Tag: Iris Murdoch

Enduring Enduring Love

Enduring Love has a justly famous opening, bringing together a group of strangers as they attempt in vain to avert a hot air balloon catastrophe in the English countryside. It then shifts focus to become a strange book about the obsessive relationship between a young religious gay man, Jed Parry, and our narrator, Joe Rose, middle-aged and married (to a woman, Clarissa). I had read McEwan’s Atonement before, so I was on the lookout for narrative games, and was convinced I had spotted a twist only to discover that there was no twist after all.

The problem with the book is that it seems rather disorganised. With a title mentioning love you have a razor-sharp thematic focus right from the beginning, and love is complex enough that it can sustain the lengthiest of works. (Including a different Clarissa, in fact.) Enduring Love, however, is not a long work. Yet it seems burdened by its title, forced into discussing love, and forced by the thought of love’s range into talking about all too much. It’s wide in scope, rather than deep. Love is one word, but it can take many forms, each of which is rich enough for a story.

Instead, speaking broadly, we have: the romantic love of Joe for Clarissa and vice versa, the obsessive love of Jed for Joe, Jed’s love of God, Joe’s love of science, Clarissa’s love for Keats, the love of the widow of one of the men who tried to stop the balloon for her husband, who nevertheless she suspects had cheated on him, the love of a trio of drug addicts for one another, reflections on the love of parents for children, and so on.

In other words, there is too much here. The main focus, Jed’s obsession for Joe (and its contrast to Joe’s relationship with Clarissa), is not given enough development despite being the dominant part of the book. The tonics, questions of moral responsibility associated with the hot air balloon catastrophe (is Joe to blame for the victim’s death?), and the contrast of reason (science) and emotions (God, faith), are too faintly drawn.

Then there is the matter of the plot. Enduring Love is a book where things actually happen. But it is also a painfully real novel. It is the most upper-middle-class English story I have ever read. It’s just about people who have nice picnics with things from Waitrose or occasionally Fortnum and Mason, who have nice houses and nice friends. The upper middle class. My people, (by birth and education, if not always by inclination). So, when we have attempted assassinations by hired killers in busy restaurants, or calling up old friends to help us buy handguns from drug dealers, there’s something that seems more laughable than congruent. The opening scene is unlikely yet believable, the rest is just silly. (And as the action is being driven by characters, we can hardly say this fits into the whole ordered universe vs randomness theme, either).

There’s a fundamental tension in modern middle-class life, it seems to me, which causes problems for novelists. In the good old days, love plots were typically structured as being against society, and brought readers on side by the truth of the love against society’s fakeness. Now, with scant exception, we can love who we want, and though we may occasionally face some disapproval, in western Europe for the dominant social groupings we cannot create nearly enough drama to make a story. Instead, the novelist of average talent or below who wants to write about passionate love and make a story of it, is practically obliged to write about something like obsession.

Obsession, however, places the lover outside of society. It’s inherently less interesting because it reflects little back on our world. Its lessons stop as soon as we think about what makes obsession happen, patting ourselves on the back at the obvious conclusion that, for the example, we must be an atomised society to cause such madness in its members. In Enduring Love, Jed is not integrated in society. He is a loner, living at home, with no family and no job. Through his obsessiveness, he gradually disintegrates Joe’s position in society, spoiling his marriage and work as he draws him into his “love”. Indeed, Jed even does a good job of disintegrating Joe’s mind.

Now there are thoughts here that are interesting, like the way that Joe’s conviction that Jed is stalking him and dangerous is shared by nobody, so that we see as he falls away from social groups just how fragile our position in society can be. But again, there’s rather too much going on. We don’t need attempted murder to make these points. While I wouldn’t want to stress the point too much, there is a sense for me that in a serious book using shocking action like this is almost like the novelist is saying that they don’t trust themselves to hold my attention otherwise. (Which is probably true of this book).

I felt like Iris Murdoch struggled with a similar problem in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which shares with Enduring Love its focus on people who I went to school with or who my mother occasionally has round for tea. Murdoch’s novel seems at first to be the story of a demonic figure who manipulates a group of friends to ruin their relationships, as if by magic. Using words like “haunted,” “demons”, “materialises”, Murdoch creates an atmosphere or uneasy horror in spite of an essentially extremely bougie London setting. Yet when the time comes to have consequential action, those moments that would prove that the demon were truly a hellish visitant, Murdoch refuses to allow anything like that before finally dismissing the mystery at the story’s close. Meanwhile, McEwan rushes to jump the proverbial shark. Neither approach is entirely satisfactory. The one brings in the unreal and surrenders to the real. The other seems real, but refuses to abide by reality’s rules.

In general, I suppose I just find my people boring. I try to be a well-behaved writer and pay attention, but so far as I am aware there has been not one interesting story taking place around me in that circle in all the years of my life. (My time in Russia is another story). No cheating, no problems which are not immediately thrown under the rug, pure bourgeois stability, punctuated occasionally by death or mental decline, complaining over inheritance, but nothing more than that. That’s not to say I cannot write stories from the material I’m given. But the stuff of old novels, society scandal and the like, is essentially absent. The problem, one of them anyway, is that in Enduring Love McEwan doesn’t seem to trust either himself or his readers. The novel could work just as well as a slow burn, a gradual breakdown in sanity, a growing sense of menace. Instead, McEwan feels the need here to have every chapter be dramatic like a cheap thriller, to show love from so many angles, so that it’s far too busy a work to be an interesting one.

