Jim Jones

5 December
Started it again yesterday, having first read it God knows when and having seen the film a few weeks ago. It was seeing the film that made me want to look at it again: there was so much I’d forgotten, especially about the endings. Plural. This morning came the first real McEwan moment: Briony’s realisation that it’s not only in her writing that she creates fictions. There’s what must be two or three pages of McEwan setting out a kind of stall: he lets the reader know that we aren’t simply reading a fiction, but a bildungsroman. ‘Six decades later’ she will write about how crucial this summer’s day was to her formation as a writer. It will be bound up with the realisation that hers is not the only version of the world that exists: she’s not the only consciousness, and the incident by the fountain could be seen in two quite different ways. She’s discovered the multiple point of view. (In fact, of course, we’ve already had Cecilia’s version, given to us by the omniscient narrator we’d assumed to be McEwan. We’re not so sure now, especially since we’ve only just seen the film and can remember the end….)

But is this no more than a McGuffin, something to tell McEwan’s arthouse readers that this isn’t just another costume drama? And do his novels always need the kick-start of a McGuffin? In Atonement it’s the succession of incidents that Briony doesn’t have the experience to understand, combined with her determination not merely to write, but to create viable narratives based on what she sees. (The manifesto-like seriousness of the section sits rather unhappily with the frankly unconvincing childishness of the Ruritanian romance she’s just written as a welcome home present for her darling older brother. McEwan tries to sell us this as the unintentionally comic Young Visiters ‘before’ stage of her development, but it’s the sort of thing a girl like Briony would have given up at primary school. And I should know. Writers like that don’t depend on moments of epiphany – That’s when I became a writer – they develop over time. And they’re always ahead of the crowd.) anyway, McEwan tells us, she knows she’s fictionalised the moment – but it’s a trick. We’re hooked like the readers of a whodunit – that’s what McGuffins are for, after all, and it’s what McEwan always does – but we know we’re not going to get a slow revelation of ‘the truth’. He’s told us, or reminded us, how different people’s consciousness turns any truth into a ghost – and the contingency of truth is what this book is obviously going to be about. And, being the trickster he is, he’s also made the idea into the aged Briony’s, with her (McEwan-like?) reputation for ‘amorality’ and a neat get-out clause for her own guilt.

But I’m jumping the gun. All we know is that this moment, and Briony’s attempts to understand it, will be crucial. Time to read on.

8 December
What’s McEwan’s attitude to class? In some ways he’s obsessed with it, and it slides around in everything he writes. It’s always present, and somewhere along the line he always knocks it about a bit. His working class characters have made some kind of success of their lives: Robbie in this novel, Edward (?) in On Chesil Beach- although he was an outsider in other ways , countrified and from a struggling aspiring family down on its luck – and… and others, I’m sure, like the Jonathan Price character in The Ploughman’s Lunch. To complicate matters there are things for us to sneer at in the upper-middle classes. The money in Atonement is third generation (the Tallises) or trade (Paul, the chocolate magnate) with a whiff of war profiteering. And the house is ugly. And Cecilia only managed a Third compared to Robbie’s celebrated First. And… you get the picture: McEwan’s literary leftiness is unimpeachable. But he does love those posh settings: this house, even in politically right-on decline; the big house, part of the missus’s inheritance, in Saturday; those Successful People’s places in Amsterdam. (Interestingly, Kate Grenville uses architecture to suggest disapproval in Secret River when she makes the successful land-grabber’s new villa not only ugly but also careless of the pre-colonial heritage, as represented by the covered-over rock painting in the cellar. House as symbol of… something. Maybe the White man’s hubris: the rock painting will still be there long after the ugly house has been mercifully demolished.)

McEwan has his cake and eats it. Non-middle class backgrounds can be sketched in very, er, sketchily; the Heritage bit, like the loving and no doubt carefully researched details of Cecilia’s1935 dresses, is still there – as gratefully received in the movie, along with a highly photogenic house, perfect for the film’s target audience. As, I suppose, McEwan’s knowing, conspiratorial asides to the reading group members he has in mind.

