Settling in
Paul Ableman
On The Yankee Station William Boyd (Hamish Hamilton pp. 184, £7.95).
Here is a collection of short stories which• are, with one exception, formidably accomplished. Like William Boyd's first novel, A Good Man in Africa, they reveal no sign of beginner's fumbling. Several of them have already appeared in various magazines and it is likely that they represent Mr Boyd's literary apprenticeship. Apart from the exception already mentioned, all the tales are assured and expert. The feeling of apprentice work derives not from their quality but from their variety. They include a psychological thriller, a touching story of sexual initiation, a sickening (because of its flawless evocation) study of a napalmhappy American pilot in the Vietnam war and the mechanic who hates him, several pieces about unpleasant fat Englishmen sweating in post-colonial Africa, a firstperson memoir (in as seamless an American vernacular as Salinger at his best) by a sometime child star on the skids and several others. The impression they convey is of an aspiring author exploring his talent by setting it a variety of literary challenges. So far, so good, and there is no doubt that Mr Boyd, not yet 30, is set fair for a dazzling career. And yet there is something about these stories that disturbs me. They are imbued with a fashionable sense of disenchantment. The author appears to be blasé before he has lived long enough to be genuinely disillusioned. This does not seem a pose but rather the product of that kind of precocity often associated with a public school education. There is no sense of a questing mind grappling anew with experience.
This applies to 12 of the stories. The ominous thirteenth is another matter. It seems an authentically early work. It has an experimental format and is entitled, not very happily, 'Long Story Short'. It is both too confused and confusing to be reviewed with any clarity but basically it is an attempt to explore the relationship between reality and its literary representation. The author sets up a scene and then destroys it by telling you that the characters 'really' had different names and even qualities: 'It was Gareth . . . Actually it wasn't Gareth at all. It was Frank.' This process is accompanied by sly authorial comments on the author's function and powers: `To get rid of the fiction element perhaps I should begin by distinguishing myself from the 'I' in part one. I — now — am the author (you know my name — check it out)'. And: 'It keeps getting in the way, this dreadful compulsion to tell lies (you write fiction and what are you doing? You're telling lies, pal, that's all).'
The relationship between the world and its literary representation is not only a valid but a vital subject for literature. Borges is perhaps the major artist to tackle it in our age although Nabokov, Becket and Joyce have at least glanced at it. But the impulse inspiring Mr Boyd seems less a mature concern with the problem than the kind of 'settling in' process which all young writers pass through. 'Long Story Short' is really a mediocre example of immature writing of the kind that is best left to gather dust. Possibly it has been included because the collection is a relatively short one. What is interesting about it is that beneath its experimental format a conventional thriller is struggling to get out. The piece ends with a murder which echoes several in the more mature stories in the collection. It is as if Mr Boyd, after a single attempt to probe the nature of his vocation, had brushed aside all such tiresome speculation and charged into full-scale commercial production. Now, no sensible critic knocks the market. Many of the world's masterpieces have been thoroughly commercial productions, but only produced after their authors had investigated their own talent and the craft it was to inherit. Mr Boyd's tales are not derivative but they follow well-trodden literary paths and there seems a danger that he will never explore and then colonise his own literary territory. This would be a great pity because he is bursting at the seams with raw ability.
Particulary impressive is his effortless mastery of the technologised environment. Most English, and even American writers, perhaps as a result of an 'arts' education, despise technology and apparently regard scientific knowledge as debased. They affect, even as they jet round the world and join movements to avert thermo-nuclear annihilation, to regard the world as essentially unchanged since Roman times. In fact, of course, technology is the most significant and challenging process in the world to-day. Mr Boyd, more than many Science Fiction writers, appreciates this truth. He could be the first of a new wave of authors to explore profoundly the dynamics of human experience in the 20th century.
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