Tag: Kazuo Ishiguro

Unrevealing Revelations in John Banville’s The Sea

John Banville is perhaps Ireland’s most celebrated living author, and as I wanted to read something contemporary and English-language I picked up my copy of The Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 2005. With its focus on grief, mourning and aging, it seems perfect for appealing to a prize committee of well-established adults who may feel their bones creak more than they used to, while its use of an unreliable narrator looking back on his life places it alongside Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (also a Booker winner in 1989) and Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending (Booker in 2011). Budding writers eyeing the prize, I hope you are taking notes.

The problem with The Sea is that it lacks that wonderful structural bifurcation of The Sense of an Ending, where the story seems finished until the narrator realises he has completely misunderstood his own past. It also, even putting aside the escapist enticements of the interwar manor house setting of The Remains of the Day, lacks a narrator with anywhere near the charm of Stevens in that book, or that tender readerly experience of sad frustration we get as we watch the old butler repeatedly missing what really matters until it is (almost) too late. Instead, what we have in The Sea is a narrator who does not even pretend to himself to be a good person, and some final revelations that really reveal nothing. It’s clever, but has very little heart. 

In The Sea, Max Morden, our art historian narrator, returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday. He carries the grief of his wife’s recent death from cancer, a certain amount of estrangement from his daughter, and another, deeper trauma from that old childhood break, where he got to know the Grace family. As he sits in his room, he writes musingly about these two pasts – the childhood past at the beach with the Graces, and the adult past with his wife Anna. The two are divided by time, but narratively glued together, as Max shifts from one to another as his memory travels. It is this split structure which gives The Sea its great curiosity.

Why write? Perhaps to cope or find order in what seems a mess, or perhaps simply to pass the time. As for us readers, we peruse these notes trying to make sense of the enigma that is the human soul. Max’s soul, that is. What we discover is essentially an exploration of the way that a man’s life can be influenced by his past. The first narrative strand, where Max is on holiday and spending time with the Graces, brings out in him a character trait – shame at his class origins – that influences the rest of his life, which we then see manifested in the second strand concerning Max’s wife Anna, and also ultimately in the narrative set at the time of his writing the notes, where we see this trait from yet another angle.

That human character is shaped by past events is something we writers are obliged to agree to before we are granted our pens – it’s practically in our contract. But here Banville makes backstory the front-story, so to speak. The influence of the Graces comes not, it seems to me, from the traumatic end of that holiday which we eventually learn about, but rather from the very fact of Max’s getting to know them over the course of the work – the accumulation of experiences of another world which ultimately sends him on a life’s journey to escape the world he was born into.

Max is lower class, while the Graces occupy a higher stratum. In a way, that’s all there is to it. Max’s relationship with his quarrelling parents falls apart and resentment towards his uneducated mother grows; he becomes an art historian, ever the refuge for the aspiring un-bourgeois; he marries a woman, at least initially it seems, for the money her father has made; and later he breaks down his relationship with his daughter, Claire, when she prefers to pursue a life that sees her helping those in poverty rather than solidifying Max’s status via continuing his work in the field of art history. A sense of social inadequacy, once present, leads the entirety of Max’s life off course.

This initial encounter with class is complicated, made rich and fragrant in the man’s memory no doubt, by its association with first love and then second, as Max grows enamoured first with Mrs Grace and then with his own coeval, her daughter Chloe. Then there is a certain fairy-tale-like undercurrent to the text thanks to Chloe having a twin, Myles, who is mute. Not for nothing does Max refer to them as “the gods” at times – they seem from another world, and gloriously strange.

Referring to the twins as such, however, also suggests a persistent problem Max has – an inability to see, which we note with a certain ironic smile given his profession. Throughout the book, he seems to prefer to view the world through the lens of his favourite artist, Pierre Bonnard. Chloe, for example, looks “remarkably like the forehead of that ghostly figure seen in profile hovering at the edge of Bonnard’s Table in Front of the Window.” That even some fifty years later he continues to think of her perhaps suggests continued infatuation, but it certainly suggests a problem with accepting how things are.

