All my life, I have wanted a tilt-top tea table. We’ll look into why it took so long to acquire one some other time. I’m no longer much interested in the whys and wherefores, because now, I’ve got one. It is a fine example of Colonial Revival, one for which I doubt that there is a period prototype. The octagonal tray top is so jolly and Edwardian that I almost feel that Mr Henry James is about to walk into the room. If I were expecting him, of course, I’d have the silver out. This was just our usual breakfast, glorified by an improved setting. In a few minutes, I’ll remove the clutter to the kitchen, tip the top into into its vertical position, and slip the table into the corner. Kathleen, who found the very sturdy table at eBay, exclaimed with delight when she came in to have her tea and toast.

***

I can’t remember quite when it hit me, but it was early on: Ian McEwan is writing a Ruth Rendell novel. Now, it happens that I am reading a Ruth Rendell novel, an old one (1987), on my Kindle — Talking to Strange Men. But, even if I hadn’t, I’d have caught the tone at once. It is a flat, artless style, capturing the vernacular cadences of intelligent, at least halfway-educated speakers who don’t, however, give much thought to what they say. Sentences are straightforward, unencumbered by independent clauses, but sprinkled with colorful phrases of the greatest conventionality. A certain tension arises from the incongruity of what the narrator knows and what the novelist is telling you between the lines. One of the hallmarks of this manner of writing is a persistent underestimation of threats and dangers, very typical of real life but hardly so of thrilling fiction. The banality of the storytelling undergirds an increasingly massive irony. Here is Rendell’s John Creasey, the hero — one wants, in anticipation, to call him the victim — of Talking to Strange Men.

John knew she didn’t much care about houses and furniture, that sort of thing, but she must surely notice the improved look of the place, the clean covers, the new lamp. And the garden, even she who had been indifferent couldn’t fail to admire the garden. The wisteria that covered the front bay was out, long mauve tassels draping the window panes, the patch of lawn was cut to the precise length of one inch and the edges trimmed, and among the last of the Siberian wallflowers the first pansies were coming out. On an impulse he bought a big plaster tub back from Trowbridge’s and, though this was the kind of cheating he had formerly despised, filled it with geraniums and begonias that were already in bloom. It seemed to him that he kept on doing things he would not have done in the past, that his whole nature was changing.

That’s as far as I’ve got, but I’m dead certain that John’s estranged wife, who wants a divorce, is not going to be moved one way or the other by the the blandishments of John’s house and garden. The passage is heavily marked by the fingerprints of John’s wishful thinking.

For a long time, I wondered what more there might be to Sweet Tooth than the exercise of imitating Ruth Rendell. It was not until the very end that I found out, and I must say that it made for an extremely satisfying wrap-up. The heroine, right up to the last, seems destined for a sorry victimhood, but we know that she must come out alive, because she tells the story herself, looking back over many years to her callow youth. Regular readers will recall my general disapproval of first-person narration; in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the writer’s very skill will make the narrator sound implausibly fluent. I doubt that any writer alive is more aware of this pitfall than Ian McEwan, and I can well imagine the serious excitement with which he took on the challenge of impersonating a twenty-something bishop’s daughter recruited by MI5. The act of impersonation is highlighted by the elementally potent gender switch: we can’t help being aware that McEwan has never been a pretty blonde girl in a miniskirt. Never once, however, does he slip; we never once feel his breath, his rich and complex intelligence, in her voice. She is a perfect fictional creation.   

The only other thing that I’ll mention at this early stage (the book will be published in the US in early November — although why any McEwan fan would wait, costs aside, I can’t imagine), is that Sweet Tooth comprises the plot summaries of three short stories by a promising writer with whom the heroine falls in love. Now, the very foundation of this tale is that the heroine is a compulsive consumer of novels who has, however, never been educated to read them: instead of studying literature at Cambridge, she was railroaded into exploiting a natural aptitude for maths. She jokes that, as a schoolgirl, she liked to shock friends by claiming that Jacqueline Susann was the equal of Jane Austen, but this is not really a joke.

I kept up the reading in the same old style, three or four books a week. That year it was mostly modern stuff in paperbacks I bought from charity and second-hand shops in the High Street or, when I thought I could afford it, from Compendium near Camden Lock. I went at things in my usual hungry way, and there was an element of boredom, too, which I was trying to keep at bay, and not succeeding. Anyone watching me might have thought I was consulting a reference book, I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favourite old shoes. Or a wild silk blouse. For it was my best self I wanted, not the girl hunched in the evening in her junk-shop chair over a cracked-spine paperback, but a fast young woman pulling open the passenger door of a sports car, leaning over to receive her lover’s kiss, speeding towards a rural hideout.

(Serena has been that fast young woman and has had that lover. She wants novels to create the illusion that she still does.) What makes the plot summaries fascinating, more interesting that the stories that we don’t get to read ourselves, is the ruthlessness with which plot points are grasped and stated. There is no appreciation of the promising novelist’s literary style, nor even any indication that he has one. Sweet Tooth is a novel “by” as well as about the sort of reader upon whom Ian McEwan’s artistry is altogether wasted. The novelist’s success at concealing his artistry behind Sweet Tooth‘s bland surface, increasingly palpable as the book goes on, is far more thrilling than any amount of espionage.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2012 at 10:51 am.