12 December
I reached the end of Part 1 and I’m… tired of listening to McEwan persuading me that the whole thing isn’t a preposterous charade, a drawing-room conceit like the 30s whodunnits it borrows from. We’ve got all the characters, all with their reasons for behaving as they do – and, crucially, reasons for covering their tracks as they do. Must this is McEwan-land, not Miss Marple-land, so motives are in line with late 20th Century mores. There's the needy Lola, persuaded by the cynical capitalist – hiss, boo – that what he’s like from her is what she wants to give him; there’s the literally absent father, busy with government affairs and whatever other affairs his morally absent wife will happily tolerate; there’s the bored little rich girl, down from Cambridge and frustrated in every way, ready for the attention of… Mr Perfect, whose only fault is too much honesty.

Overlaying all this, of course, is the precocious consciousness of the child who wants to write the story. But instead of harmlessly misconstruing events, she is led via a series of tortuous coincidences to a position where her made-up story is believed. I could start at least three sentences with the words ‘She just happens to….’ Four. Five. But I won’t, because – as I have to admit – on a first reading it’s possible to be carried along: if a story seems interesting enough it’s part of the contract to allow the writer a bit of licence. But by the time Briony makes her accusation McEwan has already spent pages on persuading us how such a story, told by such a girl, at such a point in history – and doesn’t he just love history, with all its convenient oddities of behaviour? – such a story will have its own momentum, and the girl’s motives do not have to be at all malign… etc. etc.

On nearly every page there’s another careful bit of plotting (in McEwan novels these should be abbreviated to BoPs) to make her story more convincing. One example: she finds Robbie’s letter in Cecilia’s room and runs down to give it to – whom? She was going to give it to her brother, but she changes her mind and gives it to the police inspector. Who, in exactly the way we readers of 1930s whodunnits know he would, gets it wrong and sees it as damning evidence. Her brother would have dismissed it as the bit of risqué fun it sounds like – as McEwan the spreadsheet plotter tells us a paragraph or so later – but he’s too late. The damage is done. (All this relies, of course, on the assumption that 1930s police officers lived in the same drawing-room world as those in Agatha Christie novels, particularly its general incompetence. I suspect a real officer would see Briony’s testimony for what it was…. And, for that matter, what we see of the questioning is shown to be perfectly competent: Never mind what you know, the officer replies to Briony’s ‘I know it was him,’ What did you see? But McEwan has told us, endlessly, that the momentum of her story, the class deference of the 1930s and all those circumstantial details, would be enough to sustain a whole trial. Yeh, sure. What McEwan does is use our own liberal prejudices to trick us into believing what quickly becomes an upper middle-class conspiracy. They never did like the upstart, of course they didn’t.)

One other thing. This bit of the novel is set in 1935, which is when the trial scene in To Kill a Mockingbird also takes place. Harper Lee was using the historical moment to make a point about the background to the emerging Civil Rights movement as it stood when she was writing in 1960: Look at what the Blacks had to endure only a generation ago. And what is McEwan doing? Persuading us that the class tolerance of a liberal middle-class family is only skin-deep. In fact, as we later find out, there was no assault, but once one is alleged it’s all too easy to pin it on the son of the cleaner. Ok. But… so? The thought that keeps occurring with regard to all the persuasive details is, What’s this guy selling? He obviously feels he has to, but so much layering of extra psychological evidence, or whatever, makes you realise it’s there to shore up an incredibly creaky premise.

18 December
Briony is now a nurse, and we’ve had plenty of that McEwan-style detail concerning wounds and pain… to go with the detail concerning death and its ugly banality in the Dunkirk retreat chapters. He seems to have done his research: I suspect the retreat really was something like that, just as I suspect that the life of f probationer nurse really was that much of a grind in 1941. [Note: after writing this I read how the ‘nursing’ sections are taken almost verbatim from published accounts. He’s a slippery bugger.]

