The section headings—Birth, 1905; Childhood, 1916; Marriage, 1927; Love, 1936; Motherhood, 1947; Work, 1955—64; Sorrow, 1965; Ease, 1977; Illness and Decline, 1985; Death—cover all the grand old topics of McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and the Canadian Home Companion (which for so many decades gave social and moral counsel and explained how to turn out a jellied veal loaf). The protagonist is Daisy Goodwill. Her mother, Mercy Stone, dies in childbirth. Clarentine Flett, the next-door neighbour’s fed-up wife, takes the baby and flees to Winnipeg ‘with a dollar bill taken the night before from her husband’s collar-box.’ Reclaimed by her father, Daisy goes to Bloomington, Indiana, where in the Twenties stone-carvers are still needed. She marries a rich young gold-hatted lover who throws himself out of a window; in 1936 she becomes the wife of Barker Flett, twenty-two years older than herself, an expert on hybrid grains. When her three children are grown she launches for the first time on a career—‘working outside the home,’ as people said in those days; she becomes Mrs Green Thumb, the gardening consultant on the Ottawa Recorder. But the editor—who has taken fright at the idea that he might be expected to marry Daisy—gives her column back to a staffer. She takes a while to get over the resultant depression, but emerges in old age as a ‘wearer of turquoise pants suits’ in a condo in Sarasota, Florida. During her terminal illness she is moved to the Canary Palms Care Facility. Her last words (unspoken) are ‘I am not at peace.’
I have summarized this plot to show how faultlessly Carol Shields has devised Daisy’s story. It would in fact have been readily accepted, with a trivial change of ending, by the dear old Canadian Home Companion. Daisy is precisely what her son Warren calls her, ‘a middle-class woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck,’ and Shields herself has said: ‘I am interested in reality, in the texture of ordinary life, and the way people appear and relate.’ The Stone Diaries could only have been written by an expert in sensuous detail, from the blood-drenched kitchen sofa where poor Mercy dies to Daisy’s longing, as she recovers her nerve, for ‘the feel of a new toothbrush against her gums, for instance. Such a little thing.’ Shields also likes, she says, to write about survivors. Daisy Goodwill Flett surely survives for eighty years thanks to the overwhelming force of her ordinariness.
This, however, brings us to the most interesting though perhaps not the most successful element in the book. Daisy, member of the Mother’s Union, the Arrowroots, Ottawa Horticultural Society, Bay Ladies’ Craft Group (she even has a diploma in Liberal Arts somewhere, but can’t remember which drawer she put it in), is also a closet Post-Modernist. Aware that her life is drifting harmlessly past her, she is determined to acquire power over it by standing apart and reporting on it as an independent witness. She begins with her birth. ‘Why am I unable to look at it calmly? Because I long to bring symmetry to the various discordant elements, though I know before I begin that my efforts will seem a form of pleading.’ She is aware, too, that ‘the recording of life is a cheat’ and that she will never be able to recount the whole truth. ‘She understood that if she was going to hold onto her life at all, she would have to rescue it by a primary act of imagination, supplementing, modifying, summoning up the necessary connections, conjuring the pastoral or heroic or whatever…getting the details wrong occasionally, exaggerating or lying outright, inventing letters or conversations of impossible generality, or casting conjecture in a pretty light.’ Very well, then, Daisy knows that she will have to do this, but now a narrator appears, in corrective mode, to tell us that she is often wider of the mark than she thinks. She has translated (for instance) her uncle’s ‘long brooding sexual state’ into an attack of indigestion. Later, this same narrator tells us that Daisy’s is the only account there is, ‘written on air, written with imagination’s invisible ink.’ But we cannot trust her, since she insists on showing herself in a sunny light, ‘hardly ever giving us a glimpse of those dark premonitions we all experience.’ Indeed, after th e loss of her gardening column Daisy’s consciousness seems to disintegrate altogether, for a time leaving her friends and family to interpret the situation as best they can. (This is reminiscent of the method of Shields’s brilliant literary mystery story, Mary Swann.)
The Stone Diaries, it seems, is a novel, among other things, about the limitations of autobiography. As far as Daisy is concerned, it never gets away from them, even when the narration changes from the first person in 1905 (‘My mother’s name was Mercy Stone Goodman. She was only thirty years old when she took sick’) to the third person in 1916 (‘the infant—a little girl of placid disposition—was clothed in a white tucked nainsook day slip’). All the change really does is to mark the last point when she can truly establish her identity, before her mother dies and she herself, new-hatched, begins to live. This failure to find a language—as she realizes at the very end—frustrates heaven knows how many. Her eyes ‘stare icy as marbles, wide open but seeing nothing, nothing, that is, but the deep, shared, common distress of men and women, and how little, finally, they are allowed to say.’ Carol Shields, however, believes that women have been much harder done by, in this matter of silence, than men. It is of their limitations that she is thinking.
