- - -
I am at the final
County Championship match of Durham's season. I am reading Gilead,
by Marilynne Robinson. In it, the dying Reverend John Ames slowly,
gently, but persistently and eventually relentlessly writes an
account of his life and times for his young son. At one level the
whole thing is entirely humdrum; it shares most of its features with
every dismal family saga novel. But the same could be said for As
I Lay Dying – style and the
manner of thought matter much more than the strict plot of such
novels.
John
Ames is, I must be clear, as real a person as you or I, even though
he is Robinson's creation; his authorial voice is impressed on every
passage of the book. His divagations, repetitions, cul-de-sacs of
memories, crotchets – all are unmistakably real. Yet Ames has never
existed.
As
his memoirs languorously unfold – against the background of nearly
the last languor of hyperactive Britain, county cricket – a strange
effect comes upon me. I inculcate his character. His awareness of the
passage of time is architectural – he understands the way that not
just discrete events but also the general tide of history affect the
individual personalities of human beings. His intense sympathy to
everyone but himself is winsome, and is the classic trait of the
truly good man. Ames is entirely unaware of his own basic decency. He
is self-forgetful. But he is not simply a kindly country parson –
he is fiercely intelligent, highly educated, theologically astute.
His analysis is, on the whole, rapier sharp.
And
so, whilst absorbed in my novel, I am somehow more aware of my
surroundings than normal. There are two men in their late 70s on one
side of me discussing their GCE English in thick Durham accents –
remembering the few fragments of 1 Henry IV
and A Midsummer Night's Dream
they can. Falstaff stands out for them (Honest Jack, who has won my
wife to Shakespeare). In my ordinary churlish, snobbish way, I might
think this useless nostalgia, and only wish they had understood more
of the Bard. But with the mind of Ames washing over my own, a strange
dignity settles on their conversation. Isn't it remarkable that,
scrubbing the barnacles of time aside, they remember Falstaff?
Doesn't it show some deep sympathy in ordinary man for beauty? What
greater tribute to Shakespeare (and to teachers of his works) than
that the schools of the pit villages and railway towns of the 40s and
50s could make his work memorable?
On
my other side an RP-toned husband and wife in their 50s eat their
dinner (they might call it lunch; it depends if they are from this
neck of the woods or not). They discuss fairly desultory domestic
matters. On my own, I might think it banal. With Ames beside me I
remember that a married couple recalling and discussing domestic
matters at lunchtime is part of that great bulwark of public morality
– middle-class householding. When I put down my novel and gather my
things together, the husband asks: “What's the book?” I proffer
it to him and explain the “plot”, such as it is. He reads a
laudatory quote from the back and asks if it's true. I more or less
say it is. He smiles, returns the book, and says “Well, it must be
true. You were thoroughly engrossed. Well done.”
Ames'
instinct about this couple was right.
Outside,
Durham's openers – ordinary local lads from Sunderland and Durham –
return to the wicket and prepare to return to their craft.
-
- -
Or
again – I once had to stop reading John le Carré novels. It's an
interesting contrast; le Carré, like Robinson, is incredibly
sympathetic to the travails and motivations of all people, whatever
rank or background they have. Indeed, both authors are keenly aware
of the absurdity and tragedy of everyday existence. The difference is
that for le Carré, the tragedy and absurdity are inescapable; for
Robinson – for Ames – they are accepted lovingly, with the same
sympathy as everything else.
Le
Carré's stories are a litany of woes. Think of how readily Fiedler is
set up to protect Mundt – of the mean aesthetic arrogance of Bill
Haydon – the awful betrayal of Leiser – of Gerald Westerby's
doomed honour – of Justin Quayle's almost beautiful fanaticism –
above all, of the conflicted, conflicting central character of many
of those stories, George Smiley.
I
read The Constant Gardener
around the time the film came out. Several years later, I read 7 of
the Smiley novels (all but A Murder of Quality)
in a 6 month period. That was when I had to stop. The world took on
something of the appearance of an old photograph whose colour has
begun to leech, whose paper has begun to crack. The surpassing genius
of le Carré – that precise presentation of the downbeat, grimy,
sad things of life – had got to me. Just as I was transformed by
Ames, I was transformed by Smiley.
-
- -
So
if this isn't simply the result of a fertile imagination (or more
cynically, an overly impressionable mind), what is it? Tolkien spoke
of the fiction-writer's task as “sub-creation”; for him the term
had strongly theological connotations. Because the world around us is
apparently rational and comprehensible (to Tolkien, and to this
author, it is indeed “created”), we are able to construct
rational and comprehensible worlds. They can be internally consistent
and open to enquiry. Indeed, the very fact that we can create
rational and comprehensible fictional worlds points back and seems to
me to demonstrate the fundamental reasonableness of our own universe.
Now,
what the author – to Tolkien – is doing is not primary
creation, but secondary or
sub-creation. It it not concrete or absolute in the sense our
physical world appears to be; it exists conditionally and
imaginatively. Of course, Tolkien would have believed this to be true
of our universe as well, to a degree (though the will of God is a
great deal more concrete and absolute than our own). But though it is
not in the same order as the primary creation of the universe,
sub-creation is nonetheless real. We mirror that primary creative act
in it; to some degree the sub-creation has its own proper reality in
the imagination of the writer and readers. This is why, one might
argue, many authors speak of a character leading them on their way or
telling them what to do. The character is not simply a figment of the
imagination (though at one level they are that) – they have a
conditional but real existence.
So
for me, when Ames and Smiley tutored me in their different ways, it
wasn't simply the power of the author or of myself as the reader that
produced that effect. At some level Ames and Smiley had taken on an
existence independent of either party. It is not quite that the
author had simply realized what was Platonically always there – as
if Ames had lived in Gilead, Iowa, from eternity awaiting an author.
Rather, now that Ames has been created, even if all copies of his
book should be destroyed and all knowledge of him erased, there will
be an Ames at his desk, just as even after I am dead and forgotten,
it shall not be that I did not exist. The reason that I was
transported to other kingdoms by Robinson and le Carré – the
reason I could enter the careworn loving lines of Gilead and the
rain-soaked, age-cracked photopaper of Smiley's London – is that
authors are gods, and truly create, just as they were created.