Indeed, often we have to wait to the end of a given section before Max actually reveals some useful information, about himself or his life. Take this shocking, painful, and pained admission of his wife’s frailty, which comes as a standalone paragraph after several unrelated long paragraphs on the child Max’s habit of finding bird nests – “Anna leaning sideways from the hospital bed, vomiting on to the floor, her burning brow pressed in my palm, full and frail as an ostrich egg.” Obviously, we need what comes before to see how it leads Max back to his pain, and also to give additional heft to the image of the ostrich egg. But it does mean that we spend much of the book sifting through memories, waiting for the occasional pithy statements that sometimes do not land.

(I am also not sure how honest it is as an approach, from a writing perspective. It feels a bit cheap – as if Banville had this admittedly great image of the egg, then decided to create the backstory to bring us to it. This is the cheapness of musings and memory – because they don’t really connect to anything, we can make up whatever narrative or language or image demands.)

Evasion, unseeing – Max is an unreliable narrator. We know them by now. He writes of childhood or of eggs and really he’s writing about his grief or longing. He misinterprets overheard information and he’s a flawed character, hitting his dog as a child and spouting misogynist twaddle as an adult. He hides things too, primarily his alcoholism, but in a way that the careful reader notices. All this is fine – it’s what such narrators do.  

The problem is that Banville really does nothing with any of this. Unlike Stevens at Ishiguro’s novel’s closing moments, Max does not actually learn anything about his life. The story ends with a minor factual discovery, but not growth. He may have written his pain out onto the page, but he doesn’t seem to have overcome it, or changed, or anything. The conclusion of the novel basically sees Max forced to accept certain realities he was previously disinclined to, but that again is not growth. We do not say that the suspect taken away in handcuffs has grown because she has stopped resisting – nor can we say it here.

Reader, I go into novels looking for ideas and journeys – maybe that’s my problem, but as an approach it largely clears the ground to let me enjoy a variety of things. The Sea basically has no ideas except that grief is often only approachable through evasions and that class shame can last an awfully long time. Nor does it have any journey to speak of. The traumatic event at the end of the childhood holiday seems to have had far less influence on Max’s subsequent life than his experience of embarrassment about his parents’ financial situation. As a final revelation, it reveals nothing to us.

In the same way, when Max then learns as an adult that something he had overheard at a critical moment during the final moments of his holiday with the Graces was wrong, it offers no catharsis for him or for us because that overheard information would not have stopped the traumatic event from taking place – the truth replaces the falsehood but all the bother would still have happened. Everything is disconnected, unsatisfactory. Even the sea itself is underutilised as an image!

There are readers who can drift along for page after page, enjoying a good metaphor or digression. I am not one of them – sorry. (Readers shocked at this admission should consult the name of the blog.) I can enjoy beautiful prose, and The Sea is beautiful, with plenty of phrases underlinable, but that’s not enough. These phrases ought to be connected to something, some idea or development or existence. Instead, they are like beautiful drawings on the sand, waiting to be washed away by the tide, as the memory of this book may well be for me, as soon as I start the next one.

On Reflection

Here’s a question for you. When you reflect, where do you put the mirror?

This seems a silly question, and that’s because it is. But there’s also something here too, because having thought about reflection recently it occurred to me that reflecting on reflection itself isn’t without its value. And luckily, unlike when we put mirrors against mirrors in real life, creating a headache-inducing cascade of images (which I recently experienced at the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Tate Modern), we can stop our reflecting on reflection after only one reflective layer. But still, with its own repetitions, this paragraph shows how dangerous and disorientating such mirroring can be if we are not careful about it.

So. When we see our reflections in real life, we stand in front of a mirror. Alternatively, we turn on the camera on our phones, but I am too old for that already. Facing the mirror, our goal is to examine our physical appearance. Up close, in the mirror of a washroom or via our phone’s selfie camera, we get to investigate the blemishes, the little blotches and patches of colour, the wrinkles and the hairs. From further away, we check out our figure, or how the clothes sit on us. We might be taking advantage of a mirror on the inside of a cupboard to help us select an outfit.

