Insubstantial pageant
Peter Ackroyd
Rosalind Passes Frank Swinnerton (Hutchinson 0.40) The Siege Of Krishnapur J. G. Farrell (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £2.25) What a familiar ring it has, the novel.' A comfort to the spinster and the secretary, and a temporary refuge for the reader' in an imagined world. A world in which effect follows cause, emotions are excited only to be soothed, adventure and surprise are muted in the pianissimo of a final chapter. The novel is now the armchair of our culture. 1 would hate to be considered a rabid experimentalist, but I often wish that contemporary English writing were something other than the fag-end of the nineteenth century.
Gloomy reflections like these occurred to me after reading Swinnerton's Rosalind Passes. It is Mr Swinnerton's fortieth novel and his writing career must, as they say of another profession, have given pleasure to millions. I may be a juvenile carper, but I found nothing commendable in this novel. It has that unctuous and enveloping quality which I associate with afternoon music on Radio Two. And perhaps this is its context, for the writing is of the romance-and-intrigue variety which commonly appeals to the silent majority. Rosalind Passes transpires in the world of the middle-classes. At the centre of the narrative are Clarissa, an amateur artist, and her husband Henry, a senior civil servant with an interest in Druids. Clarissa meets Rosalind through Daphne, a bright old friend, and the death of Rosalind (was it murder or was it suicide?) involves them all in a nexus of tea and suffering.
Mr Swinnerton's prose is constructed in what can only be called a mannered style. Here is a description which I have picked at random: " Clarissa's lips, too full for perfect beauty, although she would have been described as a handsome woman, closed tightly . . ." which adequately fits the generally fussy tenor of the narrative. There is something
remarkably prosaic about even the most lyrical Passages: "'Do you know what suspicion Sr Black terrible suspicion.' Tears filled the ovely eyes." The lovely eyes are those of Rosalind at this juncture, but they might have been those of any of the females. Sentiment of this kind has its place, but in a novel of emotional intrigue it makes the action a little stereotyped. Human reactions are reduced (raised, some alight say) to the status of middle-class caricature. Conversations are permanently conducted in that bright and brittle fashion which ,novelists generally assume when they aspire to real ' conversation. More surprisingly, at moments of stress the characters commune With themselves in exactly the same style. lheir interior lives are like a very long cocktail Party, thus holding the attention for less than a moment. And as a counterpoint to the Yearnings of these women who were born to better things, Swinnerton has created for us a charming working-class couple who have Worked their way up in the world (remember, this is the 'twenties). They are appropriately „named George and Doris. No working-class /num would dare call her daughter Clarissa, of course, and the aforesaid child would never dream of' taking up' painting. But the roles of Doris and George are peripheral, and the emotional heat is generated in rather more discreet surroundings. Chapters are entitled Henry Turns To Philosophy' and 'Clarissa ls A Comfort.' Which of course she is, to any frustrated and semi-intelligent woman who wants to feel — vicariously — both sorry for herself and appeased with her lot. There is writing of another quality in J. G. Farrell's The Siege Of Krishnapur. The historical novel has never much appealed to me, it offers too handy a structure for the ingenuous novelist, but Farrell's book has great strength.
His narrative is set in Imperial India that time when the English were English and the rest were, well, the Rest. It concerns a mutiny of the sepoys against their masters, and the subsequent, protracted siege of the English Residency. But although the natives are very restless they rarely appear in the story, which is devoted to the poor blighted English themselves.
These first appear as bored and listless, with that mixture of politeness and brutality which has generally been the English hallmark overseas. If India was not our barracks, it was our playground — as elicited in the first impressions of George Fleury, a literary young man on his first visit: "To Fleury India was a Mixture of the exotic and the intensely boring, Which made it, because of his admiration for Chateaubriand, irresistible." Farrell writes continually in this rather ironic and distant Manner, and quite puts the fiction back into history, If I didn't know better than to accuse anyone of being experimental, I would swear that be had dipped into one nouveau roman or another. For there are occasions of quite Mysterious transition within his writing: did this really happen, or did it only appear to do so? Could someone else have said this, rather than the person I describe? This kind of imaginative distance lends rather more enchantment to the historical view, and it is a Ploy that some of our more breathless historical writers would do well to borrow.
It certainly aids Farrell in his description of the decay of the English colony. We had seen it first during its swan-song, but when the fires begin to burn upon the horizon and the sepoys begin their assaults, a new and more mysterious character emerges. It is personified in Mr Hopkins, the Collector and virtual ruler of Krishnapur. Unloved by his children and ravaged by disease, he still has a determination and a kind of spiritual defiance that, literally, keeps him in one piece. There is Harry Dunstaple, the dashing young officer, and George Fleury, the dashing young aesthete, who become virtually indistinguishable during the course of the action. And there are the two doctors, who quarrel bitterly amongst themselves about the causes and symptoms of cholera. The controversy is only stilled when one of them dies of it. My list of characters is beginning to read like a publisher's blurb, but it is hard to keep the edge of caricature out of the descriptions. I do not put this down to Farrell's sloppiness, but rather to his humour. And it is this which emerges very clearly in his account of the women of the colony.
They are, as one would expect, billeted according to fashion and connections —Lucy, the fallen woman, is kept at a safe distance throughout the siege. But Lucy keeps her end up, and at the height of the horror invites her men-friends to tea parties, where the tea consists of cups of hot water rather too liberally dispensed. When the stench of the dead and the dying hangs over the colony, the good ladies fan themselves with copies of the Illustrated London News. And when black swarms of cockchafers immodestly cover the body of a certain young lady, they are valiantly removed with the stiff covers of the Holy Bible. The ridiculousness is, of course, intentional. Even the fighting, extraordinarily messy though it is, is handled by Farrell with a tincture of parody. The descriptions of boils, of men eating insects and of the stench of skeletal bodies are purveyed by Farrell with a certain horrified vivacity. You might be tempted to think that this way only horror lies, and when Farrell writes of the "dark roots of civilisation" I assume that this is what he has in mind. But this is altogether too obvious a point, and I preferred to see the matter differently. It is quite clear, for instance, that the English never understood the mind or the culture of the Indians. The imperial breed remain colourful but rootless figures, and even in their suffering they lack that kind of innateness, that contact with a culture which would make their suffering explicable. The community behave as though they were actors in a play which had long since been abandoned. A crowd of Indian spectators, in fact, watch the bloody proceedings with obvious and growing boredom. The lack of fresh carnage sends them away. The suffering is irrational, and has meaning only in terms of individual fortitude and not some imperial destiny. It is with this in mind that Farrell occasionally moves forward in time to the now ruined and deserted Krishnapur, and moves forward once to the old age of the protagonists. They are now settled in weary, humdrum lives and the past is all forgotten.
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