And now Briony the aspiring writer has had a letter from ‘CC’ (Cyril Connelly, I suppose): a highly detailed critique of why her novella based on only the harmless parts of the Triton fountain story isn’t as good as a proper novel would be. It needs more of a story, more development. And here’s clever Ian and his clever readers – is he just patronising us? – having a sage little nod over the literary joke. CC’s letter is a pastiche of a 40s critic describing McEwan’s own novel, taking in many of the concerns the reader already has about it: Is it deliberately old-fashioned, like a pre-Modern novel? Does the choice of points of view work? Is there too much plot (as opposed to not enough in the failed effort by the immature Briony…)?

22 December
I’m near the end of side 19, out of 20. (Did I mention I’m listening to this on tape?) ‘BT’ has signed the manuscript, London 1999. And we’ve had our old-fashioned pre-Modern – i.e. essentially 19th Century – resolution. The meeting between Briony, her sister and Robbie is a terrible strain, but the lovers are now together, they’ve had their long deferred Wiltshire moment, they know who the real villain of the piece is: the fat cat coining it as our brave lads die.

I wish I could remember what I thought about the final ‘old Briony’ section when I read it the first time around. Did I know? Did I guess, from all the clues that seem highly obvious in hindsight, that the truth is in the hands of whoever writes the story? Dunno. When I saw the film I was surprised all over again by the appearance of Vanessa Redgrave in barmy old woman mode (surely modelled on Doris Lessing, whose surprise over the Nobel Prize some months later was filmed for all to see). I was surprised all over again: I’d forgotten the black joke of the ‘other’ ending.

Hmm. False endings. This one made me think of the French Lieutenant’s Woman – and I think in the movie version Harold Pinter gave a happy ending to either the on-screen or the off-screen couple, and the more troubling ending to, er, the other couple. Must get the DVD. But I think my favourite’s Villette: not so much a false ending as a challenge to the reader: believe it if you want to, but we all know what life’s really like….

23 January 2008
I’m a quarter of the way through and it’s all just about to kick off: there’s been a massacre in – hang on – Meerut. The Hindu sepoys have risen up, brought beyond tolerable limits by increasingly insensitive British demands. They were being ordered to bite off cartridge caps smeared with unclean grease; they were being ordered to sail overseas – a no-no for Hindus – and a sepoy unit were punished for refusing by being forcibly marched to a posting that led to the deaths of most of them; lower-caste sepoys were being promoted because the British found them more amenable and less fussy…. All this despite the warnings by old British hands who had been far more tolerant of Indians of all religions, even integrated entirely into their lifestyle: the White Mughals.

Dalrymple has spent 140 pages convincing us that the Brits had it coming. Earlier in the 19th Century there had been a mutual tolerance, mutual respect – within the context of an understanding that ‘the Company’ were in de facto command. But increasingly even the ceremonial powers of the Mughals were being nibbled away. In the end the last of them, Zafar, could not even depend on having a successor, never mind being given the choice as to who that might be. His cosy little enclave, with its genuine flowering of culture (according to Dalrymple, and definitely in the eyes of the Indians), was effectively under threat of destruction. It’s no wonder the mutineers, as Dalrymple told us in the introduction, chose him as their figurehead. If he was an undeserving King Lear, they were Cordelia’s rescuing army.

The first chapters have been like a novel. Letters and other documents have got us inside the heads of the participants. Subtle shades of tolerance or prejudice are carefully described and we are given a proper sense of the shapes of people’s lives. We feel as though we know what’s going on. And, of course, who the bad guys are.

27 January
The half-way point, approximately, and almost everybody is behaving badly. There are killing sprees taking place on both sides… but, in the chapter I’ve just read, the fact that the sepoys started it is being used by the Brits to justify their own atrocities. As in, I was willing to treat these people as equals, but just look how they’ve behaved. So, during the first days of the revolt all white people, or Christian converts (or whoever) were fair game for the sepoy death squads; in return, British soldiers are now in the business of stringing up innocent Indians. Bread delivered late? Hang the baker.

