ANOTHER VOICE

'The novel as an alternative to knitting'

CHARLES MOORE

We sat and digested in the Guildhall last week and listened to the chairman of the judges, Jeremy Treglown, as he explained why his team had just awarded the Booker Prize to Ben Okri, for his novel, The Famished Road.

We sniggered as Mr Treglown told us of 'a man writing from Windlesham Manor, Windlesham, in Surrey' who had asked, in a letter to the Times, whether 'there was an inference to be drawn from the fact that none of the novels . . . is set in the United Kingdom'. Mr Treglown made short work of that poor simpleton, and of everyone else who lacked his own cultural boldness:

'Some literary people seem to inhabit a Heritage theme-park, in houses with no television, where, after the family has spent the evening around the piano, or at their Latin grammar, Father reads aloud to them from Mrs Humphry Ward.' A hit, Jeremy, a palpable hit!

'No one even half-conscious,' he went on, 'who had recently looked around a British city could suppose that Bombay or a Nige- rian village are settings less immediate to the imaginations of readers here than, say, Barchester.'

Half-conscious as I was my attention wandered from Mr Treglown's daring denunciation of dim-witted squires and Tory education ministers, and the first sen- tences of a novel floated into my mind:

An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English cathedral tower be here? The well-known massive grey square tower of its old cathedral? How can that be here? There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan's orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thou- sand scimitars flash in the sun-light, and thrice ten thousand dancing girls strew flow- ers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing fig- ure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry?

That is how Dickens starts Edwin Brood. Within the first paragraph, he has conjured up for us Barchester (as it were) and Bom- bay (as it were) and put us in an opium den in east London. And he did all this at a time when there was no television and the family was sitting round the piano in the evening and Father was incapable of read- ing Mrs Humphry Ward aloud because she had not yet published her first novel. (By the way, I know Mrs Humphry Ward's name makes her irresistibly amusing, but I wonder whether Mr Treglown thinks that a novel like He/beck of Bannisdale, with its fierce portrayal of the conflict between reli- gion and human love, would make cosy reading for his imaginary literary family, or is inferior in power to any winner of the Booker Prize.) As I write, I have in front of me the first edition of Edwin Brood. It was produced as a monthly magazine, the first instalment appearing in April 1870. The gtext is sup- ported by advertisements for other books and for Borwick's Baking Powder and Jay's London General Mourning Warehouse and the Vowel Washing Machine (not an early invention of reactionary grammarians, but a washing machine) and, of course, the despised 'Twenty Guinea Pianoforte with check action'.

Only if one understands that context will one see why Dickens got so much into the first paragraph. He was writing fast for a popular market. He had to grab the atten- tion and hold it. There was no Guardian whom he could inform, as Ben Okri did last week, that 'My road is a way, a road that is meant to take you from one place to anoth- er, on a journey towards a destination. The novel moves towards infinity. The novel as a form, if it is not going to be artificial, can only move towards infinity.' He had to write a book that people would actually want to read, and he was deter- mined to do so, even if it killed him, which, before he had finished Edwin Drood, it did.

Another Booker judge, Jonathan Keates, writing in last Saturday's Independent, praised Mr Okri's book thus'. • a passion- ate, daring visionary creation which will torment those who think of the novel as an alternative to knitting.' What have such people done that Mr Keates wants them to be tormented?

The novel obviously is an alternative to knitting. It does not exist in vacua It is there for readers, and readers are people with a choice about how to spend their time

who, unlike Booker Prize judges, are not paid to read novels.

If a novel has the manners to try to please and move them, they will read it. If not, they will knit, or whatever, and it is not them we should blame if they become the tricoteuses at the scaffold of literature, but the arrogant complacency of people who think they have achieved something by pro- moting the unreadable, 'exploding conven- tional ideas of naturalistic reality' (that is what Mr Okri's novel does, according to his blurb), or offending whoever lives in Windlesham Manor, Windle- sham.

I am not trying to argue that the public is always right, but that an artistic establish- ment that measures its courage and origi- nality by its defiance of the public is always wrong. The effect is to debase public taste. The ordinary reader picks up the message that 'good books' are not for him, and so turns to Jeffrey Archer. 'It's crucial for any culture that those with power and influence in it should be open to what is new,' said Mr Treglown. Yes, but not half as crucial as that they should be open to what is old. People can find out for themselves what is new, simply by observing what is around them. They need to be taught about what is old.

There are now people who come up to read English at Cambridge who have hardlY read any poetry or fiction written before this century. In a recent exam answered bY 63 Cambridge applicants and marked by a friend of mine, they were invited to corn- ment on the phrase 'through a glass darkly Only one of them identified it. At my vil- lage primary school in the mid-Sixties, mainly attended by the children of gypsum miners, 90 per cent would have recognised it.

Yes, yes, Jeremy Treglown is right that grammar is not static, and our culture has changed, and we must all welcome innova- tion and not be nostalgic, but that is not the problem facing the writing and the teaching and reading of literature. The problem is that virtually no one knows anything anY more. Mr Treglown told us 'just how hard- working, imaginative, sensitive, resourceful and — yes — expert most of the people are who are teaching English in our struggling state schools'. Judging by the the knowl- edge of the pupils emerging — and what else is there to judge by? — this is blatantlY, pitifully untrue.