Midlife Passions
ALLEN, BROOKE
On Fiction Midlife Passions By Brooke Allen Middle age is supposed to be a time of cooling down. Passion has safely receded into the past; marriage dulls the emotions with custom and...
...The picture one eventually gets of this apparently enviable marriage, still passionate and exclusive after so many years, is more than a little bit creepy...
...For it is in fact many-layered, the story of a single deed that reaches backward and forward into time and touches an infinity of memories and intentions...
...A word with no half measures: you've got the disease...
...Ray lives to understand and to regret his tendency—cultivated perhaps by the Agency?—to cast others too readily as potential enemies...
...Like his two previous novels...
...It was a quixotic act, sending him beyond the professional pale: "Corrupt...
...He is clearly an admirable character, but the Agency fears him as a dangerous radical and compels him to go underground...
...a gentle counterpoint asserts itself while the reader is lending all his attention to the melody...
...Whites (1986) and Mating (1991), his new one, Mortals (Knopf, 715 pp., $26.95), tackles big philosophical and religious issues in a discursive style oddly reminiscent of George Eliot...
...The second serpent in the garden is Davis Morel, an earnest and brilliant American doctor of mixed black and white parentage, who believes that Christianity has been a force for great evil and sees it as his personal mission to lift its yoke from the African continent...
...marriage dulls the emotions with custom and repetition...
...Listening for Bob Nash's arrival home on the night of his murder, for instance, George registers "the sizzly civilized sound of tires on gravel...
...The reader, then, is hardly surprised when, Eve-like, she becomes the tiniest bit restless...
...Ray distrusts Morel on a visceral rather than an intellectual level, the more so once Iris becomes his patient and begins parroting his doctrines...
...the role of whites and, yes, of the Christian faith in the tragic degradation of Africa...
...You have a goliath of an enemy dressed in armor about to smite you who sits down suddenly and looks faint and when you open up his armor you find only his face is normal, the rest is sickly, mummified, and then he dies in front of you and it's all over...
...When Iris strays, for no very good reason, one can only sympathize with her...
...remembering the sight of his father approaching the house where he planned to meet his mistress, he describes "the way he hurried through the rain and was let in like a bird swooping into a nest...
...I'd sinned...
...dark minor chords appear suddenly and as suddenly disappear...
...the photography studio, where George's father photographed his mistress and, incidentally, the infant Sarah: So many pieces of our lives connect in unexpected ways...
...Lust and violent desire are neither appropriate nor becoming within fading, sagging bodies...
...But the real center of Mortals is the relationship between Iris and Ray, and it is on this relationship that the novel stands and, often, stumbles...
...Swift is sparing with these elegant touches, and while The Light of Day is full of fine writing it does not seem to be so...
...This, of course, changed his life: "I suppose that's what I felt, under my chestnut tree...
...A lifelong scholar of Paradise Lost, Ray subconsciously imposes Miltomc ideas of Heaven and Hell, Obedience and Disobedience, God and Satan, onto his life and his world...
...Not just a cop who'd overstepped the mark...
...This Eden comes complete with its Eve: Ray's wife Iris, with whom he has remained obsessively in love after 17 years of marriage...
...Who plays the serpent in the downfall of this Eve...
...He looked around...
...It is "brilliant, blue and still...
...Soon it is evident she is falling in love with him, or at the very least succumbing to his fascination: Just as Ray has long personified secrecy to Iris, Morel seems an apostle of truth to her...
...There are many thematic strands in this novel: the fraught love between siblings...
...The melancholy Chislehurst golf course...
...Ray, who in spite of his literary interests has no religious beliefs to speak of, feels nonetheless that "By the numbers, Botswana was doing better than any other country in Africa...
...Aside from Iris, it was fair to say that he had only enemies, or adversaries...
...Swift's The Light of Day (Knopf, 324 pp., $24.00) is a streamlined book of deceptive brevity and simplicity...
...He'd never thought of himself as a limb of Christendom but of course in a way he was, and so be it...
...Ray is sent, against his will, to spy on him, and in his travels through the Kalahari he is kidnapped and tortured by aBoer-led gang from whom he escapes only after great difficulties and privations...
