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.