On the rocks
Tim Parks
SIGNALS OF DISTRESS by Jim Crace Viking, £15, pp 247 L'terary novelists seem obsessed with history these days — Byatt, Ackyoyd, Antis, Phillips, McEwan, Ondaatje, De Bernieres — so many books about the last century, the last war. No doubt somebody is study- ing the phenomenon. Inevitably the blurbs tell us that the themes are as pertinent today as they have ever been. In the case of Crace's Signals of Distress this means the vexed question of our attitude to other people's poverty, the gap between holding the 'right' views and doing the 'right' things. Urgent matters.
It all starts so well. A storm off the south-west English coast surprises two ships. We are in the 1830s. The modern steampacket makes it unscathed into Wherrytown harbour, bringing with it Aymer Smith, brother of a soap magnate, come to this remote region on a mission of mercy: he will explain and apologise for his company's decision to stop buying the sea- weed the locals have been supplying. A new chemical process has made it, and them, redundant.
The other ship is older, but ironically manned by Americans and bound for the New World. It is grounded on a sand-bank and as a result the crew will have to spend a cramped ten days in Wherrytown's only hotel, along with their one black slave, Otto, the philanthropical Smith, various would-be emigrants and a gallery of colour- ful locals. Crace handles all of this master- fully. His blend of period pastiche and terse modern prose is excellent and engag- ing, with the set piece descriptions — the shipwreck, the night fishing, the snowstorm — particularly strong. And the plot surges ahead: criss-cross love interests between newcomers and locals, shady business deals and then Smith's crass attempts to make the world a better place, all collide to pre- pare us for a delightful, perhaps even revealing read.
..Jim Crace made his name, of course, with the curious book Continent, a collec- tion of seven stories which very ambitiously sought to savour the complex relationship between the old and the new in an imagi- nary Third World, and to explore our own ambiguous relationship with that world. If a little short on intensity for my taste, there was something so purposeful and achieved about these stories that one couldn't help feeling satisfied, provoked, full of admira- tion. You kept turning them round and round and inside out in your head, examin- ing the ironies, enjoying. Which is about as much as you can usually ask of a narrative.
So why doesn't it work in Signals of Dis- tress, despite the similar themes, the simi- larly accomplished prose? Perhaps the schematic approach Grace deployed so effectively in shorter pieces just isn't enough for a novel. The various represen- tatives of the period roles — the asinine philanthropist, the bigoted preacher, the unscrupulous commercial agent, the lazy, libidinous captain, the poor, inarticulate girl, the ingenuous deckhand — are too flatly and predictably drawn to convince us that the author is engaging in any serious contemplation of the powers at play. Aymer Smith is the only fully and satisfy- ingly created character, but far too foolish and minor to constitute any comment on the whole obsession with holding liberal points of view. When he renounces, at the first hurdle, his aberrant pursuit of a local girl as his wife, the only real narrative ten- sion the book had offered, the only mon- strous and truly gripping eventuality is lost and what promised to be an excellent plot crumbles away in a series of costume sideshows, beautifully written, but some- how inconsequential, even when lives are at stake. In short, the book fails to focus. Presumably the intention of the histori- cal novel is to measure ourselves against the past, discover our own orthodoxies in contrast to theirs, understand how much love and dilemma and consciousness have shifted, how much remained the same. Which would be fascinating. But all too often, an author can be swept away by his own research, until he finds himself adrift amid a flotsam of period detail and poetic pastiche, going nowhere. Certainly this book's late announcement of a shipwreck might be its own obituary: lost with all hands. Or one could quote the charming poem it opens with:
This stranger's footprints are engrav'd in frost, But soon forgot. The sun bedazzles. They are lost. And he has not Impress'd his passage on this spot. . .
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