorly managed. If the novel begins with a statement without emotion, here there is emotion without its statement. 

Imagination is important in the novel as something missing from the main world of the work. In contrast to the materiality of things – the brands, and so on, which suggest a kind of objectifying vision on the part of the characters – imagination, in the form of empathy, provides a counterpoint: a vision of a better way of thinking about other people. After István’s time in Iraq, carrying the weight of his friend’s death in combat, he keeps it to himself except when encouraged to share by therapy. He believes others could not understand. He himself cannot understand art, that legendary transferal medium for emotions, as his trip with Helen to a museum shows. And when the affair between her and him is discovered by Thomas, his response to her suggestion that he might tell his father is simply to say “I can’t imagine it.” At first glance István wholly lacks imagination, the ability to place himself in others’ shoes.  

Again, however, the matter is only a question of seeming. In the background there is therapy, and hopefully independent personal growth. By the time István has a son of his own and has to confront the realities of the boy’s growing sexual maturity, he is able to reflect, looking back into himself at that age, to compare and contrast. It has taken a book, but this is still small progress. We can also see this progress formally. Not merely in the shockingly long paragraph (average length for any other book) of reflection after István discovers a well-thumbed porn mag, but more concretely in the way that the book begins by sticking closely to István, but then expands its reach to give glimpses into the lives of other characters too, such as Helen and Thomas. I would say this is a controversial decision on Szalay’s part in terms of focus, but insofar as it fits into a framework of the novel showing a growing awareness of other people, it makes sense. 

Finally, the last thing obviously missing from the main world of the work is goodness, or positive action. Towards the book’s end, István is faced with that strangest of things to a man whose rise has been given mainly by chance – a choice. It is quite a plain one, between the full and permanent attainment of the earthly riches he has enjoyed for much of the book at the cost of a bad action, or rather continued inaction, versus a moral and “active” action which puts that attainment at risk. In this situation, István makes the latter decision. In terms of these two worlds, it means that he loses this great moneyed world and gains a smaller world, one of reflection and self-worth. He chooses, we might say, soul over mere flesh at last. 

Conclusion  

What is Flesh, in the end? A lot of things. I read it as showing our world as it is – atomised (István has no friends), materially obsessed, helpless – and showing another world, shining through the mist. Ultimately it is no mere dismissal of life. Its title might seem to set off a negative view of the body, but “Flesh” is not body. Rather, it is something less. It is only in combination with mind, and reflection, and thought, that flesh can be elevated into harmony, can become truly “body”.  

What is interesting here is the tentativeness of the work’s conclusions on this front, which has allowed some critics to see it as specifically about masculinity. (Thomas calls István an example of “primitive masculinity”, which supports this). István’s progress, his discoveries, are limited: from nearly no self-consciousness or emotional expression to just a little. If we come to the book to learn, to grow ourselves, we probably could not – we are probably already far more emotionally mature than our hero. But all growth is valuable, is a story, and for the relative rarity of this kind of story, Flesh becomes all the more worth reading.

Alan Hollinghurst – The Line of Beauty

In the interests of full disclosure I must inform you I am compromised and perhaps, on this occasion, cannot discharge my reviewing duties as honourably as I normally would. Alan Hollinghurst’s wonderful, delectable, novel, The Line of Beauty, concerns the life of a young man during the peak years of Thatcherite Britain. A period some ten years before I was even born, but one that chances of fate and birth mean I struggle to be wholly indifferent towards. I was not born a miner’s son, no. Quite the opposite – my grandfather was a very significant Conservative MP. I am tainted, I suppose, by this. By his ghostly shadow – he died when I was very small – and his books upon the wall, even as I write this now. Whether in action or reaction, this fact is a big annoying reality, one I try to avoid in life, yet ever fail to.

I know that readers here are scattered across the earth. It can be hard to understand the strength of the feelings that Margaret Thatcher earned for herself. When she died – which I do remember – it was startling to me to see so many people cursing the “witch” who now was gone. Yet many loved her, more quietly perhaps, and she repeatedly won large majorities in parliament. Whether one views her as an industry-destroying monster who robbed thousands of their jobs in the mines, or a hero for the aspiring who opened the way to middle-class property-ownership and general prosperity, her policies and personal values touched everyone in the United Kingdom, for better or worse. After a period of relative stagnation, Thatcher brought something new. The “Big Bang”, a sudden and large amount of financial deregulation in 1983, could describe the whole period – it was an explosion of change, with individuals free left to figure out the consequences and opportunities for themselves. Those who could, anyway.