...But Swift's detective is neither cynical nor disabused...
...Swift builds the novel out of a single November day in George's life: the second anniversary of Sarah's crime...
...Caddying one day for his father on the golf course, he overhears a comment that makes him realize his father was seeing another woman, the mother of one of his friends...
...Existence was bland and tolerable enough until the attractive, well-heeled Sarah Nash arrived at the agency for the usual reason...
...since childhood he has perceived his brother as a source of malice and disruption...
...There is too much conversation, too much repetition, too much groping after a sort of formalized philosophical point of view that never materializes...
...Paradise was from the Persian for walled garden, probably the first fact anybody tackling Milton learns...
...Trolleys careering, boots yawning, a scene of plunder...
...The man who ultimately changes Ray's moral outlook is neither Rex nor Morel but Samuel Kerekang, a political activist recently returned to Botswana after years of study abroad, eager to implement a series of social and agricultural reforms...
...Like Rush's other books, Mortals takes place in Botswana, where the author lived from 1978-83...
...I was shelterless...
...he has retained a luminous idealism...
...that I didn't have any shelter, real shelter, anymore...
...Mortals, with its plethora of ideas and its fascinating setting, is a compelling novel without being an entirely successful one...
...He was in love with her...
...he wanted her to be happy, and happiness for her evidently included the errant Bob Nash...
...Ray, cozily installed in his fine government house, feels himself securely in Eden...
...Christianity or the mindset bound up with it at least was helpful to the country, so far as he could judge...
...the characters argue endlessly, and too often fruitlessly, about the various subjects at hand...
...later he pays another visit, one he faithfully repeats every two weeks, to Sarah in her highsecurity prison...
...Too intelligent to be really romantic, he nevertheless upholds a personal vision of loyalty and truth that is almost Arthurian...
...Outside of a grocery store, he notes, "The car park was heaving...
...Rex and Morel, despite their transgressions, are not evil men...
...Rush is a remarkably undisciplined writer, and has drawn out into over 700 pages what could better have been told in 400 or 500...
...No child has appeared to upset their idyll...
...Swift, the author of acclaimed works like Waterland (1983) and Last Orders, winner of the 1996 Booker Prize, is a master at drawing multiple strands of narrative and voice into a unified and powerful whole...
...An enormous proportion of Mortals is devoted to Ray's drooling rhapsodies on every inch of Iris' face and body, and to the quoting of Iris' every mot, whether bon or not-so-bon...
...Here they had everything...
...She takes no part in Ray's teaching work, and because of security protocol she knows very little about his intelligence-gathering...
...In the end, we understand that the present moment— George's day of visits—is composed of various significant moments in his past...
...As he goes about his business, he recalls the crime, its genesis and its results...
...Rush's very failure to sum up or to simplify is attractive in its own right, however, and Mortals will certainly satisfy those who crave a sloppy wallow in pure ideas...
...His clients tended to be married women who wanted proof that their husbands were having affairs...
...At the opening of the novel Ray, like his masters in Washington, is living "in a state of triumph, and had been ever since Russia and all its works blew apart overnight...
...It is the beginning of the '90s, a heady historical moment with neighboring South Africa at last poised to convert to majority rule...
...George had spent 24 years in the police department of a London suburb, rising to the rank of Detective Inspector before being expelled from the force...
...He opened a little office as a private eye...
...Going further back, he brings memories of his own childhood and his parents' deceptively placid marriage to bear on the present and on his love for Sarah...
...Iris was his one great friend, his pivot and anchor...
...Swift's prose is extremely economical and he is positively stingy with descriptive flourishes, but when he does indulge in them they are superb...
...For it is possible for a marriage to be too close, and it may even be a sin to love too devotedly: No woman could possibly stand up to the emotional pressure of being perpetually worshiped...
...Although none of this sounds terribly thrilling, it is not the subject matter or deep thought that makes The Light of Day such an exquisite piece of work but its artful construction, which resembles nothing so much as an orchestral symphony...
...Ray is horrified by Rex' play for Iris' attention...
...There are two apparently satanic characters The first is Ray's brother Rex, who writes Iris long letters from the States that seem to make her look at her husband from new and faintly disturbing angles...