That’s not to say that there are not things I admired in the work. One part I liked is the novel’s ending, not what it says so much as how it says it. As with Lolita, where if we want to know Lo’s true fate we must read the parts where Humbert Humbert’s narration stops rather carefully, here too we have an appendix that gives more closure to everyone’s story than the section of Joe’s narrative does, while concealing its actual significance under the appearance of an article in a medical journal.

There is also the hard-to-dismiss fact that the book does work hard to establish tension, and as novelists are supposed to make their works entertaining, this is a good place to learn it. The first chapter is not that dull conversation business that animates the start of War and Peace, for example. (/s) Here, it’s pure energy, suggesting that we needn’t care about characters if the story is exciting enough. And as for that beginning, it’s also a good example of a way to draw out a morally complex theme from a conceivable real-world situation. It’s just that McEwan, for mysterious reasons, chooses to leave this theme in the background rather than the foreground.

Overall, your blogger shrugs his shoulders. I felt this was a busy book, with uninteresting characters and a silly plot. It was a contemporary story – I could tell at once how much the work was written under the sensible eyes (and scalpel) of a sensible editor, or even the ghost of one, tutting at the thought of an opening that did not grip, of anything that might lose the reader’s attention and do something so irrelevant as add depth to themes. Yet unlike the contemporary fiction of people like Sally Rooney or Patricia Lockwood, where even if I have my complaints I still am excited by the opportunities for reflecting our changed relation with the world under the effects of an ever more pervasive technology, I did not feel McEwan wrote a book that was contemporary in the deeper sense of telling me something about my world which I did not already know. (A classic, of course, can be a thousand years old and still manage this). Enduring Love, instead, feels already dated. Or, to be blunt, it’s a book which apart its opening, will probably not endure.

Blog note: the recent paucity of blog posts is due to two factors. First, my bag, containing my laptop and other quite useful items like the heavily annotated books I was aiming to write about (apologies to the reader who recommended Cusk – both Transit and Kudos are gone but there might still be a post on Outline), was stolen on the train. Second, I was struck by inspiration and wrote the first draft of a novel in the past two months, some 110000 words. This necessarily has to take precedence over other forms of writing, and indeed living.

Anyway, should be back to slightly more regularly updates from now ish.

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 “Free” and Fragile World of Iris Murdoch’s The Bell

Iris Murdoch is often considered one of the best English novelists of the latter half of the twentieth century, and The Bell is one of her best-known works. I bought it because I liked the idea, about a community of religious individuals living beside an order of nuns. These individuals are people who are disappointed with the world in one way or another, and yet are unable to withdraw from it completely, as have the nuns. (A little like your own blogger, in fact). Instead, they live in this fragile, liminal space, attempting to keep their lives in order. As newcomers arrive this space’s stability is put to the test. Rather than spoil the plot as I usually do, in this piece I will discuss the ways that the community crumbles from within, and comment on the question of freedom, as it applies to Murdoch’s characters.

Introduction to the Characters

At Imber Court, an old country house in Gloucestershire, there lives a lay religious community. It is lead by Michael, a closeted homosexual. Other members include James, his second-in-command, Nick, a man who once was dangerously close to Michael, and Catherine, Nick’s twin sister and an aspiring nun. The guests include Toby, a young man looking for a spiritual retreat before he starts at university, and a married couple, Dora and Paul. Paul is older, rich, and intellectual, while Dora is younger, cheerful, and trapped in a horrible marriage that she keeps running away from, unsuccessfully. Between all these people plays out a tragic drama, as past and present collide in the vulnerable space of Imber, which at first glance appears to offer a kind of isolated utopia, and yet in reality finds the world left behind much closer than at first anyone had assumed.

Shaky Foundations

Murdoch is good at showing the subtle ways that utopia fails to escape the old world. On the very first page of The Bell we are told that Dora comes from a “lower middle-class London family”, making us aware, unconsciously, that nobody is without background, even here. James and Michael, the leaders of the lay community, get on well not just because of their characters, but because both of them have “a certain clannish affinity” stemming from a shared upper middle-class background. Indeed, the utopia, where everyone lives in a rundown great country house and grows vegetables all day is only possible because someone owns that country house – Michael. Even as the community tries to emphasise equality – everyone addresses each other by their first names, for example – it is founded thanks to privilege, and within it a certain hierarchy still sees the well-bred and intelligent at the top.