Into this world steps the hero of The Line of Beauty, Nick Guest. Young, fresh out of Oxford but not particularly rich or privileged, he embodies the upward social mobility of the times. A friendship of sorts with one Toby Fedden at Oxford gives him the chance to live with Toby’s family in London while he pursues further studies in Henry James and his style. The Feddens are a family with no need for social mobility. Gerald, the father, is a newly-minted MP in 1983, while his wife Rachel brings old money and further status to his affairs. Besides Toby, there’s also a daughter, Catherine, whose depressions are carefully hidden from the outside world.

Nick lives with the Feddens for the full four year period covered by The Line of Beauty, even as he finishes studies and begins work with another Oxonian friend, the Lebanese Wani Ouradi. The Ouradis, who have made their massive fortune in grocery stores, are another side of a changing Britain. The father is made a lord, the son is sent to Harrow. While the father may be spoken of, behind his back, in terms of racism and dismissal, the same cannot be said for the son. Wani, through his integration into the boarding school system, has already become more British – in a way – than Nick could ever hope to be.

Nick’s relationship with Wani continues his upward social climb by providing the financial support needed to solidify – at least, for a time – the social benefits conferred by his friendship with the Feddens. Wani’s wealth is so great that at one point he gives Nick five thousand pounds just so Nick stops asking him to pay him for smaller things. By the end of the novel, Wani has given Nick plenty more. The reason for such generosity is not merely that they are friends or that Wani is rich, but rather that Wani and Nick are sexual partners. For, complicating the linear progression of the novel, from rags to riches, namelessness to front-page news, is the simple fact that Nick is gay. 

The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 legalised homosexual relations between consenting adults in the UK, but a law of the land is not a law of the mind, and Nick’s sexuality exists in an ambiguous field – tolerated, rather than quite accepted, by the novel’s characters. “They’re absolutely fine with it”, Nick says to his first boyfriend of the Feddens’ knowledge of his sexuality, then adds to himself – “as long as it’s never mentioned.” The tension is light enough that we may not notice it at first. Nick’s sexual self-discovery – for he was eventually “out” in Oxford, but remained a virgin nevertheless – seems to be linked with his other advances, all these positive things happening at once to him. In the first section of the novel, “The Love-Chord”, Nick’s romance with a young Black council worker is full of excitement and affection, as he’s initiated into the world of gay sex.  

When we jump to 1986 for the novel’s main section, this innocent discovery and pleasure at the world is already gone. Leo, the council worker, has vanished – we do not learn why until much later – to be replaced by Wani. Suddenly, Nick is addicted to cocaine – the one drug whose identity is so tightly bound to money and (apparent) worldly success, and which he does together with Wani. The sex, loving with Leo, has become somewhat sordid. Wani is a risk-taker who enjoys picking people up for threesomes and is addicted to pornography. It’s hard not to read this, within the novel, as a kind of decay. Just as the sexual and physical pleasures reach their peaks, the moral content of Nick’s life is emptying out. He is no longer studying, the relationship with Wani is totally secret, and he seems utterly directionless even as his money and status grow.

Through Gerald Fedden, Hollinghurst develops the idea of contrast further. Gerald is driven to grow his own power through his politics and his money through business. He is on the up. Yet his love for the prime minister – who is a constant background presence in the novel but is never named – is a point of tension when the man has a wife to give his attention to. For their silver wedding anniversary, Gerald and Rachel have a party where Thatcher attends, and we see quite clearly how he struggles to balance his desire to impress both women. Nick later discovers that Gerald’s family man appearance is at least in part an act, when he finds him and his secretary in a compromising position behind the scenes at a campaign event. 