What’s always so disturbing is how quickly it seems to reach this point. In Anthony Beevor’s Berlin the Russians treated Germans like this (or allowed their subordinates to do so, just as the British officers are allowing pointless killings in 1857). Then, the justification was that the Germans had been indiscriminate in the atrocities they had perpetrated earlier in the war. And on the news today there are reports of how ‘youths’ in Kenya are going into villages and killing whoever they feel like. We’re very fond of referring to this or that part of Africa as a basket case. Kenya, one of the few countries to escape this catch-all description until the rigged elections seems to be going the way of so many other places. Like Delhi, Stalingrad, Berlin….

And as for The Last Mughal…. It’s not going to get any better. We’ve already been introduced to various nutters on the British side, including a certain Hodson who was considered too extreme and unreliable – not to say criminal – before the Mutiny. We knew when Dalrymple first introduced them that the only reason could be that they’d be back, with their habit of taking no prisoners, or personally carrying out summary executions (i.e. hacking down whoever they felt like)…. And the next chapter’s called ‘Blood for blood’. Oh dear.

29 January
Well, we’ve had ‘Blood for blood', and now I’m half-way through ‘The turning tide’. The trajectory of the book seems too plain, as if you don’t need to read what’s coming next. From time to time stuff happens, or a new personage comes along and/or fades from view. Like the only proper general the sepoys ever get, Bakht Khan. He’s treated like a star football manager to start with – but then gets booed off the park when the team doesn’t immediately win every match. If only…. He was within an inch of overcoming the Brits on the Ridge, but only the Brits realised.

And the trajectory? Mutineers carry all before them; everybody joins in with looting and high living; the Brits are ejected, but a force returns and camps out on the Ridge; the mutineers send waves of attacking forces at the Brits, but they have no trained leaders and never learn from their mistakes; the Brits see everything as proof of the inferiority of the ‘natives’ – to go with their inhuman cruelty; enter Nicholson the psycho, cheered on by everybody as he promises no mercy to anybody. God is on our side, and it’s certainly not going to get any better than it is. Worse.

A quotation from someone or other (not Nicholson himself), extreme but not beyond the pale for the time: ‘Hindoo and Moslem have proclaimed their caste and their religion to the world in a mass of fiendish cruelty that stands unparalleled in the world’s history. The punishment about to be inflicted will likewise be equivalent: Justice is Mercy – “blood for blood” will be the watchword.’ You bet. But there were some who could see Nicholson’s methods for what they were: ‘Such cruelties must tell against us in the long run, and because these men have done the same to us is no reason that we should emulate them. Kill them by all means by hanging or shooting the really guilty, but the innocent should be spared.’

Meanwhile Zafar, only wanting the quiet life but beset by the invasion of sepoys who want him for their figurehead…. Dalrymple compares him to King Lear, racked by forces far too big for him to cope with. Gulp. (Actually, I compared him to King Lear before. Flipping heck.)

4 February
I’m half-way through the chapter called ‘City of the Dead’. Not enough dead for the Brits, who are stringing up dozens of Indians at a time. And they’re not too fussy about the length of the drop: if they squirm for a while, doing the Pandie hornpipe, well that just adds to the fun. As before, there are a few voices raised in protest – ok, not exactly raised, but muttering in the background: some letter-writers are frankly appalled. But the norm is, they had it coming and, well, God might be firm but he’s fair. Yeh, sure. Before this chapter we had ‘Blood for Blood’, and buckets of it. There were some parts, particularly letters or reports written by soldiers who participated, which are almost literally unbearable: just to read them brings a sort of misery at the crapness of humanity. Dalrymple refers routinely to the murders carried out by the Brits, behaviour which two or three generations later would be classed as war crimes: all 40 or 50 civilians in a single house murdered, boys or old men run through with a bayonet….

But we also get the background to all this. These particular atrocities take place in – and I can’t think of a better phrase – the heat of battle. Dalrymple, through eye-witness accounts, took us into the city on the first day of the British attack. I can’t think of a better account of the sheer nakedness of hand-to-hand fighting, of the visceral passion that sustains it… and of the black panic that can follow when the passion’s spent and nothing’s yet safe. Some participants, still in shock about the loss of wives and children in the first days of the Mutiny, seem to deliberately dehumanise themselves: whilst noting the viciousness of what they do, they express satisfaction. (When was the phrase first coined that all’s fair in war? Whenever it was, we’re still seeing how people believe it in the 21st Century.)

