Defying the conventions

Peter Ackroyd

Elizabeth Alone William Trevor (Bodley Head £2.50).

Richard's Things Frederic Raphael (Cape £2.25).

I have never had a hysterectomy, and I never hope to have one; neither have I had an affair with my dead husband's mistress. And, beside these advantages, I have a golden rule — never to read a novel in which the characters lead more boring lives than my own. You might think that this would disqualify me from reviewing two novels of women and suffering, but you would be wrong. Despite the ostensible subject of both of these stories, real people and real feelings — whatever they may be — are not at the centre. These are novels which defy the conventions of British fiction by being both unreal and interesting.

Elizabeth Alone is supposedly the inside story of Elizabeth Aidalberry, a divorcee of middle age who has the usual regrets and disappointments. Forgive me if I sound blasd about the sufferings of those who are older than myself, but elderly angst has been a staple of fiction for longer than I can remember. Elizabeth's plight is symbolised, if that is not too weak a word, by her entry into hospital for what is known as a 'woman's operation.' It is here that she meets the other heroines of the story: Miss Samson, a pious lady of slender means, Lily Drucker, la belle dame sans child, and Sylvie Clapper who, as good as her name, has got mixed up with an Irishman of no fixed address. Their respective spells in hospital bring each of them to a crisis — whether it be religious or emotional conversion. For Elizabeth, it is the realisation that she is as the title says alone.' Her boyfriend manqud gases himself accidentally, and her eldest daughter goes off into a commune to eat rice and feel at one with nature.

I apologise to Mr Trevor if I have made his plot sound like an episode from Crossroads, but plots are not the centre of his design. There is a great deal of talent in being able to turn a well-heeled story into an interesting narrative, and it is this which Mr Trevor has. It is a question of style. Trevor has fashioned a prose that would be thought flat if it were not so flexible; it has a monotone which makes even the most dramatic reaches of life seem pointless but amusing. It also has a blandness and a distance which can suggest that cries and screams are not the only reality — the surfaces of things, the detail and the object, claim as much space as the heartbreak. It has generally been the case in fiction that 'characters' make the headlines, those poor fictitious beasts who feel profoundly and talk intelligently about themselves, but Trevor makes an important contribution to their decline by noticing that the supposedly stale, flat and unprofitable aspects of the world go on, and go on flourishing. This is a blessing in his narrative, since it means that he can attend to appearances, to behaviour and to conversation: subjects which have been scandalously neglected by the adherents of interior monologue and personal romance.

There is, for example, one sequence in

Elizabeth Alone in which all of the protagonists are caught watching the same TV

programme in a myriad different rooms; their reactions and their juxtaposition do more to energise the plot than a hundred pages of emotive description. I can put the same point in a different fashion by noting that Trevor is

at his worst when he tries to evoke interior states of mind. His monologues generally

smack of the factitious, and he has made the mistake of describing the respective night'mares of the women in their hospital beds. There is nothing more boring than someone else's dream, especially when the waking

reality is adequately summarised by Victor Value carrier bags, A Double Diamond Works Wonders, the Daily Express and the Chel

tenham Street Women's Hospital. Fiction cannot hope for more than the truth, and

Trevor's is at its best when it is not borrowing from that boring nineteenth century heritage of' emotion ' and' character.' These are topics now confined to pulp journalism and to people; our writing is beyond it.

But this opinion is not yet a clichd, and so it surprised me that I should come across a

second novel which has made similar, tentative steps toward divesting itself of its heritage. Frederic Raphael's Richard's Things is also a novel of female suffering and hardship, but Raphael also has the sense to realise that they are not the only things in the world. His writing has a flatnesS and an objectivity

which puts matters such as these in their proper place, within a world of objects and of

detail. This is putting the matter crudely, but There is really no other way of putting it for an English public who are used to the landscape quivering out of shape for the sake of one tantrum. I know it is de trop to suggest that Anglo-Saxon writers have anything to learn from their European contemporaries, but it is clearly the case that they have. I }lope I am not doing Messrs Trevor and Raphael a disservice by noting how fastidiously they have followed certain French models in their style.and verve. It was the French who rediscovered the surfaces of things, and it is these two novels which have domesticated them.

Richard's Things is, in part, the untrue love story of Kate Morris and Mijo. They have in

common, apart from a ragged sex-life; Kate's dead husband, Mijo, a French girl of uncertain means, had enlivened Richard's last night, and Kate goes on a mild war-path in order to possess it for herself. She tracks down Mijo, and they fall in love almost immediately. Fortunately, we are spared the torrid detail and Mr Raphael has had the discretion to evoke instead the passing of Kate's time: Mijo leaves her, after a convincingly bitchy scene, and her friends and children are seen to grow apart from her. She eventually achieves that state which, we are told, we all wish for ourselves, in the stolidness and self-sufficiency of an object. You might say, although it is heresy to do so, that character becomes a function of style in the novel. For it is the style which dominates the book, and it is one of formality, distance and opaqueness. It has a singleness of tone which gathers all of the facades of reality into one space, and an emotion becomes just as much an object as a fruit

and-nut bar. I am becoming ponderous now, and I don't want to suggest that Richard's Things is a 'new novel' or anything

approaching one. We will leave that to inferior novelists. What Mr Raphael has done

is to make trivial events as touching and-as credible as apparently ' significant ' ones, and he has done so within an elliptic and ironical prose. He is not, however, just any old

humourist and deep down, where it doesn't really matter. I found traces of good old fashioned novelist's morality: "Nature is impersonal. Read it for meanings and it's absurd, callous, cruel, vindictive." Strong words, and it is fortunate that Mr Raphael does not over-employ them. For in Kate and Mojo, he suggests effects and not causes. The proximity of Richard's death and their romance leaves them both in a mind of stupor, and they become objects colliding against each other. There is momentary violence (one quite extraordinarY scene where Kate attacks a poor burglar who Only wanted her personal effects), and then an equally sudden relapse into a calm which would be mysterious if it were not so regular. This is not the stuff of which the old, portmanteau novels were made, with their relentless pursuit of continuity and destiny, but it is one which adequately sustains some very tine writing indeed. Kate's final disapPearance into a kind of solid grief is evoked in some extraordinary prose: "1 shall join some committees. I shall be very reliable. My Pleasure will come from conforming to what People believe me to be. I shall never be susPected of being anything other than I appear and I shall appear to be exactly what I am: an Older woman."

Was it me, or I, who wrote before that these two novels were not concerned with "real People and real feelings "? I am afraid it was, and I can only assume that Mr Raphael has got the better of me, and cunningly evoked the stuff of life without being either dramatic or rhetorical. It is always a pleasure to be Wrong in such good company.