Patrick O'Brian - The Nutmeg of Consolation

'Sir,' said Stephen, 'I read novels with the utmost pertinacity. I look upon them - I look upon good novels - as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and mind than almost any other, with greater breadth and depth and fewer constraints. Had I not read Madame de La Fayette, the Abb�r�st, and the man who wrote Clarissa, that extraordinary feat, I should be very much poorer than I am; and a moment's reflection would add many more.'

Martin and Paulton instantly added many more; and Paulton, who had hitherto been somewhat shy and nervous, shook Stephen's hand, saying, 'Sir, I honour your judgment. But when you spoke of Clarissa, did the name of Richardson slip your mind?'

'It did not. I am aware that Samuel Richardson's name appears on the title-page. Yet before ever I read Clarissa Harlowe I read Grandison, to which is appended a low grasping ignoble whining outcry against the Irish booksellers for invading the copyright. It is written by a tradesman in the true spirit of the counting-house; and since there can be no doubt that it was written by Richardson, I for my part have no doubt that Clarissa, with its wonderful delicacy, was written by another hand. The man who wrote the letter could not have written the book. Richardson as of course you know was intimately acquainted with the other printers and booksellers of his time; and it is my conviction that some one of their dependents, a man of singular genius, wrote the book, perhaps in the Fleet, perhaps in the Marshalsea.'

They both nodded their heads: they had both lodged in Grub Street. 'After all,' said Martin, 'statesmen do not write their own speeches.'

After a rather solemn pause Paulton called for more tea, and while they were drinking it their talk ran on about the novel, the process of writing a novel, the lively fruitful fluent pen and its sudden inexplicable sterility. 'I was sure, last time I was in Sydney,' said Paulton, 'that I should finish my fourth volume as soon as I was back at Woolloo-Woolloo - for my cousin and I take turns at overseeing the overseer, you know - but the weeks went by, and never a word that I did not strike out next morning.'

'The country did not suit, I collect?'

'No, sir. Not at all. Yet I had set great store by it when I was in London, distracted by a hundred trifles and by daily cares, with hardly two hours I could call my own until late in the evening, when I was good for nothing; and it seemed to me that nowhere could country peace and quiet reach a higher point than in New South Wales, a remote settlement in New South Wales, with no post, no newspapers, no untimely visitors.'

'But is not this the case at Woolloo-Woolloo?'

'There are no letters, no papers, no visitors, to be sure; but there is no country either. No country as I had conceived it and as I believe most people conceive it - nothing that one could call rural. Imagine riding from Sydney over a dun-coloured plain: shallow stony soil with coarse rank grass, deep bush, and here and there some melancholy trees. I never knew a tree could be ugly until I saw a blue-gum: others of the same kind too, with dull, leathery, discouraged leaves and their bark hanging down in great strips, a vegetable leprosy. You leave what settlements there are, what sheep-walks, and the track grows narrower, entering the bush, a grey-green sombre dusty vegetation, never fresh and green, with vast stretches that have been burnt black and bald by the Aborigines. And I should have stated that it was always the same: these trees never lose their leaves, but they never seem to have new ones either. On and on, skirting several dismal lagoons, where the mosquitoes are even worse, and then at last you climb a slope through lower scrub and there you see a river before you, sometimes a continuous stream, more often pools here and there in the valley. Beyond it stands Woolloo-Woolloo, a stark house set down in the wilderness; to the left the stockade where the convicts live, with the overseer's house beside it; and far inland you can just make out Wilkins' place, the only neighbour within reach. It is true that the convicts have cleared the farther bank for wheat, but it is nothing like a field, only a kind of industrial scar; and in any case it hardly affects the huge featureless expanse of colourless monotonous inhuman primeval waste that stretches away and away before you and on your left hand. The river has a long Aboriginal name: I call it the Styx.'

'That is a sad approach to a country retreat,' said Stephen. 'And the Styx has dismal associations.'

'None too dismal for Woolloo-Woolloo, sir, I do assure you. Indeed they are scarcely dismal enough. In Hades there was no triangle permanently installed as there is in the square at Woolloo-Woolloo and Wilkins' place; for though no man can flog his own assigned servants, both my cousin and Wilkins are magistrates, and each can do so for the other. And in Hades there was at least some company, however faded, some conversation: at Woolloo-Woolloo there is none. The overseer is a gross man, with no thoughts apart from the profit of the land, the acres of bush to be cleared, the harvest that Stanley's brig is to take down to Sydney; and he says I must not talk to the convicts except to give them orders. And although the black men I sometimes meet on our beach or walking by the stream are affable enough - one gave me a piece of ochre, and they have quite often painted my arms and face with the oil that exudes from dead fishes, to keep the mosquitoes away: they use it all over their bodies - our exchange is limited to a few score words. So, do you see, I have no conversation. My rural retreat is not unlike Bentham's solitary confinement: and although no doubt there are men who can bring a novel to a splendid resounding close in solitary confinement, I am not one of them. Though Heaven knows I am sadly in need of an end.'

'You paint a sombre picture of New Holland, sir. Are there no compensations, no birds, beasts and flowers?'

'I am told that ours is an exceptionally unfavoured part of the country, sir, with little game and that little poached by a band of escaped convicts who have somehow contrived to make friends with Aborigines living beyond our northern bush. Little game... I have, it is true, been told that emus were crossing our path, but I never saw them; nor, being so shortsighted, have I seen the cockatoos and parrots except as a vague blur. Indeed, Nature's beauties are wasted on me, though her shortcomings are not - I hear the dreadfully raucous voices of the birds, and I feel the innumerable mosquitoes that plague us, particularly after the rains.'

'As for an end,' said Martin, 'are endings really so very important? Sterne did quite well without one; and often an unfinished picture is all the more interesting for the bare canvas. I remember Bourville's definition of a novel as a work in which life flows in abundance, swirling without a pause: or as you might say without an end, an organized end. And there is at least one Mozart quartet that stops without the slightest ceremony: most satisfying when you get used to it.'

Stephen said 'There is another Frenchman whose name escapes me but who is even more to the point: La b�se c'est de vouloir conclure. The conventional ending, with virtue rewarded and loose ends tied up is often sadly chilling; and its platitude and falsity tend to infect what has gone before, however excellent. Many books would be far better without their last chapter: or at least with no more than a brief, cool, unemotional statement of the outcome.'

'Do you really think so?' asked Paulton, looking from one to the other. 'I am very willing to believe you, particularly as the tale has reached a point where... Nathaniel, may I beg you to read it? If it really will do without any beating of drums, or if you could suggest the first notes of the true closing passage, how happy I should be! I could escape from this cruel, desolate, corrupt and corrupting place.'