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11ending which she constructs for Robbie and Cecelia makes no difference to them themselves. Nor, in the end, does it make any difference to the reader. Having avoided ‘the bleakest realism’ in the novel’s central sections, she exposes them as fiction in her last section, and thereby makes the lovers’ deaths even more shocking. Has Briony therefore not only failed to atone for her crime, but committed a further indecency, in writing her novel? Or is that indecency exceeded by that of McEwan in playing a trick on the reader for most of the novel? If so, is that because McEwan’s misdeeds are ‘real’ whereas those of Briony - even if greater in scale - are not real at all? The fact that there is no easy answer to this question indicates the extent to which art and life are mutually implicated. This is generally true, but this novel makes it explicit, and this is the justification both of Briony’s career as a novelist rather than a nurse, and that of Ian McEwan.
Irina Popova Moscow State University
Sentiment Replaces Phantasmagoria: a Review of Graham Swift's Tomorrow
В рецензии на роман Грэма Свифта ‘Tomorrow’ подчёркивается сравнительная простота последнего: нет свойственных более ранним произведениям писателя фантасмагорий и гротесков, отставлен жанр «истории как байки», отсутствует даже ирония. Сохранилось то, что всегда было для Свифта серьёзно: тема по-романтически верной единственной любви и тема обретения детей. Обращение к истории любви в 60-е годы напоминает о других современных романах - в частности, 'On Chesil Beach' Иена Макьюэна и ‘An Experiment in Love’ Хилари Мантел. Слышится также диалог и с Фолкнером, и с Диккенсом. Простой роман, но, особенно в сравнении с современной русской литературой, - какое отдохновение!
“What sheer pleasure!” -1 kept saying to myself from the very first pages of Graham Swift’s recent novel ‘Tomorrow’(2007). I started reading it after an over a month’s immersion in contemporary Russian literature. After the phantasmagoria, the thriving fantasy, the grotesque, after the near-porno, the half-pseudo-documentary historiography, in short, after all our native gibberish, even if not always an ungifted gibberish, - what sheer pleasure! What dear familiar element in Swift! - despite the fact that I have never visited Putney (the ‘here and now’ of Swift’s novel), but grew up in Presnia in Moscow, (the area often and thoroughly depicted by Alexandre Ilichevskii, the 2007 Russian Booker winner).
At one time Graham Swift did not seem alien to either phantasmagoria or grotesques or half-pseudo-history as-‘story-telling’. He thus created the brilliant and unforgettable stories about the waterland, the Coronation Ale, about incest aiming to give the World its Saviour, about a criminal abortion in an English Baba-Yaga’s hut (‘ Waterlancf, 1984). He created a grotesque image of the Police Archives of unclosed cases {‘Shuttlecock', 1980) and a number of grotesques in ‘Last Orders’(1996): the brothel in Egypt in World War II, the butcher invited to help his neighbour the undertaker to properly adorn a corpse, the fight over the urn containing the ashes). Half-pseudo-history, the ‘grand history’ of historic events and historic persons was also, till recently, present in all of Swift’s novels, up to his previous ‘The Light of Day’ (2003) where the main plot is paralleled by the sub-plot telling the mostly imagined story of the Empress Eugenie Montijo in her exile in England (this historical background was suggested to the author by the area where he placed his characters - the very same area where the ex-Empress lived through her long widowhood). The ironic-grotesque-fantastic modus was already absent in ‘ The Light of Day’ which marked that novel as a somewhat new departure (well, unless you see a grotesque in stabbing a much-beloved husband with a cleaver - very true-to-life actually from the contemporary Russian Literature’s perspective).
This is the question: has Swift refused in ‘Tomorrow’ all the phantasmagoria, the grotesque, the ‘history-as-a-story-telling’ just because he is now older and wiser and more sober? Or else, has the refusal been caused by the development of culture itself and should be regarded as a reaction against the modes and devices and generic preferences of postmodernism?
