William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

Take the question of point of view, for example. The narrative voice is omniscient: namely, the author is at liberty to enter any character’s mind and tell us, the readers, what he or she is thinking. Godlike, the author can flit here and there, and present the novel’s world in all its objectivity or subjectivity as he pleases. As the twentieth century moved on, omniscient narration became less and less favoured, or else was used with deliberate knowingness. It was the most popular narrative method of the great Victorian novelists and, surprisingly, A Handful of Dust sounds at times very Victorian in its use of omniscience. Waugh does not hesitate to employ what we might call the Dickensian apostrophe: a moment in the text when all suspension of disbelief is cast aside and the novelist addresses the reader in his own voice. For a book regarded as bleakly modern it is in places creakingly antique. Waugh favours the use of the bracketed aside quite frequently. For example, early in the novel after Tony and Brenda have breakfast there is a two-line parenthesis: “(These scenes of domestic playfulness had been more or less continuous in Tony and Brenda’s life for seven years.)” Whose voice is this, thus distinguished from the surrounding expository prose? It is Waugh, himself, filling in a bit of background, ignoring the modernist injunction, “show not tell.” And Waugh does a lot of “telling” in this novel, often clumsily, which is surprising given that the novel’s strongest technical virtuosity is otherwise its economy and spareness. A Handful of Dust is at its most accomplished and convincing when Waugh does the opposite of apostrophize and tells us virtually nothing: when what is implicit in the few words used detonates so much more effectively than any amount of elaborate explanation. I find Waugh’s manifest awkwardness with the omniscient voice perplexing — seeing it as evidence (with the aid of hindsight operating, I admit) of something hurried rather than fully or carefully considered. The opening of chapter three, “Hard Cheese on Tony,” almost reads like a parody of Dickens: “It is not uncommon at Brat’s Club, between nine and ten in the evening, to find men in white ties and tail coats sitting by themselves and eating, in evident low spirits, large and extravagant dinners.” The tone is avuncular, the overview authorial, the tense is present — and then it shifts back to the past tense for the arrival of Jock Grant-Menzies: “It was in this mood and for this reason that, one evening towards the middle of February, Jock Grant-Menzies arrived at the club.” This would not seem out of place in Trollope.

By dramatic contrast you then find passages as elliptical as this conversation between Tony and Brenda after Brenda has seen Beaver in London:

“Barnardo case?”

Brenda nodded. “Down and out,” she said, “sunk right under.” She sat nursing her bread and milk, stirring it listlessly. Every bit of her felt good for nothing.

“Good day?”

She nodded. “Saw Marjorie and her filthy dog. Bought some things. Lunched at Daisy’s new joint. Bone-setter. That’s all.”

“You know I wish you’d give up these day trips to London. They’re far too much for you.”

“Me? Oh, I’m all right. Wish I was dead, that’s all… and please, please, darling Tony, don’t say anything about bed, because I can’t move.”

Underneath these commonplace exchanges lurks the ticking time bomb: Brenda hasn’t mentioned Beaver. She hasn’t exactly lied, true, but we, the readers, will be hugely aware of the omission. It’s at this moment that we know for the first time she will have an affair with Beaver and will betray Tony. It is what is not said, what is left out, that makes these few lines function so effectively. But such skilful reticence isn’t consistent in the novel: implicitness and explicitness coexist, often uneasily. This is not a sign of a writer exercising total mastery over his material.

Such signs are legion, however, in the passages leading up to the death of Tony and Brenda’s child John Andrew in a hunting accident. Before the fateful hunt Waugh uses a device that can only be called cinematic: a series of short scenes juxtaposed, sometimes no more than a few lines of dialogue, a method that, in a film, would be known as cross-cutting, or even, at its most rapid, montage. Again, it is the absence of interlinking passages that is conspicuous. Often the speakers of lines aren’t identified, neither is their location. Waugh was an avid cinema-goer and he doubtless realized that here was a method of moving narration along without the need for pages of expository prose. And such descriptive passages as there are demonstrate the old adage of “less is more” to near perfection:

She hit him and the horse collected himself and bolted up the road into the village, but before he went one of his heels struck out and sent John into the ditch, where he lay bent double, perfectly still.