In both cases, from close up or far away, we are seeing ourselves as an object in others’ eyes. We want to look good because when we look good we feel confident and happier. Even if we turn our backs on beauty products and fancy clothes, we certainly don’t want to look bad. This isn’t complicated. We use mirrors and physical reflection – the fake image of ourselves – to improve the real image of ourselves. Mirrors make the world more beautiful, if a little more narcissistic too.

This isn’t too interesting. What is, is when we reflect in a different way. Now, when you try and answer the ridiculous question I set at the beginning of the post, what did you come up with? I’ll tell you what I got. You place the mirrors right in front of your eyes. You look immediately back into yourself, without worrying about such silliness as what you are wearing. Here you are trying to descry the state of your soul.

Reflection in this sense is a matter of personal diagnostics. We are trying to work out our own selves. It’s connected to things like mindfulness. When we reflect, we try to understand our feelings and why we feel that way. We are trying to follow the wires and circuitry of our inner being, such that we might, with any luck, prevent ourselves from falling into bad moral and spiritual habits.

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” Father Zosima, in the Brothers Karamazov.

Reflection is designed to stop just this. By understanding ourselves, we can uproot the lies that have gained purchase within us and prevent hypocrisy, that most fatal and inevitable of human weaknesses. The more we understand ourselves, the less likely it is that we will be able to deceive ourselves. If we spend enough time immersed in our hearts, we deprive the devils that live the chance of twisting them in unhealthy directions.

Yet is that all actually right? The first thing that you will have noticed when I suggested putting the mirrors right in front of one’s eyes is that this position completely obscures the light. Now, the soul is a murky place, but even so, doesn’t it need some light for us to actually see? What a hindrance the darkness is. Though we might be attempting to remove the rot from the floorboards, it is precisely the dark and the wet that the dark contains, which makes the rot exist, to begin with. We go into ourselves, find nothing, come out again and pat ourselves on the back, missing the obvious.

Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending deals with reflection as one of its central concerns. First, the narrator takes us on an introspective tour of his life, reaching one conclusion. Then, new information comes to light, and he does the same tour all over again, reaching a completely different conclusion. The process of reflection is the same both times. But what we see is that reflection of a certain sort can be an act of self-deceit. To continue the silly metaphor, how are things supposed to enter us if we have mirrors covering our eyes? Don’t we all cry out with despair every time Stevens fails to notice his life and his opportunities are slipping away in The Remains of the Day?

Introspection is a fairly useless thing when you put the mirrors in front of your eyes. Useless at its best, but often downright hostile. Turning our gaze inwards prevents us from noticing others or the world outside. These modern novels that are so deep within someone else’s head always bother me because they portray quite an unhealthy way of going through life. I confess I am probably more self-centred than most, but even I am more aware of the world and its inhabitants than the likes of Else in Schindler’s Fraulein Else. Of course, Else is not what we would call mentally O.K. But even the narrator in The Sense of an Ending is pretty bad at this. The deeper we go into ourselves, the less we seem to get out, and the less we act as members of the external community as well.

Who has not, on this score, found how utterly useless reflection is when dealing with depression? Thinking, reflecting, and ruminating, rather than actually using those CBT techniques to dismember one’s bad feelings, that is. When we reflect while depressed then it really is like we are in a hall of mirrors, because we only get dizzier and dizzier, and further and further away from what is real and meaningful.

One solution to ruminating depression that often works wonders is talking to others. Unburdening one’s soul is removing the feelings from the damp cellar I described earlier and shoving them into the light, where they are often quickly disinfected. Is there not a way of placing the mirrors that also does this?

Indeed, readers, I have determined that there is.

