The Columbia History of the British Novel

death… mirroring in its excessive interest in clues and motives man's perennial fascination with the mystery of his mortality, providing too, a comforting illusion of a moral universe in which innocence could be avenged, right vindicated, order restored. But nothing was restored, certainly not life, and the only justice vindicated was the uncertain justice of men.

'Excessive interest' hints at a reservation about the whole business, as do 'comforting illusion' and 'nothing was restored.' The passage as a whole confirms Auden's diagnosis of the genre, but denies his conclusion about it. This not mere escape. Or, an escape that so thoroughly knows it is an escape becomes a form of realism, and asks to be judged like any other form of activity.

The individual death is important, though, dignified or not. The most urgent argument in the book is that death is not, as the genre so often suggests, 'only a mystery.' A policeman calls a rotting female -971- corpse a thing, and is severely rebuked by Dalgliesh: 'Sergeant, the word is 'body. Or, if you prefer, there's 'cadaver, 'corpse, 'victim, even 'deceased. … What you are looking at was a woman. She was not a thing when she was alive and she is not a thing now.' This is a little preacherly, but the question, I take it, is not about words only. It is about our feelings on the subject of endings, the abrupt crossing from life into death, the sudden absence of human identity. This is no longer the excuse for a story of detection, it is what stalks detection itself, the story behind the stories.

The End of History

A strand of rope, a child on a swing, a hanging body: these images, in Kazuo Ishiguro's Pale View of Hills (1982), haunt the mind of a Japanese woman thinking back over her life in Nagasaki after the war. She is in England now; her lively, modern, half-English daughter has left home, and her Japanese daughter, from her first marriage, has recently committed suicide in Manchester. The implicit question in this wonderfully delicate novel is one of connection: what is the link, if there is a link, between the girl's early life in Japan and her early death in England; and more largely, between this time and that, between suicide here and the bomb-blasted landscape there. The narrator remembers the months of her pregnancy, after the Nagasaki bomb, during the Korean War; recalls, indeed almost becomes, a woman she knew, involved with a foreigner, neglecting her child for her lover and her pride. Both women are then figuratively associated with a child-murderer on the loose, as if to be a mother, in that time and that place, is to be a murderer-or even worse, perhaps, to have failed to be a murderer, to have willfully prolonged life in a blighted world. The dominant image of the novel, which we watch through a little girl's eyes, or more precisely through the eyes of a mother watching her daughter watch, is of a woman drowning her child in war-ruined Tokyo, and the most tempting interpretation of the later suicide is as a painful imitation of this act, the delayed completion of an infanticide:

There was a canal… and the woman was kneeling there, up to her elbows in water. A young woman, very thin. I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw her. You see… she turned round and smiled at Mariko [the speaker's fiveyear-old daughter]… At first I thought the woman was blind, she had that kind of look, her eyes didn't actually seem to see anything. Well, she brought -972- her arms out of the canal and showed us what she'd been holding under the water. It was a baby. I took hold of Mariko then and we came out of the alley.

Ishiguro himself was born in Nagasaki in 1954, but moved to England in 1960 and has lived there since. He is thus, like Timothy Mo and Salman Rushdie, an English writer of cross-cultural allegiances, rather than a foreign writer who resides in Britain, and his Japan, although impeccably researched and limpidly evoked, is always part metaphor. This state of affairs remains (mildly) masked in Ishiguro's second novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), which explores the bewildered complicity of a generation of Japanese in the war aims of their prewar ruling class; but becomes very clear in his next book, The Remains of the Day (1989), where an English butler, looking back on his life, sees that what he thought of as dignity was a ghastly sacrifice of everything human in himself, a ruin that mistook itself for a monument. His story is paralleled by that of the aristocrat he served, a kindly but stupid man who thought well of Hitler out of sheer muddled naïveté What interests Ishiguro is not the condemnation or forgiveness of these figures but the size and nature of their error. «Japan» and «England» become forms of historical delusion, moral locations where old virtues turn quietly into implacable vices.

