their hint of Blakean innocence, and their less peaceful suggestion that even mirrored creatures can snarl and burn.
The nervous, passionate young lesbians of Jeanette Winterson's fiction seem to take us a long way from the motherly, heterosexual Fevvers, and of course they do. But Winterson's writing is not all that far from Carter's, or indeed from that of many of her British contemporaries. There is a continuing sharpness and intelligence in the voice, an appetite for swift, throwaway jokes, even as the ground of the story keeps changing. 'A complicated narrative structure disguised as a simple one,' Winterson says of her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985); 'it employs a very large vocabulary and a beguilingly straight-forward syntax.' A good example of the effect would be the following sentence, describing the state of affairs in a rigidly religious home after young Jeanette ('Is Oranges an autobiographical novel? No not at all and yes of course') has been found in bed with a girl: 'The days lingered on in a kind of numbness, me in ecclesiastical quarantine, them in a state of fear and anticipation.' The book has chapters named after books of the Old Testament, and opens with epigraphs from Mrs. Beeton (about the scum that forms on marmalade if you don't skim the top) and Nell Gwynn (who said, apparently, 'Oranges are not the only fruit'). A central story is told by Jeanette's mother ('She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies'), who when young thought she was in love because she experienced a sensation she had never known before: 'a fizzing and a buzzing and a certain giddiness.' It turned out to be caused by a stomach ulcer, and the mother's moral is plain: 'So just you take care, what you think is the heart might well be another organ.'
It might be several other organs, and if there is an appealing simplification of life in the thought that oranges are the only fruit (another -983- dictum of Jeanette's mother's), there is a genuine liberation in the knowledge that they are not. It is the liberation Jeanette finds as she fights her way free of religion and home, into an understanding of her past and her present and her sexuality; into the knowledge, as she briskly puts it, that 'not all dark places need light.' 'I have to remember that,' she adds; the missionary impulse dies hard.
When we say the world is small we mean it isn't much of a world; more of a village or a club, lacking the profusion and unpredictability that worlds are supposed to have. The world Alan Hollinghurst evokes in The Swimming Pool Library (1988) is not small. Almost anything can happen in it;, it has many inhabitants and plenty of new recruits. But it is cruelly, brilliantly specialized, haunted by repetitions, by a relentless sense of what its narrator might call déjà vu. William Beckwith is gay in both senses, queer and pleasure-seeking, and his promiscuity is nothing short of heroic. At one point he remembers his «sexobsessed» younger days, but he thinks of it all the time now. 'I was determined to have him,' he says of a lad in a Stepney churchyard; 'I must have him,' of an Arab boy in Hyde Park. He doesn't have either, as it turns out, but these are rare misses. Beckwith is terribly conscious of his mostly overwhelming appeal, and a friend suggests his last words are likely to be 'How do I look?' Beckwith cruises clubs, hotels, Soho cinemas, parks, swimming pools; falls in love with teenagers, gets roughed up, toys with the idea of writing the biography of a lord whose life he happens to have saved. The year of the narrative is 1983, and Beckwith remembers it as 'the last summer of its kind there was ever to be.' 'I was riding high on sex and self-esteem,' he continues, 'it was my time, my belle epoque-but all the while with a faint flicker of calamity, like flames around a photograph, something seen out of the corner of the eye.'
This is to say that the novel is a memorial to the randy, reckless world AIDS has depopulated. Beckwith recalls this world fondly, but also with an astringent and undeceived precision. Hollinghurst's gamble, which comes off magnificently, is to get us to feel the charm of this disreputable and self-absorbed young man; to like him without approving of him. It's hard not to appreciate a person who can so breezily bend Yeats to his irreverent purpose and speak of 'the young up one another's arse,' an entirely new view of why one might want or not want to leave for Byzantium. It is true too that a more respectable homosexual culture is evoked through the names of Forster and Britten, and with -984- the beautifully described appearance of the aged Peter Pears at a performance of Billy Budd.
