Lyricism Battling with Clich?
ALLEN, BROOKE
On Fiction Lyricism Battling with Cliché By Brooke Allen IN THE INTRODUCTION to one of his early novels, William Maxwell spoke of trying to include “as much poetry as prose fiction can...
...Vasyl’s tale is riveting, but the voice in which he tells it is not credible: We are back in the land of movie melodrama, with Vasyl throughout his several-page monologue sounding strangely like The Third Mans Harry Lyme...
...This is not the England Alfie fought for, a mythical kingdom he has ceased believing in by War’s end...
...In Day Kennedy uses the technique sparingly, switching at will between the second person and the more traditional third, apparently in the interest of heightening particular moments through contrast...
...However many dramatic stories have emerged from the War, there are always more and more—a vein canny genre writers like Alan Furst and Joseph Kanon have exploited with care...
...Otherwise, why write a novel at all...
...The subject constitutes a testing imaginative leap for Kennedy, a woman born in the 1960s...
...Kennedy battles with our preconceptions, but is only occasionally successful in dislodging them...
...It’s the other ones that die...
...This isn’t the shit they taught us...
...Nevertheless he does turn out to be possible, and the two embark on a fevered love affair while Joyce’s husband is stationed elsewhere...
...Subsequently captured he spends the remainder of the War in a prison camp very much like the imitation one that will be created by the movie production team a few years later...
...One doesn’t usually think of leaves “pitching down,” but the image is exactly right...
...Here, for instance, is an excer pt from the first chapter of her newest novel, Day (Knopf, 274 pp., $24.00), in which the hero, Alfred Day, meets the man who will be his skipper in their World War II RAF bombing unit: “He angled his head for an instant and then you could see his eyes, what you were certain must be proper pilot’s eyes— you hadn’t a clue about anything, but they really ought to be like this: their interest too far forward and an odd temperature at their back...
...If an author chooses to write a novel rather than poetry, he owes something to the narrative he has committed himself to, however poetically charged he means to make the language...
...But it is the one he must come to terms with, and by the novel’s surprisingly optimistic conclusion he has managed to do so...
...Kennedy gives us one such character in Day, a Ukrainian named Vasyl who has been hired to play the role of a Nazi guard at the movie prison camp...
...A Catholic member of the crew recognizes that he has given up any possibility of heaven, and Alfie finds that his ideals, such as they were, have gone forever as he looks out over “the bombed thing that was Germany . . . their work...
...The unit’s participation in the bombing of Hamburg ends any feelings they might have entertained of high moral justification...
...Mentally equating his father’s brutal ways with those of the distant Führer, Alfie is an enthusiastic soldier and forms with the other men in his bombing unit—men of every social class and personality type—the sort of family unit he had never been privileged to be part of at home...
...She is richly talented, and when her effects work properly they can be stunning, rather in the manner of Henry Green or even D.H...
...So it could possibly make sense that he’d turn up here and at least work out what was missing, maybe even put it back...
...The question of exactly how much poetry that is has always been intriguing: We can all think of times when a novel’s narrative has been fatally subsumed by linguistic overkill...
...Take this simple sentence: “The night air was tender, full of grasses and heat and a mindless calm, a little taste of autumn there as well, just a clue that the year was spinning and the big plane leaves would soon start pitching down when he got back to London...
...All the rubbish my mother used to talk about this and that class—it doesn’t matter...
...And we are very healthy, very intelligent...
...So does his romance with Joyce, a young married woman of “officer class” whom he encounters in a London bomb shelter...
...Alfie Day enlisted as soon as he was old enough, to escape a dim future working with his sadistic father in their Staffordshire fish shop...
...It’s only that whoever crawls to the top of the heap will always think the rest of us are scum...
...A Waen SS division—all waiting in Italy and then all declared very good immigrants...
...When a local German woman comes upon him in his phony uniform she is momentarily frozen infear...
...The most memorable use of it in recent years was probably in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, where it was arresting at first but soon began to seem pointless...
...The combination of extreme subjectivism with the use of the second person is deliberately challenging: We are seeing inside Alfred’s head, as it were, but with an emotional distance imposed by the odd choice of voice...