And now Hodson’s captured Zafar. He was the nutter we first met chapters back, and he’s outlived Nicholson the outright psycho. He’s acting almost as a law unto himself – but doesn’t gets criticised for killing two of Zafar’s sons and a grandson, no questions asked; people do disapprove – but only of his promise to Zafar that he’ll be safe from execution. I’m speechless – just as Dalrymple wants me to be, I suppose.

7 February
So, it’s over. The last chapter is about the tying up of loose ends. Any member of the royal family still free? Arrest them. Any bits of the Red Fort still standing? Demolish it. Anything valuable left in Delhi? We’ll have that…. And of course there’s the drawn-out process of Zafar’s trial that even the British can see is a charade, and the drawn-out process of the final years of his life, and his family’s. The dead hand of British officialdom is on it all, particularly in the way their demonisation of the Muslims divided the two communities and led to the eventual rise of a new Hindu elite. Meanwhile the destruction of a whole culture is as bureaucratically well-managed as anything the Nazis managed 80 years later. (The language of racial bigotry is almost identical: Dalrymple quotes an 1868 textbook in which a single photograph demonstrates how it is ‘hardly possible to conceive features more essentially repulsive’ than this archetypal Muslim.)

But it isn’t European ethnic cleansing that closes this history, it’s the rise of what we’re now urged not to call militant Islamism. In a few paragraphs Dalrymple aims to sketch a timeline leading from Delhi in 1857 through the beginnings of the Muslim/Hindu divide and the beginnings of the fundamentalist madrases to the eventual rise of Al Qaida. The way he describes it doesn’t seem far-fetched, and he rather foolishly decides to locate ‘aggressive Western intrusion and interference in the East’ firmly in the present day. He hasn’t really earned this generalisation, and he knows it: he brings on the cavalry, in the form of Edmund Burke on history repeating itself. If you aren’t sure you’ve convinced the reader, always end with a quotation.

Footnote. Today good old Rowan Williams has caused a furore – no other word will cover it – by suggesting that in our multicultural society there may be room, in certain circumstances, for Muslim communities to solve local problems through an application of Sharia law. Nothing particularly unusual in that: it’s the sort of leftfield outside the box stuff we’ve come to expect from the turbulent priest. But the reaction – within three hours leaders of all three major parties are squelching the idea and the Sun editor is interviewed on radio to explain why this will be front-page news tomorrow – has been as predictable as anything in The Last Mughal. The ill-advised thing was to use that phrase ‘Sharia law’, which in current demonology means stoning rape victims and cutting off the hands of thieves. What did the Neo-cons in the US say? You’ve got to have an enemy – and, in Britain in 2008, we know who that is.

18 February
A few afterthoughts. Following a book group discussion I’m persuaded that Dalrymple gives too one-sided a picture. He keeps telling us throughout the book how detailed his research is, how during the writing he had access to thousands of documents on both sides…. So why did we have so much from the British side, particularly (in that novelistic way) from letters that let us see the inner workings of their minds, and so little from the Indians? The sepoys didn’t like the lack of understanding – lack of a willingness to understand – on the British side; so they killed everybody. Obviously it wasn’t like that… but, really, Dalrymple isn’t the one to give us the details. It’s as if he’s so Delhi-fixated anything that happens anywhere else becomes simply a sort of ‘given’. Sepoys: fed up; slash, burn. Brits: surprised; 300 pages of reaction. Odd, really, for the great Indophile to treat so casually the Indian mindset that led to it all.