...Rachel decided—almost overnight—that I wasn't just a bad cop, I was a bad husband, a bad deal altogether...
...the exiled Empress Eugenie, who once lived on that very spot, and whose biography Sarah is translating in prison...
...George took on Sarah more as a mission than a client...
...But sometimes the senses refuse to be tamed, and passion erupts as brutishly in later life as it did in youth...
...Rush's middle-aged protagonist is Ray, a CIA agent working undercover as an English instructor in a boys' high school...
...The novel's narrator, George Webb, is at first sight a stock character, the slightly seedy private eye of a Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett tale...
...Although he does not consider himself a true believer in the Agency and its sometimes unsavory works, Ray sees the American system as preferable to the many worse alternatives and defines his own role as that of a provider of certain truths that his employers are free to do with as they see fit...
...He looked forward to their occasional dinners together as giving structure to his shaky new life...
...The novel might seem to be about a gruesome and sensational murder case, it might mimic the conventions of the psychological thriller, but its real themes are the timeless and agonizing ones of husbands and wives, parents and children, solitude and commitment...
...George pays a duty visit, for Sarah's sake, to Bob's grave in Putney Vale...
...Nor does the beautiful Iris have any task other than the wifely one of sweetening Ray's existence...
...it is the emotion of the story, not its stylistic flourishes, that the reader retains...
...He acquired a faithful female assistant, a former client...
...Rejected passion had made an unlikely murderer out of a conventional middle-aged wife...
...His marriage ended along with his police career...
...In spite of George's efforts, though, things went badly and Sarah killed her husband in a crazed moment of grief and rage...
...The author's association of pertinent images and events is masterful...
...His crime was fudging evidence to put a dangerous thug out of the way...
...Certain refrains repeat again and again as haunting leitmotifs...
...at one point he even laughingly refers to himself as "Saint George...
...Christlike, he retreats to the desert with a group of disciples...
...His rebellious daughter Helen, now grown up, unexpectedly took his side during the divorce and became a friend and ally...
...It would be absurd to say that intellect does not have its place in fiction, but pure intellect should, perhaps, be used sparingly if the novel is to remain a novel rather than a fictional symposium, which Mortals at times is close to becoming...
...Graham Swift and Norman Rush, both skillful and experienced writers as well as middle-aged men who presumably know what they are talking about, bring their very different talents to bear on this subject and its connection with life's larger patterns in two new novels...
...Swift's skill is especially apparent in the way he weaves George's uneventful childhood in the English suburb of Chislehurst, where his father was a portrait photographer, into his present life...
...His books display both the virtues and the vices of their kind: They force the reader into real thought—not an easy feat by any means—but they also tend to worry issues to death...
...In Milton's words, "The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven...
...Terminating a partnership of many years, the strong-willed Rachel took her leave "like some departing official visitor," George remarks, "like someone who'd only ever visited my life...
...I didn't have a real home anymore just a pretend one, and I'd have to work hardjust me and for as long as it took—to stop the pretend-walls and the pretend-roof from tumbling down...
...The American Norman Rush is an entirely different type of writer: monumental, expansive, often repetitive, intellectual as the Victorian novelists were intellectual...
...Ray thinks at one point that "the true main effort of his adult life was and always had been to have Iris' love, which sounded selfish put in that way...
...George does not narrate the events in a linear fashion, he pulls them, piecemeal, out of his subconscious...
...the paranoia of the CIA and its perverse conversion of harmless and even good people, like Kerekang, into implacable enemies...
...Her husband of more than 20 years had fallen in love with another woman, a young refugee the Nashes had welcomed into their comfortable Wimbledon home...
...it is only in Ray's morally limited vision that they become demons...
...If you had left the man alone," Ray chides his boss, "he would have been running boys' clubs, for Christ's sake...
...There were two discs of grayish struggling lawn flanking the flagstone path to the house where it diverged from the driveway leading to the garage...
...Men and women were surely not meant for coupling on such an intense, solitary, long-term plane...
...He sacrificed the allimportant rules of procedure, in other words, to justice, an ideal that is not always best served by the protocol of police work...
Vol. 86 • May 2003 • No. 3