In ‘ Tomorrow' there is one narrator only, a woman (as a matter of fact, not a very common device in the history of English Novel - the famous instance of a male author using a female narrator is Dickens’s ‘Bleak House'-, the opposite cases a female author using a male narrator - are rather more frequent). Well, the female narrator in Swift’s novel is lying and dying - not literally dying, yet the allusion to William Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying’ becomes only too obvious, especially so because earlier, in the structure of ‘Last Orders’, Graham Swift already ‘remembered’ that work. Well, Swift’s protagonist-narrator is still kind of dying of some deadly foreboding which is to be inevitably fulfilled tomorrow, today actually - it is already small hours. Tomorrow some truth ought to be declared and may prove deadly for her husband, for her beloved sixteen-year-old twins ( addressed in their Mother’s inner speech as ‘my angels’!) and for the whole happy home. The truth, as the reader very soon realizes, has something to do with the mystery of the twins’ birth.
The mystery of a birth. The favourite Dickensian mystery. What are Swift’s twins to learn tomorrow? Why such anxiety for their loving parents? Happy Family! Gradually in her sleepless inner speech the woman reveals the cause of the unhappiness - the actual mystery of the twins’ birth could never ever have been borrowed from Dickens.
This novel, unlike any other by Swift, has almost no allusions to the ‘grand history’ apart from the not-too-detailed stories of the twins’ grand-parents who met during the Second World War. Nor is there any departure into the ‘grand history’ with the aim of highlighting the small history of just one family. The history of the 1960s youth of the now middle-aged couple (the time of the novel - June, 1995) mentions the use of the Pill and so establishes a dialogue with the recent novel by Ian McEwan ‘On Chesii Beach’ (2006) and, more
conspicuously, with Hilary Mantel’s ‘An Experiment in Love‘(1995). What McEwan’s newly-weds did not know (that lack of knowledge, according to the novel, triggered the disaster) was no longer a problem lor the characters of Mantel and Swift, being young only five or so years later. The borderline is 1963.
(...) Everyone felt the same, r 5 And every life became A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unloseable game.
So life was never better than ' In nineteen sixty-three (...........................)
Between the end of the Chatterley ban ; s'-i ^
And the Beaties’ first LP.
Thus wrote the poet Philip Larkin (‘Annus Mirabilis’).
It should be reminded that the Jury’s verdict in 1963 to the effect that D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterly’s Lover' (first published in Italy in 1928) could not be classed as ‘pornographic’ coincided with some other developments, including the introduction of the Pill. That radically changed the situation described in McEwan’s ‘On Chesil Beach'. ‘Sleeping around’ is what Graham Swift’s narrator remembers about both her husband and herself.
Sleeping around before they met and never after. All-important in the novel is the theme of love, the only and true love - as in the works of the High Romanticism. It is also the theme penetrating most Swift’s novels. Such Romantic Love and also striving for children, if not ‘natural’ children, then children ‘by spirit’, or adopted or even - in madness - kidnapped - have never ever been corrupted in the writer’s works by skepticism or irony. When the Pill is mentioned by the sleepless woman the reader somehow apprehends it as a kind of a Chekhovian gun hanging on the wall: the Pill in the late 1960s is felt to be bound to shoot later in the characters’ lives and in the novel. It
does not. There were blank shots instead - they make a considerable part of the woman’s memories and of her anxiety about tomorrow.
The strong sentiment dominating the stoiy makes for the happy-end high expectancy (the good old “rules of the genre”). Swift does not provide one. Yet neither does he block it off: we are not going to learn what has happened ‘tomorrow’. The open ending here, though, is nothing like the open or multiple endings in John Fowles’ ‘The Magus’ or ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ or in Peter Ackroyd’s 'Chatterton'. It is an Open Ending Traditional, existing, apart from plentiful other cases, in some of earlier Swift’s novels - as well as in Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations with or without a Bulwer-Lytton for a prompting friend, the Happy End must have its chance.
By no means it’s a difficult novel. A true and authentic one however. And what sheer pleasure!
___________________________'
-.4--
Sandie Byrne Oxford University
Thoughts on An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel
An Experiment in Love is an unsettling novel whose ending, shocking, horrifying, powerful, yet unresolved, is haunting. It has, superficially, a straightforward, simple, and even hackneyed plot: the progress of a young woman from working-class origins to a life-style once reserved for the middle class; the acquisition of education and connections at the expense of family and cultural ties; the oppressions and repressions of a narrowly-practiced religion. The simplicity is deceptive; this story leaves questions and disturbing images resonating long after its end.
The strangeness of the novel begins with its title. What is the experiment? In the story of a young woman at the age to see love as the beginning and end and all of life, where is the love? The narrative