Bu…ut. I’m ok with it. I have my own agenda, I suppose, and that’s to do with finding evidence of British Imperialist awfulness. I tend to look for stories that allow me to say, well, whatever atrocities there are in the world, we’ve been just as bad.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman

17 January 2008
I started listening three days ago – and I’m already a third of the way through. I love it, again. In 1969 – eight years before I first read it, on a plane – it must have seemed extraordinary: this omniscient author who keeps stepping out of the story to let us know he’s no more omniscient than we are. He’s a bloke writing a novel… and whatever ideas he might have had about where his characters are going, they’re going to make up their own minds. The great thing is, of course, this might be just another metafictional trick: when he says he expected Charles to do one thing, but he turns out to do a different thing, he might be giving us a genuine insight into what it’s like to be a writer. Or he might be having a laugh.

What really appeals to me is the way Fowles lets you in on one particular aspect: if he’s working hard to make a character’s behaviour seem convincing, he has a chat with us about it. He’ll even draw modern-day parallels to help. And it makes us like the author, makes us want to believe his argument that a century ago this kind of character (who Fowles makes as alien as possible in some ways, like the clothes and the mid-Victorian moral stance he has to keep up) really would behave like this. Which is the trick: we like the way this author talks to us, so we buy what he’s selling.

The alienating, step outside the narrative stuff helps him to place the other characters as well. He pretends to take nothing as ‘given’, so we don’t simply have to take characters at face value. He tells us how that stereotypical ‘Victorian’ set of attitudes arose, so that Mrs Poulteney – who really is no more than a stereotype – becomes believable. So… although Fowles tells you he’s made these characters up, we believe him when he pleads that his creations have a life of their own. Not a Greek god, then, like those in Hardy (especially in Mayor of Casterbridge) but a Christian God, whose people possess free will. Well, if it works – which I think it does – good luck to him.

21 January
Just read Chapter 27. Charles is besotted by Sarah so, being a good Victorian, he’s gone to the doctor to help him sort himself out. This gives Fowles a chance to play another game: the doctor summarises, in role as if he is Sarah speaking, all of her motivation as a character as we might have already surmised it for ourselves. (He’s a forward-thinking Darwinist with a precocious interest in the infant science of psychology, so he’s allowed to get it spot on.) This is clever, because for several chapters Fowles has kept himself pretty well hidden, so the novel has been allowed to go on its almost parodic Victorian-style way without the usual interruptions. Shit, there’s even a lightning storm to accompany the revelations about himself that Charles has to face. And... and what? Sarah will be put in a liberal asylum (or whatever), so Charles is given the chance to step back from the brink and swallow his petty upper-class dissatisfactions like a man. Except we’re not even half-way through yet, and he can’t stop picturing those eyes. Just because he knows he’s been trapped doesn’t mean he’s free of her. Reader... you’d better play the tape.

[Later] A couple more chapters. 28 is a short history of hysterical women and the scrapes they got themselves and others into. In other words, Evidence, capital E: upping the plausibility rating. 29 is a flashback: Sarah, a character we can’t help but sympathise with – she is a 20th Century woman in a 19th Century body, after all – tells it like it is to her high-horse boss, Victorian Values personified. It’s a bit like the moment in Chapter 27 when the doctor says what’s going through our mind, except this time it’s the scene we’d like to witness, not what we already think (without quite having put it into words). Clever stuff.

27 January
I’m three-quarters of the way through, and Fowles has just delivered the first ending – identical, in that everything is resolved without the crises needing to come to a head – to the ‘fictional’ ending in Atonement. But this time we aren’t given the story as written and published by one of the characters in it; it’s the story Charles has written only in his head, and only Fowles the god – he even consigns Mrs Poulteney literally to hell – is privy to what’s going on inside the head of another human being. Being an author, he tells us: that’s his job…. But this is a playful god and at first he pretends it’s what, as it were, ‘really’ happens. Then, like Eric Idle as the wag in Life of Brian he shows us how he was pulling our leg. He’s playing metafictional games again, and it’s with the lightest of touches.