...At first he cannot imagine her returning his affection: “Talking about equality was one thing, touching a man like him as if he was possible, that was another...
...It is difficult for someone of her generation not to look at World War II through the countless mythologizing layers applied in War films and books over the last 60 years, and indeed Day is loaded with imagery straight from the Pinewood Studios: Alfie Day could be a film hero played by John Mills, Ian Carmichael or Dirk Bogarde...
...People like you and me, Alfred...
...Her linguistic gymnastics and experimentation with points of view is no mere dandyism, as is the case with so many “literary” novelists, but a genuine attempt at enhanced expression...
...She also switches back and forth between two historical points: the War years, when Alfred served as a gunner based in England going out on bombing raids over Germany, and 1949, when Alfred signs on to be an extra in a War film, a job that enables him to re-enact his stay in a German prisoner-of-war camp and work through some of the events that have paralyzed his postwar existence: “It had seemed not unlikely that he could work out his own little pantomime inside the professional pretense and tunnel right through to the place where he’d lost himself, or rather the dark, the numb gap he could tell was asleep inside him...
...On Fiction Lyricism Battling with Cliché By Brooke Allen IN THE INTRODUCTION to one of his early novels, William Maxwell spoke of trying to include “as much poetry as prose fiction can accommodate without becoming too fancy...
...THESE SORTS OF EVENTS have so often been the stuff of melodrama that Kennedy has been unable to keep melodrama out of her narrative: You half expect to hear “I’ll Be Seeing You” piping up as background music...
...Vasyl’s electrified reaction, and the pleasure he takes in terrifying the woman further, disturbs Alfie and leads him to eventually uncover the horror of Vasyl’s past as a mass executioner in Nazi service...
...Vasyl admits this to him quite openly, for it turns out he has little reason to care about the revelation...
...She must have done a great deal of research on the subject as she imagined her way into the alien life and person of Alfie Day “You recognize every angle, detail of a ship just like your own, but you do want it to be a scarecrow that the Jerries have fired up and not a plane and you stare away from the shine, you concentrate, but you’re sure there was a shape against that first hard rip of light: the shadow of a man, his legs slightly bent, as if he was walking, but lying on his back in the air, in the very thin air, and that s something you can t think of— that so many planes have caught it and the route was a dud too straight, and this is a mess, is a bloody mess, and the bombs not gone yet and the city and the Krupps works and the people hating you below...
...What do I worry...
...We are ideal...
...Kennedy’s descriptions of the bombing raids are persuasive...
...The campaign, dubbed Operation Gomorrah, left a million people homeless and killed between 40,000 and 50,000 civilians, reducing 10 square miles of the city to rubble...
...We are much better than the Russians, the Communists...
...He was almost sure it had come adrift in Germany, in the real prison, in ’43, or thereabouts...
...Later, you’d see the same in other men and you would think of the skipper, whether you wanted to or not...
...You like us now...
...We kill them...
...Something else had been there once, but he couldn’t think what...
...Kennedy treads the fine line between fiction and poetry a little uneasily...
...This is the real truth—we don’t die...
...The Scottish writer A.L...
...There is a constant tension throughout the novel between these almost clichéd images and the freshness with which Kennedy is determined to invest her tale...
...From the Ukraine...
...Alfie’s solidarity with the varied characters in his unit represents the massive social shake-up that the War set into motion...
...As a postwar colleague tells him, “They think we’re scum...
...Day veers rather uneasily from stock melodrama to dashingly executed battle scenes to rather overcharged romance, and occasionally genuinely good writing sneaks up on the reader...
...Lawrence...
...The parts of Day that are most successful are those treating Alfie’s accommodation with Britain’s social stratification and his decision to divorce himself from his own rigidly constricting background—to accept permanent deracination as the price of autonomy...
...The second person has usually proved of limited value as a narrative device...
...Yet for all the hundreds of RAF men whose careers have been documented there are the hundreds of thousands of displaced East Europeans who had to make their pact with the devil, and whose stories we seldom hear...
...As with so many writers, it is often Kennedy’s less strenuously crafted images that make the neatest impression...
...That’s the only law...
...You know two years ago,” he tells Alfie, “your government accepted a whole division...
Vol. 90 • November 2007 • No. 6