The difference between illusion and reality is one of the clearest thematic oppositions of the novel. As in our own world, people live within one of their own imagining. Gerald has an admirer on his street called Geoffrey, who is convinced of Gerald’s merits until the crisis of the novel’s final section forces him to understand otherwise. The Ouradis believe, or wish to, that their son is not gay, and pay a young lady to pretend to be his girlfriend, and then fiancée, to maintain the illusion. The drugs consumed by the wealthy characters are also tools for the creation of another picture of reality, as the text shows by drawing repeated attention to the performance of Nick and Wani socially before and after they have visited the bathroom for a quick hit of cocaine. Being trapped within illusions is not, either, the sole prerogative of the rich. Leo brings Nick home to meet his mother, who staunchly refuses to believe that her son could be gay or that Nick could be anything other than a mere friend.

Illusions can remain solid, or become fragile and break. Rather than the sudden collapses at the novel’s end, the more interesting illusions are those that are slowly undermined as the novel progresses. We follow Nick throughout The Line of Beauty. It is his novel, his consciousness that we watch, his prejudices we live. His relationship with Leo, the council worker, is interesting in this regard for revealing the negative impacts upon the people he works with of Thatcher’s policies. Nick, however, chooses to ignore them, just as the Feddens choose to ignore the negative reputation of Gerald’s business partner until he has already been fleeced by him, and as the Conservative party chooses to ignore the Ouradis’ class and ethnic background while they can accept significant donations from them. We have a sense that while things are good, boundaries and identities can shift and be safely blurred. Unfortunately, as in life, the music soon stops.

The moral decay of the upper classes, drugs and sex and power in all their attraction and distraction and destruction – these are time-honoured things. Indeed, coinciding with my reading of The Line of Beauty I also plunged into the show Succession, about the succession crisis for the aging patriarch of a large US media conglomerate. Excellent also, the merging of themes in both works (illusion, drugs, lies) did make me uneasy as to why one might choose the novel over the show, besides the period colour of the Thatcher years and the prominence of gay sex in the book. Even the period of Succession’s filming (starting in 2018) has coincided with particularly poor moral performance of the United States, at least when viewed from across the pond, as the Thatcher years may be viewed today.

The answer has to be Hollinghurst’s language, and the filtering effect of Nick’s consciousness. Language is important here – Nick aims to become an expert on Henry James’s use of the stuff, after all. All of those classic tropes of fiction written in the shadow of class consciousness are here. Of Rachel Fedden we hear how Nick “loved the upper-class economy of her talk, her way of saying nothing except by hinted shades of agreement and disagreement.” When we read the dialogue of the novel we must be willing, as we might with a novel of the 19th century, to read the language as a dance of concealment and revelation, as when Catherine Fedden has a breakdown which must be suppressed by the language of the guests at a dinner: “an emotional young lady” says one, “a very emotional young lady” says another – empty phrases preferable to acknowledging an unpleasant fact.

The language of something like Succession is masterful, but in that case it is a mastery of swearing and comic insults rather than subtlety. One might be tempted to say this is a difference of temperament between American and British national characters, but it’s fairer, I think, to note the differences of the media. In television we have too much to work with – acting, backgrounds, music, action – so that language can be lost or become of secondary importance. The limitations of prose also serve to focus attention upon what it can do well, and the deliberateness of each choice of word and phrase. Prose also goes at our own pace, whereas television is propelled onwards unless we reach for the pause button – for this reason too, it seems to ask for a holistic appraisal, rather than close reading. Or close watching, I suppose.

Prose also allows for the theme of illusion to work better than it perhaps would in film or television. Nick’s illusions become our illusions, his evasions become our small opportunities to see what he refuses to notice. We see the Thatcherite years both as a bounteous becoming in the first part, then as a desperate attempt to enjoy things in the second part, before finally witnessing their collapse in the third part. Yet at the same time we can see the direction of travel, even as Nick avoids it: the presence of AIDs long before it is named, the prejudices against gays and foreigners that are neatly ignored so long as the money flows, the sense that not everyone is benefitting from the Conservative government.