This is not at all like clunky you-know-who, who has Briony the ageing author pretending she’s going for a deeper literary ‘truth’, one that’s more satisfying for everybody than the messy stuff of reality. To be fair to McEwan, he does show the reader a degree of respect: we have to work out for ourselves the extent to which old Briony’s redemptive ending comes about from her own needs, specifically her need for the atonement of the title. In the ‘real’ story – which she also tells us about in a different act of atonement, this time to all us readers who bought the happy ending – her attempt to atone for her lie is merely an empty gesture. Who am I to say that it would have been a more honest way to end without the feelgood ‘false’ ending? Briony has her cake – the world thinks she really did atone for what she did – and eats it too. But so does McEwan: he lets us have the old-fashioned ending and he lets us know he’s really a postmodernist.

[Later] Well, he’s done the deed… but only after Fowles has had some more fun messing about with the idea of the fictions we live by – as in, We’re all novelists, and this time it’s Charles who’s decided to change the ending, not me. Moi? says Fowles. I’m just a humble writer telling you what he did. Fowles knows it’s a game, we know it’s a game, so everybody’s friends. And then, just when we thought we knew whose side we were on, Fowles disabuses us. This is a novel, stupid, and you’re not supposed to know everything in advance. For instance, that bit where Sarah told us about Varguennes (or whatever his name is), the nasty French lieutenant…. Turns out she’s an unreliable narrator of her own story, Charles was a fool to believe her – and so were we. She isn’t a victim, she’s a spider, Charles is the fly – and so are we. Just because it’s an old trick doesn’t make it any less effective: the reader, like Charles, is floored by the sucker punch. Shit, even the twisted ankle was just another strand – I’ve started this metaphor so I’ll finish – of her web.

This is a re-read for me, remember, and I knew there was something dodgy going on. But I’d sort of unremembered the details, and I was as just as impressed this time as I was when I first read it 30 years ago.

29 January
It turns out that the joke ‘false’ ending inside Charles’s head was just a dry run for an even more outrageous bit of exhibitionism. This time, Fowles doesn’t pretend he’s only the messenger; he puts himself right inside the story, as a character on the train that Charles catches on his disgraced way back to London. He tells us there’s a choice. He could give us the Victorian ending or the modern ending: all problems neatly solved and tidied up; or problems faced, acknowledged, unresolved and messy. He pretends to toss a coin – but it isn’t to decide which ending to give us: he’s already decided we can have both, but can’t choose which one to end with. That’s the one we’ll take away with us as the more ‘true’ one, after all.

And if you believe he really can’t decide, well, you haven’t been paying attention.

30 January
End of Chapter 60. I’ve just reached the end – I think – of the right-hand fork in the road. But this is Fowles, and he makes us think we’re on the rocky road before we reach the longed-for resolution. At Rossetti’s house there’s a tortured conversation between them, and it looks as if Charles’s hopes are to come crashing to pieces against Sarah’s – what? – stubbornness, or inscrutability, or… well, he doesn’t know what’s going on any more than the reader does. When he does think he’s got it at last it turns out he’s wrong: she isn’t immured within some mystical proto-feminism with Charles forever locked out; she’s discovered… motherhood. Charles is the father, they are a family at last –and Fowles makes a joke of the moment as the cloying sound of ‘a thousand violins’ is interrupted by the percussion of their baby’s cry. Aww.

It’s no bloody wonder, 30 years after first reading it, that I couldn’t remember how the scene ended. Talk about a merry dance.

[Later]
Finished. The other road only takes a few pages, and Fowles makes another appearance, this time as an impresario. He winds back his magic watch and – hey, presto – we’re back at a crucial point in the tortured conversation. Except this time Sarah doesn’t stop him from leaving, and doesn’t tell him about the baby. In this scenario she really is the arch-manipulator, offering Charles only companionship. By refusing her self-serving offer, Charles becomes a more complete person, achieves a kind of growth. And we really are in the 20th Century, where we know the difference between cheap fairytales and – what? – more expensive, reader-flattering ones. As Charles sails into the west (I’m not making this up – Charles will go back to America, across ‘the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea’) we know he’s man enough to take it. And, as thoroughly modern readers, so are we.

I loved it. It might only be a firework display, a showcase of literary pyrotechnics, but I’ve always liked fireworks and I’ll give it 11/10. Sometimes we can just be too solemn.