Technology and Squirrels

Just as class undermines the community, so too do the differing conceptions of it that its members have. Michael thinks back to conversations with the Abbesshe had had before The Bell begins. She describes the people, “disturbed and hunted by God”, who can “neither live in the world nor out of it”. These people, who are looking for a way to make their “spiritual life most constantly grow and flourish”, are disappointed by the growing bureaucratised, technological world that was becoming ever more dominant in the years after the Second World War. They head to the lay community as an act of flight. It’s not clear what they want, so much as what they don’t want. For example, many of them see farming in much the same way as does Wendell Berry, aiming to use only horses and the simplest tools to provide for their own sustenance.

Michael, meanwhile, wants to purchase “a mechanical cultivator”. He doesn’t understand why they cannot make use of the good bits of the outside world – the technology – while avoiding the bad. For many of the others, the work loses its dignity when a machine is involved. Another argument breaks out of the squirrels and pigeons of the community. These and other pests have been eating the crops and fruits of the garden, and Nick and others have been shooting them. Long before tractors were invented, farmers defended their wealth from winged and furry intruders. But the community is divided yet again – Catherine does not want to see any of the animals getting hurt. Although they all want a bounteous garden in their utopia, nobody can agree on how to achieve it. They are united more than anything else by their desire to escape the world. Murdoch asks if that is truly enough.

Christianity – various interpretations

Murdoch was not a Christian, but she was, from what I gather, what we might term “spiritual” these days, and she has a lot of sympathy for the religion of the majority of the characters depicted in The Bell. At the same time, it is religion that must also bear part of the blame for the fragility of the world of the novel. Just as people retreat from the world for different reasons, so too do they believe completely differently in the same religion. This is exemplified in the two sermons recounted in the story, one by James and one by Michael. James’s sermon talks of the need to “live without any image of oneself” in order to achieve the good life. Personality, he thinks, gets in the way of goodness. James’s vision of the community is one of order and – for some, stifling – conformity.

Michael’s sermon, given later, essentially says the opposite. His speech, as introduced, begins just as James’s had, with the phrase “the chief requirement of the good life”. But Michael argues that the secret is that “one should have some conception of one’s capacities”. Instead of destroying personality, we must work within it, using it to better live according to God’s wishes. Michael’s view is influenced by his actions earlier in the novel, in particular by his guilt over his love for Toby and Nick. He convinces himself that God would not have made him the way he is without a purpose, and that in his love there is a great value, however wrong the love is.

Bells themselves help make clear to the reader the conflicting interpretations of Christianity that Michael and James offer. Each of them uses the image of the bell in their sermons, but reach a completely different result thereby. Photo by I, Randal.J. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Both sermons sound, at least to a layperson like myself, sufficiently Christian. And both I think have merit too – for anyone who has found the evil in themselves will inevitably oscillate between these two views about how to exorcise it, through the destruction of the personality that contains the evil, or through the transformation of that evil into good through force of personality. Yet these two sermons make it clear that Christianity, at least as most of us understand it, is full of contradictions. Dostoevsky, at this moment, would step up and say that that is the point. Only Christianity is capable of offering a way of life that can deal with human contradictions, thanks to its own contradictions – any other ideology will inevitably disappoint. However we look at it, though, within the context of The Bell religion has an ambivalent role, being another site where a supposedly united community divides.

Are Murdoch’s Characters Free?

I remember reading a comment from James Wood, a critic I like, that although Murdoch “again and again stresses that the creation of free and independent characters is the mark of a great novelist … her own characters never have this freedom”. There are some excellent things in The Bell, but I cannot help but agree with Wood’s assessment. Murdoch’s characters are intelligent, they have their own personalities, but they are not at all free. Not in the sense that they are bound by external forces, like class – that kind of unfreedom is de rigueur for a realist novelist. Nor are they unfree in the sense that Bakhtin thinks Tolstoy’s characters are unfree – that they all, consciously or not, reflect Tolstoy’s way of thinking and force the reader into it. Murdoch’s characters are unfree in the sense that they do not escape her.

In preparation for this piece I watched an interview with Murdoch that I enjoyed a great deal, but one thing that struck me was the way that she emphasised just how much planning goes into her novels. The whole book is planned in great detail, even on the level of chapters and dialogues, long before she begins to write. It is perfectly reasonable to plan things, but I think that in this lies the unfreedom of her characters. They always feel incapable of spontaneity, even if they are supposed to be spontaneous, because any spontaneous actions have been meticulously planned out already. Whatever freedom they have is structurally insincere, and we feel that, reading the book. Murdoch is hostile to things like the “machinery of sin and repentance” that govern the characters’ personalities, but she seems to have overlooked the machinery of control that her own writing places upon them.

Conclusion

That her characters feel unfree is not, however, as big a criticism as it might seem. There are fewer free characters in fiction than it seems at first glance. It is only when characters claim to be free – as they do here – but are not, that we have a problem. Murdoch’s planning does so much good for The Bell that I do not want to seem like I am criticising it. The work is extremely intelligent, at times funny, very well written, worthy of analysis, and – what is far more important anyway – worthy of thought. Whether or not the characters are ultimately free and real is secondary to this. It deals with these simple, but rather important questions – of how we should live, what we should believe, and how to be good and free – in such an effective manner that I do not mind its one, rather small, fault.

The Bell is a novel I can certainly recommend, from an author I know I will read more of.