The optimal location for the mirrors when we are reflecting is right in front of us, just like when we are getting changed, but the mirrors in this case are also rather wide, so that we can see the world behind us instead of just ourselves and what we are wearing. When we reflect, we need to be able to place ourselves as a unit within a community. Reflecting when we only get deeper and deeper into ourselves fails to let us see how we fit into the narratives of others’ lives. Rather than binding us to others, reflecting in that sense divides us. Not so here, where we are obliged to see the connections between us all because we have to see others wandering about in the background, even as we focus on ourselves.

Does this mirror placement prevent hypocrisy or lies? Certainly not, but it also lets us see our actions as they are played out in the world, rather than only in our distorted memories. It becomes harder to hide from ourselves. Coupled with seeing ourselves as part of a network of human beings this mirror placement might make us a more responsible being too.

I was reflecting on reflection because I have been thinking about some of Adorno’s comments on fascism, namely how among those who fall victim to it their common characteristic is their inability to reflect. Reflection is obviously hugely important, but so is reflecting the right way, not just going into yourself and expecting that in itself to be enough to sort things out. Adorno, of course, understood that fact when he noted that working through the past is a process we must do every day, rather than simply do in one go and then move on. Here, however, I just wanted to have some fun thinking about what reflection might look like, and how we might want to visualise it.

We might go further and think about a form of reflection in which we ourselves are invisible (the mirror is placed alongside our eyes and takes in images from without). This we could equate to certain Buddhist teachings or else Schopenhauer’s own renunciation-orientated ideals of life. And there are things like music and literature and great art in general, all of which can also lead us to reflect in a way that removes our own egos from the equation.

But those are topics for another day.

The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes

I remember first seeing Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending at school. Twenty copies used to sit in one of the classrooms I had English lessons in – I imagined it was on some A-level syllabus as a recent masterpiece, which predisposed me to dislike it. (It was some time before I realised authors could write alright without first being dead.) It did win the Man Booker Prize in 2011, which is practically yesterday, after all. And certainly, if we want to be uncharitable, this is a book that can be knocked down by pigeonholing it as one of those books that seems written to secure a place on a syllabus. We have a textbook unreliable narrator, a dualistic structure to consider, a limited number of characters, things to talk about, literary references, school days, and a length which means even the laziest schoolkid might actually read it, or at least be able to sprint through it on the night before the exam. With that said, readers expecting me to rehash my criticism of Schlink’s dreadful The Reader will be disappointed for the simple reason that The Sense of an Ending is actually pretty good.

There are two stories here, one for each of the novel’s two parts. Tony Webster tells his life story in the first part, or at least the life story he thought was his own. He goes to school and has three friends including the intelligent Adrian Finn, then they head their separate ways and begin drifting apart. At university, Tony meets a girl, Veronica, stays once at her house for the weekend and later introduces her to his friends, before eventually breaking up with her. He later discovers that Adrian, who ended up at Cambridge, is now going out with Veronica. He writes them a postcard and a letter, the latter of which he barely remembers, and then sometime later learns that Adrian has committed suicide. In his note, Adrian explains his decision with reference to philosophy and the importance of free will. This existential flourish seems in line with the Adrian that Tony knew at school, so he agrees with his friends that the death is a shame, but not out of character. Tony then finishes university, gets married and has a child, gets divorced and retires, and that’s really as much as we get. “And that’s a life, isn’t it?” – one told from beginning to apparent end. There are some disappointments, some pleasures, but really it is a slightly cautious, empty thing.

The second part begins when the older Tony receives information that he has been given a little money and two documents through the will of a certain Mrs Ford – Veronica’s mother. We are just as confused as he is. The first of these documents is a short and ambiguous letter from Mrs Ford, while the second is a diary – Adrian’s diary – which has been taken by Veronica and which Tony then spends much of the second story trying to get back. Here is our mystery. Why does Mrs Ford have the diary, why is she giving him the money? Tony’s rather confused attempts at working all this out and what he discovers along the way is what The Sense of an Ending is, in essence, about. It completely changes our reading of the first part because it turns out not that Tony has been coy about the truth, but rather that he has simply forgotten it and let it fade. The new information of the second part is a rude awakening that forces him to look back at his life again and interrogate how it all really took place.