Daisy has something important in common with Mrs Morel in Sons and Lovers. ‘Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.’ Mrs Morel sets herself to live through her sons, but Daisy does not even contemplate doing this. She makes her own sortie into the world of earning money and respect, is unkindly rejected, recovers, and maintains a certain dignity without asking help from anybody, ‘and yet a kind of rancor underlies her existence still: the recognition that she belongs to no one.’ Her children are moderately fond of her, her great-niece Victoria very fond. Victoria, in fact, bids fair to bring the whole book to a happy resolution. She is the daughter of a gone-astray niece whom Daisy has taken in, with her baby, out of pure good nature, and this baby has grown up to become a paleobotanist, classifying traces of fossil plants in the rock. In other words, Victoria combines Shields’s stone and her plant imagery, just as Daisy Stone does when she becomes the well-liked gardening correspondent, Mrs Green Thumb. But here Daisy does not deceive herself. She is certain that none of her descendants will do more than look back on her with forbearance. This gives her a frightening feeling of inauthenticity.
In the process of growing up, of becoming a middle-aged woman and an old woman, Daisy has failed either to understand or to explain herself. If you were to ask her the story of her life, says the narrator, and one can hear the exasperated sigh, ‘she would stutter out an edited hybrid version, handing it to you somewhat shyly, but without apology, without equivocation that is: this is what happened, she would say from the unreachable recesses of her seventy-two years, and this is what happened next.’ She is accustomed to her own version, and so, sadly enough, are we, all of us, accustomed to ours.
An exception, of course, is the witty, cautious, sometimes lyrical narrator, who knows all the words, all the versions, and all the weak places. For fear we might doubt the reality of her characters, convincing though they are, Shields supplies a section of attractive-looking, faded photographs of five generations. Daisy herself, as might be expected, doesn’t appear, but by comparing the family snaps with the portrait on the back dust jacket we can make out that Carol Shields must be the mother of Alice, the most difficult of Daisy’s children. (Alice becomes an academic, whose first novel is everywhere unfavourably reviewed. But she is able to rise above this, because she knows she is making up her own life as she goes along.)
Talking recently at Edinburgh about her books and her motivation for writing them, Carol Shields spoke of her care to establish the narrator’s credentials and said that Daisy’s inability to express herself was the true subject of The Stone Diaries. This would make it the tragedy of someone incapable of being tragic. But the novel as it stands suggests something more complex. The publishers
tell us that Daisy’s signal achievement is to write herself out of her own story. ‘Somewhere along the line she made the decision to live outside of events’—that is, to accept her own insignificance. But the reader is also asked to decide whether this is ‘a triumphant act of resistance or a surrendering to circumstances.’ In novelist’s terms, did she do right or wrong? Daisy is described as summoning up her ‘stone self’ so that even her brain becomes transparent—‘you can hold it up to the window and the light shines through. Empty, though, there’s the catch.’ She is shown as breathing her own death and contriving it, taking charge of it, in fact, as though in exasperation with what has so far been suppressed in her. If she is capable of this, there was no need, perhaps, for the narrator to pity her quite so much.
Carol Shields is asking us to play a game—a game for adults—but she is also playing it against herself. The epigraph, attributed to Alice’s daughter, says that nothing Grandma Daisy did was quite what she meant to do,
but still her life could be called a monument
and that, in the end, is what the novel makes her.
London Review of Books, 1993
Ryder’s Block
The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro
I was asked to name the book I thought should have received more attention than it did during the last 12 months, or, in this case, did not seem to have had quite the right sort of attention. Reviewers complained because Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled was much longer than his three previous books and apparently not at all like them.
Certainly it is a very long novel, and its atmosphere takes getting used to—you have to sink into it and go with it, rather like swimming through clouds. Ryder is a world-famous pianist who arrives in an unnamed city in Central Europe to give a grand, long-awaited concert. His visit is considered a great honour. The community seem to think of him as a kind of saviour. But, in a way which will be familiar to anyone who has bad dreams, he meets with a long series of interruptions, diversions and frustrations. It is not that the people he meets are trying to make things difficult. All of them treat him with respect, but all of them press absurd demands and requests on him which Ryder, although he is too courteous to say so, has no idea how to carry out.
Gustav, the hotel porter, begs him to protest on behalf of all the town’s porters. Brodsky, the drunken conductor of the municipal orchestra, wants him to provide the music for his dog’s funeral. Gustav’s daughter, Sophie, has a little boy, Boris, who may or may not be Ryder’s son. When they meet, Sophie expects Ryder to move in with her, and his conversations with the child (exactly right, as always in Ishiguro) are the best and tenderest thing in the novel. Meantime, it seems impossible for Ryder to find anywhere to practise, or even the right way to the concert hall itself. In the course of his errands and changes of plan he patrols the town, its parks, its cafes and its suburbs and yet oddly enough always finds himself back where he started. Time and place have become fluid. And the hotel room, with its worn carpet, is no longer a safe refuge. From time to time it turns into the room he once slept in as a boy, listening to the quarrels of his parents below. The book’s structure, then, is one of the simplest of all—the anxiety plot: will Ryder arrive at the concert hall in time? But Ishiguro has explained something else about this book. Ryder is trying to piece together his own past, and perhaps his future, and to do this he is ‘appropriating’—‘that is, he is recognising echoes or variations of himself in everyone he meets. We do something like this ourselves whenever we come across anyone new.’