'We're cutting back on history,' a headmaster says in Swift's Waterland (1983), and later, more violently, 'We're cutting back History… History will merge with General Studies.' The headmaster doesn't intend any irony, or general commentary on his age, but the reader can hardly miss the point. The present time of the narrative is 1979; between then and the date of the novel's publication falls the shadow of the Falklands War, and of the revival of a tub-thumping patriotism, served by that war perhaps rather than brought on by it. A sentimentalized «history» (Agincourt, Dunkirk, the heart-warming Victorian family) became the home of everything the present was thought to lack, and yet in the novel history is sacrificed for the sake of the economy, cuts made for efficiency. This is not quite what happened in British education, although the cuts were real enough; but it is what happened in British culture at large. Against this tangled trend, this loss of history at a time when «history» is applauded, novelists asserted not that they knew what history was but that they knew what it meant to lose track of it. This is the historical inflection of the story about the uncomprehended crime. 'The past is a receding shore-line,' Barnes writes in Flaubert's Parrot, it -973- is what the mind cannot grasp and cannot do without. But it is also, Ishiguro and Swift suggest, what grasps us, what we cannot evade.

Heraclitus was wrong, Swift's narrator says in Waterland. 'We are always stepping into the same river.' Tom Crick, an about-to-besacked history teacher, abandons the French Revolution for stories about his childhood and his ancestors, impelled by the fact that his wife has gone quietly crazy and stolen a baby from outside a supermarket, claiming the child has come to her from God. The children realize that their teacher isn't giving them the history they are supposed to learn, but they also realize that history is everywhere. Crick's narrative (partly told to the children, we assume, and partly imagined by him as being told to them, a long internal monologue) embraces murder, madness, incest and abortion, two World Wars, a history of brewing, an essay on the procreative processes of eels ('natural history'), and many dark and allegorical thoughts about earth and water, floods and reclaimed land ('For consider the equivocal operation of silt,' 'For what is water, children… but a liquid form of nothing?').

Swift's earlier and later work (The Sweetshop Owner [1980], Out of this World [1988], Ever After [1992]) is full of people who know only cruel and crooked paths to love, but in Waterland more than anywhere else, these intricate relations become historically entangled and irrevocable, a cage of consequences. Crick seems at first to want to understand the past, but we soon realize that he chiefly wants to tame it, tire it out. 'I don't care what you call it-explaining, evading the facts, making up meanings, taking a larger view, putting things into perspective, dodging the here and now, education, history, fairy-tales-it helps to eliminate fear.' This is the function of history for Crick, 'History itself, the Grand Narrative, the filler of vacuums, the dispeller of fears of the dark,' and the only alternative to this compulsion would be an untenable belief in the ubiquity of accident. 'Now why can't everything happen by accident? No history. No guilt, no blame. Just accidents.' But as Crick knows and says, the consoling verdict of 'Accidental Death' is merely the way history talks when it doesn't know any better. Crick has become not the enemy of the recent British confusion about history and «history» but its intelligent yet helpless embodiment. History, as we learn and he doesn't, is guilt and blame, and a chief source rather than a dispeller of fears of the dark.

There are great and brilliantly evoked fears in the world of Julian Barnes's novels: night terrors, blockages of feeling, agonies of self-con-974- sciousness. The characters hunt emotions, like the boys in Metroland (1980), and then panic at what they find. They hide in ordinariness, like the narrator of Flaubert's Parrot, as if a wary banality could protect us from pain. What they fear most is their own judgment, which could always be wrong, and worse still, might be right.

One chapter in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989), pictures a permissive heaven that is everything you want, and open to everyone. The mildly hedonistic narrator, fond of eating, shopping, having sex, and meeting famous people, decides he also needs to be judged. 'It's what we all want, isn't it? I wanted, oh, some kind of summing up, I wanted my life looked at.' His wish is granted, and a 'nice old gent' in a nice old building reviews the whole case history and comes up with a considered verdict. He says, 'You're OK.' And when the narrator seems to expect a little more, the old gent repeats, 'No, really, you're OK.' This is not the judgment (or the heaven) we can really want, but it may well be the one we deserve, the one most persistently implied in our earthly behavior. Barnes's book suspends us between this horrible laxity and the cruelly selective salvation of the Ark, which occupies another chapter.

When you think of the Flood whose side are you on? Is there a relation between an ark and a raft, say, the corpse-littered planking that appears in Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, reproduced as a centerfold in Barnes's