Narrative

At its heart, The Sense of an Ending is about the stories we tell ourselves. It’s about the lies that Tony has told himself his whole life, and the “truth” he eventually discovers. Adrian, ever precocious, quotes the Frenchman Patrick Lagrange: ‘“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”’ The first part of the novel is one certainty, the certainty that Tony has about his life based on the memories he has retained of it. The second part concerns the new “history” that writes itself when he finds documentation that does not sit easily next to his original view of things.  

Tony is well aware of how this all works. The novel is full of philosophical asides that work well to hammer in its themes. “How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.” Tony does meet Veronica again, but he never sees more than a page of the diary – for she has burned it. Her excuse, “People shouldn’t read other people’s diaries”, is not unreasonable. To read a diary in which you figure is guaranteed to knock you off balance, because it reveals the unadulterated vision of history that belongs to someone else, and thus necessarily contradicts your own.

Worse still is when Tony receives a copy of the letter that he had sent to Adrian and Veronica after hearing that they were going out. In the novel’s first part the letter is passed over briefly as if it were of no importance at all, but we later see that this is an evasion – by Tony or by his subconscious, we cannot say. The letter is brutal, nasty, and exceptionally spiteful. And it is the last thing he ever sent to his friend before he died. Tony cannot deny that it is his letter, but he does not seem able to accept it fully either:

I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn’t recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception.

Taken as a whole, The Sense of an Ending is full of things that seem to separate us from anything close to the truth, with language itself being a particular target. Early on, for example, Tony notes how the word “going out” has changed in its definition over the course of his own lifetime, making us aware of how at a basic level the words we read and understand now may not correspond to what Tony is actually trying to convey. At another point, after talking to a solicitor, Tony notes how his own linguistic independence seems to be lost in conversation with them – “Have you noticed how, when you talk to someone like a solicitor, after a while you stop sounding like yourself and end up sounding like them?” Finally, there is the newspaper report of Adrian’s death, the ‘Tragic Death of “Promising” Young Man’, which is so cliché at this point that the words are essentially empty.

It’s not for nothing, then, that Veronica seems to spend the entire book telling Tony that he just doesn’t “get it”. If our memories are faulty, just as faulty will likely be our attempts to fix them. Early on in the first part, while discussing history writing, Adrian says that the only way to understand a given work of history is to understand its author’s biases. But we cannot, because they are too complicated, and often too deeply hidden. One comes away from The Sense of an Ending rather battered, clutching the solution to the mystery that Tony does eventually reach, but with a feeling that so much has been lost in the search for it that we might have been better off just staying in the novel’s staid and stable first part.

All in all, I did enjoy The Sense of an Ending. I had read some rather hostile reviews that had said it was a work of philosophy with nary a novel in sight. This criticism falls flat to me. Of course, the novel does indulge in a lot of introspection, but it does not feel out of place. As far as I am aware, older people do tend to reflect on their lives – Tony is not unique in this. Its main fault is that Tony does tend to repeat himself and the same ideas in only slightly varying phrases, which is tedious by the end. The plot here is sufficiently meaty, the characters sufficiently real, to satisfy me, even if it does suffer from that problem that most introspective works do, namely that it’s a little claustrophobic and airless. There are not enough characters, nor enough vibrancy, at times.

To end with I want to note that it’s interesting how we have come to this sort of novel. The great modernist writers loved their interiority and stream-of-consciousness. Now, with that vein fully excavated, we move from the experience of the present into the experience of the past and the failures of memory and interpretation – as we did in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day or Sebald’s The Emigrants. This is a mere musing on my part, not an exact science – after all, Ford’s The Good Soldier came out in 1915. However, perhaps what I am trying to suggest is that there is no sense that Tony is deliberately confounding us here. Instead, we simply have a world that is hard to make sense of because we are all, all of us, reliant upon memories that do not match up with those of others or to the world itself. In this sense at least it is a somewhat forgiving novel, and one that possesses a message valid for our own lives.

Anyway, it’s an interesting little book and easily readable in a single sitting.