But has Ryder any real feeling for these ‘others’? Does he care when Gustav dies, after taking part in the bizarre Dance of the Hotel Porters? Or when Brodsky’s leg is amputated and he appears on the platform with an ironing board instead of a crutch, later falling heavily into the audience below? Self-deception and failure of compassion are a living death to Ishiguro. There is a moment in The Remains of the Day when the butler, Stevens, allows himself to realize, for the first and last time, what he has become. And Ryder, towards the end of this book, when the small boy Boris leaves him without saying goodbye, finds himself sobbing out loud. That does not last, but it is enough to make us realise that Ryder too is one of the unconsoled. I have said why I found this book interesting and moving, but perhaps have not explained why I liked it so much. I think it was perhaps because I was able to lose myself in it, which is what I always hope for.
On presentation of the 1995 Cheltenham Prize,
Daily Telegraph
War of the Words
Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie
Midnight’s Child was born, once upon a time, in the city of Bombay. His faithful record was dedicated to Zafar, Salman Rushdie’s son. So too is this new children’s book. To write it, Rushdie has gone back beyond the Thousand Nights and One Night to the Katha Sarit Sagara, the Hindu Sea of the Streams of Story. This Great Sea has been polluted, he relates, by evil-wishers to prevent truthful inspiration welling up. They fear it because it will be forever beyond their control.
Like Midnight’s Child, little Haroun was born in a city where smoke-belching factories manufacture sadness. His father, Rashid Khalifa, is a professional storyteller, in demand at parties and political rallies, and often away from home. In consequence, his mother Soraya runs off with a weaselly clerk from the upstairs flat. ‘What to do, son?’ Rashid asks piteously. ‘Storytelling is the only work I know.’ Haroun, in his distress, asks his father in return of what use it is to tell stories which are not even true.
The question is a blow against the imagination. ‘Haroun wanted to get those words back, to pull them out of his father’s ears and shove them back in his own mouth.’ But it is too late, and when Rashid next appears in public he opens his mouth and finds he has nothing to say.
Haroun must atone. He sets out on a long journey to restore his father’s lost gift. His friends are Iff the blue-haired water genie, Butt the bus driver, and a Kashmiri floating gardener whose mouth is a purple flower. His enemies are darkness and silence, and the tyrant Khattam Shud who ‘eats light, eats it raw with his bare hands’ as well as destroying words. The light fails as he approaches the Twilight Strip, where speech is forbidden and a shadow falls over the heart.
Like many other good children’s books—At the Back of the North Wind, for example, and The Jungle Book—Haroun and the Sea of Stories is an allegory. At times it brings to mind Swift’s The Battle of the Books, particularly when Haroun leads a gallant army of chapters and volumes protected by something that Swift didn’t have, laminated covers. And when the Colossus of Bezaban, the great ice-cold idol of repression and censorship, falls and shatters, it flattens Khattam Shud, who turns out to be none other than the weaselly clerk who went off with Haroun’s mother. For the allegory of words and silence is also an allegory of love.
Granta Books has published Haroun as a novel, but I thought it right to try out Rushdie’s brilliant wheezes, rich narrative and wild jokes on a seven-year-old, whose only criticism was that it wasn’t possible for Haroun to forget his own birthday. He does, however, and wakes surprised to find new clothes laid out, his father a story-teller again and his mother singing in the kitchen. Let’s hope that this delightful tale turns out to be a Just-So story.
Evening Standard, 1990
When I am Old and Gay and Full of Sleep
Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow
Old age, on the whole, is not a time to be recommended, but very old novelists are allowed to write about what they like and at the age of eighty-five Saul Bellow is interested in illnesses and their recent treatment and patients who are ‘blindly recovery-bent, who have the deep and special greed of the sick when they have decided not to die.’ If they have things left to do, that will be a way of keeping themselves alive.
His Midwestern narrator is Chick, Old Cluck, an unassuming scribbler with Bellow’s own familiar, puzzled, confiding, deeply beguiling voice, talking half to us, half to himself. He has undertaken to write a memoir of his youn
ger friend, Professor Abe Ravelstein, a scholarly but grossly successful teacher and writer. Unlike Chick, Ravelstein is a human being on a giant scale. Even his hands tremble, ‘not with weakness but with a tremendous eager energy that shook him when it was discharged.’ All his life he had wanted—in fact, needed—the best of everything: Vuitton luggage, Cuban cigars, solid-gold Mont Blanc pens, Lalique wine glasses. Naturally this had got him into financial trouble. Chick had suggested that he might try a book based on his lecture notes. ‘Abe did so, and became tremendously rich.’ It is rather difficult to envisage this book, which is said to have sold millions in both hemispheres, but Ravelstein belongs, like Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, to a mythical world which seems to await discovery behind the real one, or is perhaps the more real of the two.
Bellow once wrote that
It’s obvious to everyone that the stature of characters in modern novels is smaller than it once was and this diminution powerfully concerns those who value existence…I do not believe that the human capacity to feel or do can really have dwindled or the quality of humanity degenerated. I rather think that people appear smaller because society has become so immense.
A House of Air Page 40