This might just be so much guff from me, as usual. Especially as it only took two years from publication before there was a television adaptation of The Line of Beauty. Clearly the prose could live just as easily as spoken words, after all! It’s a good novel, well-made and well-written. To a certain extent, as an assassination of Britain’s ruling elite, it reminded me of the Patrick Melrose novels. But where Edward St Aubyn’s novels each take place over a continuous time period (with one exception), The Line of Beauty is more comfortable varying its scenes. This, to me, makes it seem technically more accomplished. I also amassed a staggering number of new words in the back of my copy, so clearly Hollinghurst has done a good job eating the dictionary.

I think what makes the novel worth reading is the way it manages to portray a very historically contested period without seeming overly partisan. Naturally, the rich are rude, prejudiced toffs, but that’s hardly news – indeed, I don’t think they would find that surprising either. They, (we?), would probably laugh at the accusation. Rather than focusing on either the suffering caused by Thatcher’s policies, or solely on the glamour, the novel shows it as a time of possibilities, good and bad. “I was lucky. And then I was… careful” – so speaks Nick of how he avoided contracting HIV. Just the same can be said of his experience of 1983-1987. Luck means that he comes out of the final pages rich in spite of his relatively lowly origins, with valuable knowledge gained at a painful price, but not one too hard to bear.

Yet we know that it could have been otherwise, that things are fragile. This is a valuable lesson, in our own turbulent times, as well.

Jacob’s Room and the Limits of Biography

1922 was a good time to be a person who read books written in English. Ulysses and The Waste Land both appeared that year, though you might have had trouble getting your hands on the former because it was banned in various places for obscenity. However, if you wanted cutting edge fiction but couldn’t get your hands on Joyce’s work, then luckily there was another great writer ready and waiting. Virginia Woolf is a wonderful writer, and every time I have returned to her I am grateful for it. My wanderings within the pages of the first of her “experimental” novels, 1922’s Jacob’s Room, was no different. This is a novel about a man where his role as plot actor is very much secondary, his voice muffled. It’s a Bildungsroman with very little Bildung. Most of all, though, it’s a frolic, a joyous exploration of what literature and language can do.

But also, however, what they cannot. Jacob’s Room concerns the short life of a young man in Edwardian England, Jacob Flanders, yet from the title alone there’s already a hint of a problem – for the title refers to his lodgings, and not to the man himself. This problem is what makes the work so fascinating – I interpret Jacob’s Room as a work that’s both determined to shake off old ideas of characterisation and literary creation, while at the same time trying to defend itself against the kind of total narrative collapse that rejecting old forms entirely might lead to or imply. It’s this strange mix of past and future, a kind of conservative modernism, that makes the work so fascinating. Compared to Ulysses, it’s really a kind of anxious battleground about what the future of literature might look like – and what it should not.

Out With The Old

Somewhere or other I remember reading that literary modernism began with a growing scepticism of the idea of character. Perhaps the best way to explain how this works is by reference to a work by one of my favourite German writers of the 19th century, Theodore Fontane, No Way Back. In that novel, our main character, Count Holk, has an affair while away from his wife. His letters home, naturally, reveal none of this. But we, readers, know the truth. And eventually his wife finds out too. Fontane uses letters as a way of exploring the communication difficulties two people can have, all the while Holk’s character remains known to us and his wife’s remains knowable too – that Holk ultimately does not understand her, leading to the novel’s tragedy, is a fault of his character, not a statement about character in general.

Letters and other writings dot the pages of Jacob’s Room as well, and as with No Way Back they are places for concealment more than communication. Jacob writes home, revealing nothing of his loves or his thoughts. His mother is delighted, “he seems to be having… a very gay time.” But what separates the treatment of writing in both works is that in Jacob’s Room there comes no revelation of the truth, no contradiction to the apparent world of the letter. The final scene sees his mother and Bonamy, the man who loved him, standing in Jacob’s empty room with “all his letters strewn about for anyone to read.” The dispersal of the letters indicates a similar dispersal of character. Who is Jacob? One person to his mother, another to Bonamy. Putting all the letters together, or the two people talking, would only be to court chaos. It’s not that character is changeable; rather, that there may be nothing solid about it all.