But then we need to remember that AIDS is not mentioned in the book, because AIDS had not arrived in the consciousness of the summer it recounts. The disease casts a horrific shadow, but only a shadow, and there are dooms that have arrived in the novel's pages and are its commanding subjects. The beautiful Beckwith knows he is not like the old blokes in the loo in the park, but also knows he may not always be so different: 'I felt a faint revulsion-not disapproval, but a fear of one day being like that.' Ronald Firbank becomes a mannered patron saint of the book, and is glimpsed in a film taken shortly before his death, 'a bona fide queen,' coughing, laughing, enjoying an 'impromptu kind of triumph.' The triumph is real but also pathetic, because it is pure style and parody, bereft of all the hectic physical attractions Beckwith lives by and cannot think of living without. Can this be all that liberation means? Looking for a boyfriend who has disappeared, Beckwith is beaten up by a group of skinheads, and understands (none too soon, we may feel) the ridiculous physical (and other) risks he has long been taking. 'It was actually happening. It was actually happening to me.' And he grasps for the first time the 'vulnerability of the old, unfortified by good luck or inexperience.' It's not that Beckwith suddenly turns virtuous, or that the book becomes uplifting; only that Beckwith glimpses the precariousness of his glory, and of glories like his. When the old lord sees Beckwith's face with its broken nose, he says, 'Well, at least I saw it before they spoilt it'-as if the face were a house or a landscape or a painting.
For a gay writer seeking to treat the subject of AIDS, Adam MarsJones writes in his introduction to Monopolies of Loss (1992), there is 'a particular political variant of denial.'
At a time when media coverage tends to push the issues of AIDS and homosexuality closer and closer together, as if epidemic and orientation were synonymous, how can you justify writing fiction that brings this spurious couple together all over again? Surely the truly responsible thing to do now would be to write sexy nostalgic fiction set in the period before the epidemic, safeguarding if only in fantasy the endangered gains of gay liberation?
Mars-Jones answers himself, 'Well no.' I don't think he means that the truly irresponsible thing is to write novels like The Swimming Pool Library, only that the contemporary life of AIDS is also an important (and so far largely taboo) subject for fiction. 'The novel seems the obvi-985- ous form for so weighty an issue.' «Weighty» is a fraught and bittersweet joke, given the physical manifestations of AIDS, and Mars-Jones has so far managed only short stories on this topic. In 1987, he and Edmund White published a volume called The Darker Proof, feeling it was possible that 'the big issue and the little form had a paradoxical affinity.' Monopolies of Loss includes Mars-Jones stories from that book and some new ones. I mention them here both for their scrupulous evocation of important questions and because I think the future of the British novel may come to depend more and more on its dialogue with shorter fiction.What marks this book is its compassion and its range, its sense that AIDS, however fearsome, is not alone among human calamities. AIDS isolates a person, we learn in a story called 'Slim,' 'only… from the young, the well, the real.' Only. That's a lot of people to be isolated from, but it's not everyone. 'All the time my Gran was ill we never once said cancer, but now cancer is a soft word I am hiding behind… Cancer. What a relief. Cancer. Oh, that's all right.' Of course it isn't all right. The new fear falsifies the old; a sign of how terrible the new fear is. In a later story a man who does not have AIDS commits suicide, and the homosexual community finds it hard to forgive or understand him. 'It seemed to us that he'd just thrown away a body that any of our sick friends… would have jumped at… We were angry. Didn't Victor know there was a war on?' He didn't; or if he did, his private, old-fashioned misery mattered to him more than the war, more than his own continued existence. 'He had no loyalty to life. He felt no patriotism to the mortal country.' The victims of AIDS are patriots by comparison; not just because they are losing life but because they know what the loss of life actually means. When Mars-Jones writes of succeeding infections 'holding court' among a young man's 'ruined defences,' there is an eerie majesty in the metaphor that celebrates not the drama of the disease, but the tragic grandeur of the fading mortal country.
Michael Wood
Selected Bibliography Anderson Linda, ed. Plotting Change. London: Arnold, 1990.
Carter Angela. Nothing Sacred. London: Virago, 1982.
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Crawford R., and T. Nairn, eds. The Arts of Alasdair Gray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.
Kirkpatrick D. L., ed. Contemporary Novelists. 4th ed. London and Chicago: St. James Press, 1986.
Lee Alison. Realism and Power. London: Routledge, 1990.
