The limit
Peter Ackroyd
Peter Smart's Confessions Paul Bailey (Jonathan Cape 23.95) The Consul's File Paul Theroux (Hamish Hamilton £3.95) When the qualities of two novelists are particularly elusive, they can often seem sharper in contrast. After all Nabokov might be thought a great, or even a good, writer if we hadn't noticed that he was perched precariously on Joyce's shoulders all the time. Paul Bailey and Paul Theroux, though, aren't quite so ill-matched. They even complement each other in a curious way, like,a Myra and Myron Breckinridge.
Paul Bailey is witty", Paul Theroux is observant; Bailey hears precisely what people say, Thei-oux the way they say it; Bailey can whip up any domestic situation into a music-hall routine, Theroux can make the most grotesque events seem almost familiar; Bailey sometimes gets hysterical, but Theroux never loses his composure. His prose is calm and solid enough, but Bailey can go over the edge and transform his narrative into a number of slightly camp, slightly outrageous 'scenes'.
They are also two of the smartest novelists now writing.
Despite appearances, Paul Bailey is the more conventionally English writer of the two. He has taken off from Dickens, bypassed the mediocre heavies like Orwell and Priestley, glanced against Firbank and Angus Wilson, and eventually landed in that twilight world where parody, satire and fantasy are effortlessly aligned. Peter Smart's Confessions is a sport, a game constantly threatening to get out of hand as Bailey swoops with horrid glee upon each of his characters as they alternately fumble, strut and moan through their lives. Among them Peter Smart himself shrinks to .a cipher (he is a self-eonfessed Hamlet, but in this case without a proper stage), a barelY acknowledged object which the monsters sweep around and occasionally, just occasionally, knock against. It is as if Paul Bailey were permanently fixed with the vision,of a child, seeing the world from knee-height and understanding very little of it. So he leaves everything to his characters, and the novel echoes with their voices. There is Doris Hedley (Miss): 'She is not her lively old self at all. She had the last of her teeth out on Tuesday and a new gas cooker put in. You should have seen the mess but that's British workmen.' There s Mother: 'Your father will run a bath for you when he can summon the energy to get 1.1P out of that chair. The war will probably be, over by the time that happens. Oh look, he s, taken the hint. Wonders will never cease. There's Granny Smart, reading her Dead Flesh for Sale and She Slashed for Lo 1' 'Don't you go growing up breaking women's hearts, our Pete. Life's best wile,11 it runs easy and natural.' There's Dr Cottle, the author of With Stethoscope and ScalPel.• The small amount of food I take each claYls made to do its work. My wheels, so to speak: run smoothly. They do not grind to a halt. Monologues like these bristle through the novel, as Bailey's characters address the, world about themselves, ferocious a."' furious, helpless and merciless in turn, lying and hesitating. Bailey is overwhelmed their mannerisms, by those ridiculoll't gestures which always give them away bg_ which draw them to him. It can go a little too far, but it's fascinating to watch. 4 And, like all good comedy, pathos is .111,f around the corner — the joke handkercit is always stiff with dried tears. It becor7 quite clear that all of these mannerisms, _Id of the clichés and the circumlocutions In the homely phrases, are simply waYs. which Bailey's characters canbid.e. themselves from the light. They are ec).1t cealed by their own outrageousness. Outor is not as if they were hiding any nastY_01‘ ungainly impulses. No one in the, bu jf. means any harm to anyone except hint.se...'d Bailey's world is actually populated by. K_Iyue, and generous souls whose feelings fla,„e somehow or other, stopped short at `.`e"c, source. So when he dwells upon a charae.016 playing with a neurosis here or a nerN",, habit there, embroidering a little, encoll“'v ing them to send themselves up, he is actually adding to the enormous carapace which they seem to have carried since birth. And this wilful and witty book carries one too. Despite his mockery and his distance, Bailey actually writes very mournful novels. If you listen closely enough, like a child, you can actually hear the sadness breakirig through: grabbed my aunt's hands, to still them, and to give myself support as well — I had sensed, on the way to the station, that something more than two women was leaving me. They were taking my childhood away with them.' Paul Theroux doesn't inhabit this tYPically English landscape where pathos, mawkishness and hysteria can lie down together. He has too firm a sense of himself as a novelist, and too strong a grip upon his story-telling powers, to allow his narrative to fly off in all directions at once or to be at the mercy of dizzy dialogues. The Consul's File, a collection of short stories, is actually set in Ayer Hitam, a small town in Malaysia Where anything can happen and generally does. A woman is raped by a wood demon, a witeb-doctor turns into a tiger, a murderer is O n the loose, an anthropologist marries a tribal chief. All human, and some inhuman, Passions are here but Theroux's prose manages to keep even the most frantic situations credible and exact. Bailey's novel had no real imaginative or thematic centre, but "ere it is the presence of the narrator himself.. the Consul and, behind him, Theroux — which dominates and shapes the book. The stories are charged with closely observed feelings, with human behaviour sYmpathetically related and with sensations carefully expressed. In a way it is an elaborate and perhaps slightly 'old-fashioned' writing — but its strength comes frdm Working within orthodox limits which, once rle°guised, become a living part of the uesign.
, Limits are in fact at the centre of the book: the way people overstep the mark in their relation to each other, the social distances between Malay, Chinese and Americans, the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural. And what keeps everything in place is, as always, the place itself: the most grotesque and disruptive stories always return to that community, Ayer Flitam, with its physical and social rules. But what is unsettling in these stories, and what is clearly disturbing and exciting for Theroux himself (he has recently written about the Orient Express in his The Great these Bazaar) is the transgression of
limits, if only for a short time. The .s,trongest perception in the book, and it is e strongest because it is the least acknowledged is the sense that all limits are in the end illusory; you must never look over your Shoulder too suddenly or for too long: `. crossing the road with that sinking feeling You get at a national boundary or an u.nguarded frontier.' A man can turn into a tiger; an American lady may marry a tribal
Only the guards, like Mr Theroux, Know just how unsafe the limits can be.
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