Three Stories - Alan Bennett

an admirable display of Updike-like insight into the absurdities of modern behaviour

pp. 229

Published: Profile Books, 2003

It often takes a significant event in a writer’s life to make me realise that I have neglected them in my reading. Recently, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s death alarmed me to the fact that I had never, despite intending to on many occasions, read a single word he had written. I quickly rectified this and now have about three or four of his novels under my belt (though shamefully not his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I am still questing after and will probably share with you on here in the next month or two when I finally manage to get my hands on it). A similar thing has happened this last week with Alan Bennett, although the event was nothing so severe as his death. As he celebrated his 80^th birthday on May 9^th, I decided that I would delve into the literary creations of the mind that brought us The History Boys and Talking Heads.
    

Bennett’s 2005 book of three novellas is an admirable display of Updike-like insight into the absurdities of modern behaviour, mixed with some not entirely successful literary liberties that he takes with the narratives, and not to mention some hilarious set pieces.
  

The first story, The Laying on of Hands, about a memorial service for a sexually rampant masseur that goes awry when the congregation are invited to share their experiences with the man, contains some harshly critical satire about the celebrity culture, as when an autograph hunter asks the partner of a soap-star, ‘‘Are you anybody? ... or are you just with him?’’. This piece, beyond the humour, has some interesting ideas about how the dead can be moulded, personality-wise, into anything depending on the fickle and unreliable nature of the memories of those left behind.

The Clothes They Stood Up In is the second story, this one about how a couple reacts when they come home one night to find that the entirety of their belongings have been removed from their apartment. It is a burglary ‘so comprehensive as to have taken in both the toilet role and its holder’. So, literally, everything, except the walls that contained it all (they did take the carpets, though). The questions that are raised as a consequence of this are to do with how we can rebuild our lives without our possessions. How do we define ourselves when the only things we have retained from a lifetime of purchasing, hoarding, collecting and inheriting, are the clothes on our backs.

The inexplicable injection of postmodernism towards the end, however, taints the piece a little for me. Suddenly Mr Ransome is treated self-reflexively as a character who can be manipulated, rather than as a real person, and because this technique has no basis in the rest of the story, it seems a bit like an adopted child of a different race.

I have a similar quarrel with the third and final story in the collection, Father! Father! Burning Bright, which has a dream sequence somewhere in the middle. Here, this technique seems to me to be nothing more than a misused literary tool designed to express a protagonist’s anxieties without having to adhere to the strict limitations of reality that Bennett heeds everywhere else in the book. In my opinion, a writer of any kind of realist fiction should have the skill to express inner character without resorting to ‘cop-out tricks’, and relating the disconnected meanderings of a dream can occasionally come under this category, as I think it does here.

Having said that, this last story is the finest piece of the three. It explores in a humorous and infuriating way how an overbearing father can continue to exercise control over his son from his hospital death-bed. The reader, by the end, is tormented along with Midgley, the protagonist, as his father wins the last battle between the two, which is to prove his son to be incompetent.  

Taken as a whole, this piece has some rather inventive insights into our private and public lives. The significant events that take place in each story act as a springboard for Bennett to explore our relationships with ourselves, our possessions, our families, and with the world at large.            

The Giant, O'Brien - Hilary Mantel

'Mantel is one of few novelists who come very close 

to bridging the gap between poetry and prose' 

The aptly titled The Giant, O’Brien, turned out to be a very good introduction to Hilary Mantel for me. It is, of course, about an Irish giant named Charlie O’Brien, fleeing the cultural squalor of his rural country home in Derry (along with his band of follow-ons) to be exhibited in London by his ‘agent’ Joe Vance as ‘the tallest man in the world’, a marvel of the eighteenth century. His path eventually crosses with a renowned surgeon, a ‘bold experimentalist’, who wants to get his hands on the giant’s corpse, once he is deceased, in order to study the anatomy of the ‘freak’.

In spite of its being ever so lightly based on a true story, Mantel explains in a note at the back of the book that her giant is one out of legend, and that the real man ‘bears little resemblance to the giant of this story, since he probably suffered from a pituitary tumour and may have been mentally retarded’. The Charlie O’Brien of the novel is, on the other hand, a confident and skilled orator, an artist of the spoken word, of the mythological story. His eloquence and perfect manner are endearing. He is thoughtful, empathic and highly intelligent. It is his perpetually growing body that fails him as we progress through the narrative, rather than his mind. His tragedy is in his stature.

The storytelling becomes an important leitmotif through the novel, recurring frequently as a method by which conflict can be avoided. O’Brien himself is described as a bard, and as such, his entourage put great stock in the tales he tells them when tempers have begun to flair out of control. It is a distraction welcomed by all, as like little children they frequently interrupt the speaker to suggest what they think might happen next.

And when storytelling begins to fail the giant, to sicken him in the face of his impending death (which reduces all effort, all hope and faith, to nothing), he tells his friends ‘You know it … Tell it yourself’. The realisation comes finally that ‘stories cannot save him’.

The giant’s decreasing health and his failure to keep on telling stories have a deeply saddening effect on the novel, but Mantel’s sense of natural humour keeps the piece alive and kicking to the end. It is the constant repartee between O’Brien and his cohorts that offers the respite from morbidity. As an example here is a passage where O’Brien and his men are discussing the value to them of purchasing a fortune-telling pig to accompany O’Brien as entertainment to the public (yes, it is literally that absurd):

‘But would you trust your fortune,’ the Giant asked, ‘if it were told by a pig?’

‘Well, I do so think,’ said Pybus. ‘For a pig won’t give you a favourable one, to get a tip.’

‘The boy reasons well,’ Joe said.

‘And if a pig said, beware of a dray coming up fast on your left and mushing you against the wall, well, you’d beware.’

‘But not if a human said it?’ the Giant asked.

‘You see, Giant,’ Pybus explained, ‘the pig wouldn’t have any interest whether it came true or no. But if a human told it you, and the dray came up and dunted in your ribs, you’d suspect that the said dray was driven by the fortune-teller’s uncle. It’s what they call a ploy. It’s to get future money off you.’

‘Well, well,’ said the Giant. ‘You seem wise in the ways of the world, all of a sudden.’

Sophistry fit for a king, and certainly fit for a novel of such intensity.

     

But what of the second protagonist of the piece, whom we have neglected up to now? What of John Hunter, the obsessive surgeon? The man who covets the very flesh and bone of our beloved O’Brien?

I found Hunter to be, in many ways, a more fascinating character than any other. Certainly he is a more interesting psychological study, a fanatical man consumed by his desire for knowledge, a man who seems to believe somewhere deep in his psyche that by gaining knowledge he will be able to bypass the degradation of ordinary mortality, who asserts on the final page that ‘I want more time.’ He is seeking a way out of the laws of physiognomy that he studies so arduously. And what is more exciting than a character as hopelessly flawed and contradictory as that? I found that I began to understand his strong desire for scientific empiricism, and to sympathise with his misguided quest for immortality.

     

Much of the charm of this fairly short novel is in the poesy of its diction. The prose is light, easy to read, yet somehow manages to achieve a deep intensity that makes every sentence worthwhile. Mantel is one of few novelists who come very close to bridging the gap between poetry and prose, screwing each sentence tight yet allowing the space required for the reader to feel that his or her presence is necessary, that he or she is a vital component in the craftsmanship of the novel. I think that in her approach to writing she encourages multiple readings, because you can always find something more, something that was hidden to you the first time around.

Please read this novel, it will not take long (it has only 211 pages). If nothing else, it will teach us the beauty that is possible in misfortune, in decadence, in downright weirdness.