Everyone agreed that it was nobody’s fault.

Terse, heavily monosyllabic, the words do their job with perfect thriftiness — and then the overused phrase “bent double” seems, at first, slack or lazy, until you realize, as you visualize exactly what the words describe, that there is no more expressive way of conveying the fact that John Andrew is actually dead. A little boy bent double in a ditch.

Sustained passages of brilliance like this can function as an ideal model of how to maintain narrative power. The pages that lead up to the death of John Andrew are a tour de force. But then you come across a section, such as the following, when Tony learns that Brenda is going to sue for heavy alimony.

He hung up the receiver and went back to the smoking room. His mind had suddenly become clearer on many points that had puzzled him. A whole Gothic world had come to grief… there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled …

Just in case we hadn’t got it, Waugh resorts to telling not showing, in a manner that is over-obvious and over-larded. Time and again in the novel, these inconsistencies and dissonances are revealing. And what they reveal, I would argue, is that A Handful of Dust is not the harmonious whole, the masterwork, that critics have claimed it to be. Inside the structure of omniscience and Victorian apostrophe, a leaner, more oblique, more modern novel is struggling to coexist. Pages of rapid cross-cutting and terse dialogue consort unhappily with ponderous explication, authorial asides and forced humour (A Handful of Dust is the least funny of all Waugh’s novels: look at the interminable ten pages of Tony and Jock’s drunken spree). What is in fact a dark and acerbic exposé of contemporary decadence and ennui is overweighted at the end by the battened-on symbolism of a previously written short story.

I see other inconsistencies that point to further warring intentions. Take the portrait of Brenda, for example. At the beginning of the novel she seems sweet: loving and tolerant of Tony — yet she takes to adultery effortlessly and without a qualm: indeed she’s rather good at it. Scenes are then presented to show Brenda in the worst possible light as someone utterly without feeling and casually cruel. The famous exchange when she learns that “John” has died and instantly thinks it is John Beaver, rather than John Andrew her son, is perhaps the best example (though I’ve always felt the scene sells itself short — no one really refers to Beaver as “John,” so when she says “John” the reader will automatically think of the boy. The joke requires a double take (you have to remind yourself of Beaver’s Christian name) and in that split second the shock effect rather loses its potency). More to the point are her lying telephone calls to Tony when Beaver is in bed with her: there is nothing in Brenda as she is first presented to us to hint that she is capable of such icily calm duplicity — this is the behaviour of a serial adulteress. Some other process is going on here, I would argue, in her changing portrayal. Similarly, critics who contend that Tony is meant to be seen as a buffoon and that his love of his big, ugly, Victorian Gothic house is risible are not reading the book closely. Waugh — whose own tastes were maverick and the opposite of à la mode — lovingly celebrates Het-ton and Tony’s love for the house. The precision of the writing about the architecture does not remotely hint at mockery — on the contrary, every word speaks of relish and approval. If Tony’s taste is meant to be absurd then what of Mrs Beaver’s ghastly interiors? Surely Hetton is meant to represent values, however out of fashion, that are fundamentally sound and worthwhile and deliberately set in opposition to the shoddy trendiness of Mrs Beaver. What these discordancies illustrate is the effects of attempting to shape A Handful of Dust into something it isn’t. My contention is that, at root, A Handful of Dust was written to be Waugh’s own exploration of betrayal and marital humiliation and that it is, in its special way, a form of revenge against the damage inflicted on his psyche by Evelyn Gardner. Brenda’s casual adultery and the disasters it sets in train are meant to be condemned in the most stern and merciless terms. Waugh gives her no escape route: her lover is a waster and a sponger, a hopeless remittance man. Her betrayed husband, by contrast, is sincere, decent and loving. Furthermore — and this is the killer blow — Brenda has so lost her sense of value that she cares more about her boyfriend than she does about her son. It is an unyieldingly cruel and vicious portrait of a worthless woman.