Other letters and writings are similarly undermined. Those of well-bred Clara are “those of a child”, and even when she writes in her diary, there’s nothing more there than air – she writes “how the weather was fine, the children demons, and Jacob Flanders unworldly.” There’s a sense that even when characters in Jacob’s Room try to express themselves, they cannot. We readers only have what we can see of them, hear of them, and that is rarely enough. “It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, not yet entirely what is done.” This phrase is repeated, word for word, twice in Jacob’s Room. What pessimism, really, lies in it – “hints,” “not exactly,” “not yet entirely”. If character is so diffuse that this is how we trap it, then clearly what we can trap will be far from the real thing.

Elsewhere that pessimism is more clear, as we can see from this description of men on a bus: “Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all–save “a man with a red moustache,” “a young man in grey smoking a pipe.”” Traditionally, by focusing on individuals, we might get a past. This does not work here. Jacob’s father has a grave that may not be his, while the scenes of Jacob’s childhood are mere flashes of impressions with as much attention on the other characters and their thoughts as on Jacob himself.

Finally, we might hope that impersonal forces would provide a key to character. Instetten, in Fontane’s Effi Briest, decries this “society-thing” that forces him to kill a man he does not hate because of an idea of honour he is powerless to reject. What are the forces in Jacob’s Room?“The incessant commerce of banks, laboratories, chancelleries, and houses of business”, “the men in clubs and Cabinets”. Woolf explicitly names this “unseizable force” that drives men to their deaths. But whether the forces of her novel match those of, for example, Fontane’s, is another matter.

On the one hand, Jacob is shaped into seeming conventionality by a usual society – the artistically-inclined former graduates of Cambridge and Oxford. He stands for the Greeks (despite knowing the language poorly) and for Shakespeare, neither a particularly radical opinion. He has other views, such as his ideas of women, that are still more clearly conditioned by society. However, though ultimately his society does kill him – for the Great War is coming – it seems fair to say that Woolf suggests we cannot just turn to impersonal forces to describe character either. Since Jacob is hard to fix down to begin with, he is too uncertain to be moulded by external forces.

All this is to say that the novel looks to the sources of character from fiction of previous centuries – what is revealed in letters, or the forces of an impersonal society, and says these are not adequate. Even dialogue itself is typically disconnected, disjointed words floating on the page, with Jacob rarely speaking. The old ways do not work, but how does Woolf innovate and experiment to build an alternative idea of character – and what are the limits?

In With The New

If I try to think of how this novel works, what makes it modern in its depiction of character, the answer is simple – the fragmentary flashes of prose that make up the bulk of the text. Jacob’s Room is told in snatches, sometimes only a single short paragraph long. It is true that every biography is broken into events and key moments, for lives are long. But in Jacob’s Room the moments chosen are less obviously important, even when contextualised. We might read symbolic importance into them, such as by analysing the significance of the sheep’s skull he finds on the beach as a child or the image of the moth, but it’s not necessarily the case that any of the characters joins us in such narrativizing work.

All memory is fragmentary. When I try to think back to yesterday, an ordinary day, there’s scant solidity to it. I recall a few images, the food I cooked for dinner, but little more. Woolf enjoys noting vibrant colours, and drifting between her characters’ consciousnesses, as if they are already looking back from some moment a little ahead. This gives the text a kind of blurred feeling. Even its characters seem themselves a little like names on whirling sticks, because none is quite embodied, pinned down and described like a beetle in the previous century would be. Really, like certain paintings, while we may appreciate the texture of Woolf’s prose up close, it’s only when we retreat a little that we see the overall effect – the mood, the shifting shapes settling into scenes.

Such fragmentation puts action into the background and overall reflects that pessimism about getting to the heart of character which I mentioned earlier. Solidity, perhaps, comes from the novel’s interest in architecture and buildings, which, suggested by its very title provides the clearest example of this. Yet Jacob’s own room, when we first encounter it at Cambridge, gives no clue to his personality. “Jacob’s room had a round table and two low chairs.” For the first mention of the title, its lack of force is its force. He has books and the detritus recognisable to anyone who has gone to Oxbridge – “a photograph of his mother; cards from societies with little raised crescents, coats of arms, and initials.” A piece of writing in his own hand is titled “Does History consist of the Biographies of Great Men?” – a normal assignment then, as if to highlight that Jacob is really only an average Edwardian, nothing special. 

