The Columbia History of the British Novel

more reflective, harder to tell from fiction outside the genre; and Michael Dibdin's thrillers Ratking (1988), Vendetta (1990), and Cabal (1992), like the novels of Graham Swift and Kazuo Ishiguro, to be discussed a little later, place us in a world where a mystery's solution is called for but is finally the least of our problems. The frightening question is what to do with the truth when it surfaces; what it means, who can be trusted with it. -967 -

Gothic Innocence

It is impossible, of course, to date shifts in sensibility with any accuracy; hard enough to argue that a bundle of novels, however impressive, represents any such thing. I would suggest though that the early work of Beryl Bainbridge (Harriet Said, Sweet William [1975]) and Ian McEwan (The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers [1981]) represents a convenient marker, and that McEwan's continuing work (A Child in Time [1987], The Innocent, Black Dogs [1992]) is a useful guide. A publisher's reader, turning down Bainbridge's first novel, said, 'What repulsive little creatures you have made the two central characters.' Repulsive is not the right word, and it was certainly a mistake to refuse that elegant and troubling book. But the two girls in Harriet Said do ruin any comfortable ideas we may have about sheltered youth, as they taunt an old man and finally kill his wife.

McEwan's Cement Garden begins: 'I did not kill my father but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way.' If the narrator had killed his father, he would still be talking in this offhand fashion, as indeed he does when he tells us that he and his sisters have buried their dead mother in cement in order to keep the authorities from finding out that they are orphans, and that incest seems to him the natural expression of a beleaguered affection. And earlier, when he describes his newly dead mother:

The room was full of sunlight. Mother lay propped up by pillows, her hands under the sheet. She could have been about to doze off, for her eyes were not open and staring like dead people's in films, nor were they completely closed… Mother's feet appeared, they stuck out from underneath the blanket, bluish-white with a space between each toe.

The close observation, the reference to films, the lack of expressed surprise or distress-all signal a character more frightened than he wishes to seem, but we know this only because we recognize that horror has its reticences as well as its extravagances; because we have made the boy's strangeness our own. Both Bainbridge and McEwan suggest to us how normal the abnormal can feel once we are caught up in it. They invite us to think the unthinkable, or if we can't think it, to live it imaginatively, as if it were no longer alien to us, or as if there were no more aliens.

For McEwan, the innocent is never entirely innocent; it always has a real but murky relation to whatever crime hangs in the memory. But -968- an innocence remains nevertheless, a bewilderment no simply guilty person would feel. Even McEwan's adults are children, sometimes cripplingly so, as in A Child in Time, where a politician commits suicide because he cannot bring his residual childhood into line with his frantic public life; where a father cannot mourn his lost daughter without recreating his parents' marriage and the moment of his own conception.

McEwan deals in the gothic in a rather special sense-in what we might call the gothic of everyday life. In a Hitchcock film, for instance, innocence says, It looks as though I did it, but I didn't. In McEwan it says, I may have done it, but you have to hear the whole story, or, I did it, but only because I was ambushed by some stranger hiding in my personality. 'He was innocent,' one of McEwan's characters thinks, 'but it would take some explaining.'

By gothic I mean that moment in a fiction when all the emotions go underground, when what has seemed like a logical if perhaps violent plot turns to outright nightmare, driven by forces that no one will name. The corpse, for instance, already a practical problem in material reality, takes up residence in the mind; the monster doubles in size, the aggrieved woman becomes a shrieking harpy. McEwan's great gift is for getting his characters onto this level of experience by the most casualseeming means: they step into the gothic the way other people step onto buses, and the sheer ordinariness of their arrival in terror takes the breath away.

'They knew one another much as they knew themselves, and their intimacy, rather like too many suitcases, was a matter of perpetual concern.' McEwan's writing is patient, inventive, intelligent, attentive to detail. The tone is always steady, underplayed, even (especially) when it deals with repellent material. The books are also funny, in a macabre way, particularly The Innocent, where quite ghastly bits of behavior keep stumbling across the structure of farce, as if farce were in the end the natural form of horror; horror's home.

