Leave 'em Laughing
When it comes to fiction, English sensibility is fundamentally comic, sentence by sentence
I have trouble with fiction books because I’m a slow reader who quite often has lost the plot halfway through. Plot seems designed to keep me interested in the turgid and flabby prose in which it is incarnated. Even with Dorothy L Sayers, guessing the ending is just mental effort, and I’m spending enough of that already just trying to remember how it all started.
What keeps me reading is not plot, but the sentences. I think the greatest writers win their laurels sentence by sentence. I can and do pour myself into Proust mainly to enjoy the sheer pleasure of his sentences (and how pleased he’d be with that). I will probably never finish ‘A la recherche’, so have no idea, and little interest, in ‘how it ends’, but I am quite often hooked on how will this sentence end . . . if it ever does.
My belief is that the greatest English writers make you laugh, no matter how serious their purpose: Laurence Sterne, Dickens, Jane Austen, Evelyn Waugh, Martin Amis (sorry, Martin, that’s you). They do it sentence by sentence. England can produce good story-tellers who haven’t got the comic groove - William Boyd and (perhaps) Graham Greene - and it has a huge extended family of excellent genre-writers. But rare indeed is the English literary giant who can’t raise a smile - Orwell, and certainly DH Lawrence lacked the gift. As for Thomas Hardy. . . well, let’s just call it one of ‘Life’s Little Ironies.’
It’s a great shame when the English comic sensibility passes readers by. ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ got the cold shoulder from my wife’s multi-national reading group. Yesterday, I gave up on Apple TV’s adaptation of ‘Slow Horses’. I love Mick Herron’s Slough House series because he’s funny. The set-up announces its absurdity: Slough House is the dumping ground for spies who almost certainly are not up to the job, where they are employed on projects which almost certainly are pointless, and from which they will almost certainly never be rescued. They are overseen by Jackson Lamb, a repellent physical, moral and mental specimen who almost certainly is the worst boss in the world.
It is a world, and an institution which John le Carre almost certainly would have rejected out of hand. Dickens, on the other hand, would have recognized it as the inheritor of his Circumlocution Office, or the legal world of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Indeed, Mick Herron is quite happy to borrow Dickens’ methods for insinuating our way into the physical structure of Slough House.
The comedy is all about how many of those ‘almost certainlys’ turn out to be right, and, if they turn out to be wrong, how and why? It is relentlessly the comedy of misdirection, with his books usually ending in the revelation - immediately cancelled - that Jackson Lamb is almost certainly the best the spy services have to offer.
Somehow Apple’s producers have missed the entire point: they think Slow Horses is a spy thriller. Ha!
Could they possibly have made the same mistake with The Master? P.G. Wodehouse laboured mightily over his plots for Jeeves and Lord Emsworth: the effort is there on the page, and can be distracting. Which is why I prefer the blissful, inconsequential stories, (or yarns), of Mr Mulliner, the the unstoppable and indulged sage of the Angler’s Rest. Here, in ‘The Smile that Wins’ he reports on his nephew’s appointment with a ‘specialist’ in search of relief for his dyspepsia.
‘Odd',’ he said. ‘A curious smile, years, Mr Mulliner. It reminds me a little of the Mona Lisa’s. It has the same underlying note of the sardonic and the sinister. It virtually amounts to a leer. Somehow it seems to convey the suggestion that you know all. Fortunately, my own life is an open book, for all to read, and so I was not discommoded. But I think it would be better if, for the present, you endeavoured not to smile at invalids or nervous persons. Good morning, Mr Mulliner. That will be five guineas, precisely.’
Russell Hoban’s use of language stretches all boundaries, from the horrific to the comic. It took him five years to write ‘Riddley Walker’, a relatively short book, because he wrote it in a language never known, never spoken, but here living on the page anyway. ‘On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hant ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.’
In ‘Pilgermann’ he’s all over the place, from the impossibly dense to the punishingly direct. Here the pogromed and castrated Jew has been calling on his god. What he gets. . . . . ‘He was wearing a patched robe, his sandals were worn, his feet looked hard and hard-travelled. He stood there with a silence flung down in front of him. He was no one in whom I had any belief but there he was and there was no mistaking who he was.
‘I looked at him and listened to his silence for a while. When I was able to speak I said, ‘You’re not the one I was calling.’ He said, ‘I’m the one who came through. I’m the one you’ll talk to from now on.’
And in my favourite Hoban, ‘The Medusa Frequency,’ the language is often aphoristic, but shot through with profound insights simply stated. “Alone and blind and endlessly voyaging [said the Head of Orpheus] I think constantly of fidelity. Fidelity is a matter of perception; nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognised they fill the heart. In love or terror or in loathing one responds to them with the true self; fidelity is not an act of the will: the soul is compelled by recognitions. Anyone who loves, anyone who perceives the other person fully can only be faithful, can never be unfaithful to the sea and the mountains and the death in that person, so pitiful and heroic is it to be a human being.”
And finally, on the far end of the sentence-scale, we have the volcanic tour de force of Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow. Perhaps nobody has ever understood Gravity’s Rainbow as a coherent ‘story’ - certainly I don’t - and it’s not only obscure but raucous, stupid, paranoid and in places obscene. But I keep returning to it because Pynchon can write some of the most powerful simple English since John Donne.
The scene is Advent in 1944, England.
‘Near her battery one night, driving Somewhere in Kent, Roger and Jessica came upon a church, a hummock in the dark upland, lamp-lit, growing out of the earth. It was Sunday evening, and shortly before vespers. Men in greatcoats, in oilskins, in dark berets they slipped off at the entrance, American fliers in leather lined with sheep’s wool, a few women in clinking boots and wide-shouldered swagger coats, but no children, not a child in sight, just grownups, trudging in from their bomber fields, balloon-bivouacs, pillboxes over the beach, through the Norman doorway shaggy with wintering vines. Jessica said, ‘Oh, I remember. . . ‘ but didn’t go on. She was remembering other Advents, and hedges snowy as sheep from her window, and the Star ready to be pasted up on the sky again.’
Jessica doesn’t really want to join. ‘But she did want to go in, nostalgia was heavy in tonight’s snow-sky, her own voice ready to betray her and run to join the waits whose carols we’re apt to hear now in the distances, these days of Advent dropping one by one, voices piping across frozen downs where the sown mines crowd thick as plums in a pudding. . . often above sounds of melting snow, winds that must blow not through Christmas air but through the substance of time would bring her those child-voices, singing for sixpences, and if her heart wasn’t ready to take on quite all the stresses of her mortality and theirs, at least there was the fear that she was beginning to lose them - that one winter she would go running to look, out to the gate to find them, run as far as the trees but in vain, their voices fading.. . . ‘
The language is so simple - it’s all one and two syllable words, so when you hit the word ‘mortality’ it’s a three-syllable shock which delivers the punch. He’s writing simplicity as only genius can. And yes, he can be funny too.