We often think of Woolf as a writer of the inner world, someone who lived in the marginal thoughts of men and women. Jacob’s Room certainly shows her moving between her characters, but of them, Jacob is probably the one inhabited least. When we hear a voice, like his room it almost seems to tell us we were fools for expecting anything more of him – “I’m twenty-two. It’s nearly the end of October. Life is thoroughly pleasant, although unfortunately there are a great number of fools about. One must apply oneself to something or other–God knows what. Everything is really very jolly–except getting up in the morning and wearing a tail coat.” Here is the gentle delusion of superiority of the untested, but does this show Jacob to be any different to a hundred thousand other young men? Certainly not.

At the beginning I mentioned a kind of anxiety to the prose. Woolf read avidly among her modernist contemporaries such as Katherine Mansfield and knew through Eliot what Joyce was up to with Ulysses, so she had a keen awareness of the options for advancing prose which were being worked upon by others. One thing I found curious was that in her revisions of the novel Woolf primarily worked to reduce instances of interiority. It was as if, while retreating from the scenes and structures of 19th century fiction – the genealogies and letters, the carefully orchestrated scenes and overheard gossip – she did not want to commit wholly to something from the 20th century, that totally absorbing, egotistical monologic stream of consciousness of the sort we read from Molly Bloom at the end of Ulysses. Something that is both extraordinary, yet at the same time a kind of dead end, for it denies the soul of every other living being.

All this is to say that it’s as if Woolf were experimenting here with trying to find a third way of characterisation, neither the pure continuous interiority of the stream of consciousness, nor the lifeless puppetry of the realist novel. A characterisation through fragments, through assembling snatched moments of life, and of consciousness, into a kind of whole. Except, if that is the goal, it is a failure. I have no idea who Jacob is, and I am not sure that any truth on that score really lurks within the novel. We may have escaped the madness of stream of consciousness and run out onto the street, but now cars are hurtling past us, and all is disorientation.

Yet if the goal is not to create a character, but to paint a world, to load readers with the impressions and thoughts of a society, then by contrast Jacob’s Room is a great success. We learn as much about Jacob in five pages as we do in fifty – giving us more is only like putting another thin sheet of coloured glass upon a heap, and indeed the effect of colouring is diminished as more and more is added. The first sheet is when things are most striking. So it is that in a single one of Woolf’s fragments she has more than enough opportunity to create her effects.

The one that sticks in my mind comes from early on, a tiny story of four pages, in which Jacob’s mother receives a letter from his tutor proposing marriage, considers it, and decides to remain independent. In this section Woolf’s total technical mastery is evident. Mrs Flanders receives the letter and, expecting nothing but remarks related to her son’s work, reads it while continuing her own business. Thus do we see her, divided: ““Yes, enough for fish-cakes tomorrow certainly – Perhaps Captain Barfoot—” she had come to the word “love.”” A few sentences on she rages at her children, not truly out of anger towards them, but because she is angry at the letter and cannot control it. This is all wonderful, delicate writing. Her emotions, a world of them, are covered in a few pages. Completeness stretches even to time – we get a little epilogue, in which some years later Mr Floyd sees Jacob by chance in London, but thinks he “had grown such a fine young man that Mr Floyd did not like to stop him in the street.”

What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Woolf comes up against the limits of biography within this approach. She can create characters through her experimentation, certainly. But with her reluctance to travel too deep and stay too long inside their heads, as she does in her later novels, that characterisation can only go so far. That is why Jacob remains a blur, while those other characters, whose internal worlds are clearer to us, are themselves are much clearer – Mrs Dalloway or Mrs Ramsay, for example. Overall, Jacob’s Room is a book of wonderful prose, challenging forms, and experiments which remain relevant to writing even today. I did not love it as I do To the Lighthouse, but that is no matter. Woolf was such a prolific writer – of letters and diaries as well as her novels – that as readers we get a view of nearly-unmatched privilege compared to other writers. We see not just the brilliance of her experiments when they succeed, but also the many false-starts and sites of practice she needed to prepare for them. That, for anyone interested in the craft of fiction, will never not be exciting.