Bring Up The Bodies (Hilary Mantel)

Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies is a study - continued from Wolf Hall - of drawing out empathy with a character whom history has despised enough to denigrate and even almost eradicate.

In Thomas Cromwell we have a brute of a man, born of bare-knuckle origins; an autodidact and polymath who is charming, cunning and covetous, who will wield power at all costs even as he knows his empire of influence must eventually come crashing down, who will avenge the suffering of those he himself has loved and betrayed, and whose basic normality and humanity stripped bare of the intrigue of his own bidding and enmeshment is glimpsed in conversations in the kitchen with his cook.

Cromwell comes alive on the page because his is the only character written in 3D, his the only heart and mind we're able to penetrate, he is the sole source of empathy in a cast of hundreds because he alone gifts us his reflexive as well as his public self. And then of course he is written into a language and landscape of modern politics so irrefutably aligned with our received understanding and consumption, via mass media and cable television, of the back-stabbing and intrigue-laden corridors of power.

Personally, I'm not looking forward to Cromwell's demise in the third and final instalment of Mantel's trilogy. And while I believe that it's absolutely correct that we don't judge how good a book is, don't measure it's quality and durability, in terms of our empathy with the protagonist - even, perhaps, our sympathy - you really do only think a book good is it speaks to you: whether in the form of a character, a theme, an issue, a narrative defined by a perspective or an idea with which you feel capable - interested - enough to interact.

When The Prodigy met the Catcher in the Rye, and bumped into Lessing while fishing

I read Hermann Hesse's "The Prodigy" on a recent trip to India. I hadn't visited India in almost three decades; when, eventually, I did, The Prodigy was my night-time reading companion. It seemed fated.

Hans is a young rural boy whose intellect defines him to the world beyond his own private fishing spot. Groomed for a career in the Church, he wins a scholarship, befriends a renegade, is sparked by a frisson of profound feeling and friendship never before tasted, struggles to maintain academic excellence when life in all its meaningful incoherence comes a-calling, crashes from his pedestal like so many misunderstood 'fallen' angels before him, loses his identity and value in a world that knows only to worship his intellect at the expense of his very soul, and kills himself.

Hans' life is an indictment of the West's deep well of iniquitous dichotomies. Such is the popular reading of Hesse's attitudes, his affinity with the holism of the East and the diabolism of the West well commented upon.

But broaden it out, and you have the tale of a young man on whom the world and its expectations and structures weighs down like an oversized and heavy woolen winter coat, dragging the body down and into itself, causing fissures of the soul that only death seems to assuage.

Enter: Holden Caulfield. J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye". Holden is a poster boy for superior, privileged, disaffected youth. But burning brightly is his overwhelming desire to preserve the innocence of youth. It's an impulse the world doesn't comprehend and so Holden struggles against the expectation and structure of a world that has no affinity for the likes of him.

Hans and Holden. Creations so disparate yet so similar: Hesse writes from the vantage point of a champion of holism, Salinger from the perspective that the world is a cynical and cruel place.

But for all this seeming difference, the pounding of your ribcage against the impiety of duality, against the poisoning of polyvalence, is the same whether you read "The Prodigy" or "Catcher in the Rye". Because you're reading about self and society. You're reading about yourself and your society. You're reading about the courage to stand up, to not be moulded by, to not be forced to divide against yourself within the prison of false dichotomy (Doris Lessing "The Golden Notebook").


Post-script: This blog differs in many respects from what I had drafted in my diary: not in terms of what I wanted to say, but in how to say it. In that draft I touched on society as a structural-functional behemoth, whipping the individual or the self (your preference will depend on whether you've been socialised in the East or West, since these attest to very different things) for its temerity in seeking meaning, in seeking to exist outside the structure and function that fathomed it. I think that analysis remains true, though it didn't make it into the body of my post.

 

Transmission (Hari Kunzru)

Hari Kunzru’s Transmission shines a satirical and oftentimes farcical – as in the development of some ridiculously cartoonish characters that are all stereotype and no depth – spotlight on how Western states respond to the dilemmas of globalisation. On one hand, there is the boon of cheap immigrant labour; and for anybody with even a passing grasp of the indenture system, Kunzru’s rendering reads like a twenty-first century update on those indignities: paid pittance, left to subsist in a state of squalor, without family or comfort, unable to return home because of the shame it will confer on one’s family, unwilling to return home because there yet persists a dream of something better if only you hang on in there. On the other hand, is the impulse to close borders, malign those who don’t belong, cast them out like so much unwanted human detritus.

I felt so much impotent rage and Kunzru was so alarmingly spot-on in deflecting that anger, making me need to almost laugh out loud through the rising bile, that I think he wrote Transmission as a straight-up drama, gave it out to test audiences, and then sat inserting just the right amount of pith and humour into the text in counterbalance to reader expressions of outrage and sadness and, yes, tears at some point.

There are other things too that spoke to me in Kunzru’s book, a nod to the overlapping identities that are written into us but are too rich and diverse and chaotic, and ultimately that are simply too useless in the zero-sum power games that characterise the vast swathe of state and political activity in the twenty-first century. I identified with the Indian immigrant when he chooses to stand up for his rights as an employee, with the Bollywood actress whose worth is measured in terms of how good she looks and her happiness be damned, with the flamboyantly rich and egotistical PR man who gets beaten and trafficked like those he despises. Quite an achievement, this multilayered identification, given that many of the characters are so sparsely drawn that you imagine it was a deliberate tactic on Kunzru’s part, that he’s goading you into fleshing these characters out using the basic stereotypical characteristics he provides as a springboard.

My lasting impression of Transmission  - and it was a compulsive read, aided by flowing language – is that when mapped along the postmodernist continuum Kunzru emerges as the London Oratory School-educated cousin of Ben Elton’s more grizzly wideboy satirist. And the prep-school polish pays off.