'Tout comprendre, c'est tout condamner,' Adam Mars-Jones says in Lantern Lecture (1981), inverting a famous phrase. The third section of this subtle book is based on the historical case of Donald Neilson, also known as the Black Panther, who in the early 1970s killed three postmasters and left a kidnapped girl to die in a drainage complex. MarsJones's interest is in the odd and disastrous collusion between Neilson's craziness and the police's incompetence. -969-

There is a frightening image of chance here. Nothing goes as anyone plans; people die because the killer is scared of his victims, the girl dies because the intended ransom trail cannot be followed. Neilson, as MarsJones imagines him, doesn't mean to kill anyone, and keeps seeing the deaths he causes as mere snags in his grand scheme, accidents for which he cannot be held accountable. The irony of the book is complicated, since its language puts us in Neilson's place without putting us into his mind. He can have thought what the prose has him think, but not, plausibly, with the wit and lucidity Mars-Jones lends him-that is the work of fiction. The interest of Neilson's trial, in this view, is not the establishment of the guilt or innocence of the accused but the discovery of whether he can 'hold on to his idea of himself under cross-examination.' He does, but we don't, and the result is to spread some sort of innocence, however qualified or reprehensible, all over the place, to continue the dark but candid world of McEwan's butchers and buriers, and Bainbridge's murderous young girls. We come to invert the inversion of the aphorism about understanding; that is, we put it back on its feet. To understand everything is to forgive everything-or it would be if we understood everything, or anywhere near it. As it is, our impulse to forgiveness is just a name for our bafflement. We have lost our villains in the same way as we have lost our feeling for abnormality. There is a principle of tolerance here, of course, but there is also, more urgently, a sense of helplessness, as if we had mislaid the concept of justice somewhere and could not go back for it. 'All these cruelties,' a character thinks in Swift's Shuttlecock (1981), 'were no more than a way of making remorse possible.'

The Body of Crime

'I find it very difficult,' Auden said of detective stories, 'to read one that is not set in rural England.' Rural England, for Auden and a whole generation of crime writers and crime readers, was an emblem of innocence. The corpse on the carpet stains and complicates this innocence, but the detective clears up the mess: 'Innocence is restored,' in Auden's words, 'and the law retires forever.' The object is not justice but the disappearance of the need for justice. We gather in the library, and are content to identify the culprit-as if there were only one kind of guilt, and none of it were ours.

What is missing here is any sense of monstrosity in the solution as well as in the crime, and this is precisely what recent British fiction pro-970- vides. Even the dreamlike Edwardian village is now a version of what Auden calls the Great Wrong Place, its echoes of old pieties a mockery of the very idea of a settled or certain peace. P. D. James's Devices and Desires (1989), which we can take as emblematic of recent developments in detective fiction, is set in darkest East Anglia, and borrows its title from the Anglican prayer book: 'We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed the devices and desires of our own hearts.' A psychopath called the Whistler is on the loose, killing young (and then not-so-young) women. But is he a psychopath, and is there only one of him? Or her? Suspects include several scientists at a nearby nuclear power station, a retired schoolmistress, a writer of cookery books, a protester against the use of nuclear energy, a secretary who has secretly joined an international terrorist organization, and Adam Dalgliesh, James's poet- detective, who has just inherited an old mill in the area and is awkwardly close to several of these people. The book ends in a brilliant train of misdeductions and evasions, and an explicit contrast with detective fiction of the old school, where 'problems could be solved, evil overcome, justice vindicated, and death itself only a mystery which would be solved in the final chapter.' This book itself of course finally belongs to this old school, and does solve its central mystery, but it also shows with unusual clarity what the school is up to.

Dalgliesh, reflecting on his detective work, is also, necessarily, reflecting on the sort of fiction he is in:

Perhaps this was part of the attraction of his job, that the process of detection dignified the individual