On Flaubert’s Beach.

Chesil Beach in Dorset. You have to imagine the parrot.Here's a couple of responses to a couple of books.

Flaubert’s Parrot
I’ve just finished reading Flaubert’s Parrot. What a book that is. Also, what book is that? I mean to say, I’m not sure exactly what it is. The emotional echoes it leaves remind me of The Good Soldier or A Dance To The Music of Time – so a French novel, that is to say a novel of ideas, run through with a wonderful streak of earthy, melancholy English romanticism. Then it’s also playful with form in a way which we should, if we’re being exact, call postmodern. But whatever you call it, the book provides a wonderfully ambiguous, yet never fatuous or unsatisfying journey; the ambiguities and non-disclosures seem to outline a sense of loss which is very real and moving. I suspect this is one of the principle aims of the book: to create a structure and a style which mirror the protagonist’s rejection of the simple answers and categories we create for ourselves, leaving us instead with a shimmeringly ambiguous conclusion in which all the threads of several lives, living and dead, are suspended and nothing, not even the plot-driver of identifying the parrot, is ever resolved.

On Chesil Beach
This is the way to tell a love story. You put a few characters in a room (no less than two, no more than four). You make their lives and their scenario painfully mundane. You apply forensic observation to the invisible lines of interrelation and motive connecting them (thereby creating an impression of stillness wholly anathema to the frenzied interiority of modernist confessional (Plath, Roth, H. Miller), the unstoppable truth-deluge of the Great American Novel (Irving, Wallace), or the pleasing analgesic of genre). Then you let the inevitability of character and history lead them, like sleepwalkers, to the brink, where they push themselves over. 

And so love, grandest of all the clichés, is made to stand newly clear precisely because it irrupted within the confines of normal life rather than the exotic landscapes of melodrama. The sudden departure from glacial inertia to real, urgent emotion is like a bomb going off in your chest. Suddenly you remember the feeling you had some bare and moonlit night when you perceived that love is the only thing in the world worth having and that you can never quite have.

From here, it is possible to pull off that trick of compressing the entire remainder of the protagonist’s life into a couple of pages. After all the detail that came before, such ellipsis sounds crass – but it has been earned by the fact that we gaze on it through the immediate recollection of what just occurred, with our hearts still broken. And in this way the novel serves to confirm what we already know, which is that love provides the vital narrative to a life to the extent that, even if we travel decades away from that terrible plenitude which had to sunder, it is still the only story we tell to ourselves, or the story which tells us.