A Noble Prize for Ish

The Nobel Prize for literature is always a surprise. Though people still get surprised by it, wondering why, for instance, a slight, but popular novelist like Murakami hasn't won it. I don't know why Murakami keeps coming up, perhaps as a Japanese novelist with a worldwide audience, but if there's a British equivalent (there isn't really), then its certainly not Kazuo Ishiguro, who shares heritage and a Japanese name but little else.

Ishiguro is the first British recipient since the British-Zimbabwean-Iranian Doris Lessing. Unlike Lessing, Ish grew up in the UK, as well as coming of age in the early eighties and quickly becoming part of its literary establishment, albeit off in a side room somewhere, rather than front of house. A graduate of UEA, he was always mentioned as a second to McEwan as an outcrop of it's famous creative writing course; and a Nobel prize of course puts that to bed - and gives the UK's first city of literature its own Nobel laureate.

I recall reading "A Pale View of Hills", his debut, in the mid-eighties and enjoying it alot, though it did feel a somewhat slight, thin book, and I need to re-read it. "Remains of the Day", his third novel, didn't sound at all like my sort of thing - that default position of the English novel - a nostalgia for a country house past. I probably saw the film at the time but only read the book years later. Of course its much more than that. Ishiguro had found a perfect subject to match his interest in the unsaid, the understated, the dignity and otherwise of repressed feelings, yet one that was not set in Japan, but in England, albeit a version that was already much gone in the early eighties. It was of course a brilliant move, as it's a book that is both about the English establishment, and critical of it, and it is also a sad, human love story. Its fascinating that this would be the book that he would write. I've always wondered if McEwan, who actually comes from a very stratified British background, looked at the success of "Remains of the Day" (and later "Birdsong") and led to his own exploration of the upper class reticence that we find in "Atonement."

"The Unconsoled" - again a book I read along time ago - was my favourite of his at the time. It was another about turn. A sign that this novelist was wilful in his choice, not just of subjects, but of styles. Here we have the opposite of his Booker winner, instead of specific place and character, we have an unknown country, an unnamed protagonist. Ishiguro has never been a prolific novelist - the books seem to all come out as surprises, presumably after working on them for a few years. Perhaps this explains their diversity of theme and style. They have been popular around the world. I remember one interview where Ishiguro mentioned that he would make his language simpler, aware of the role of the translator; so he's not a writer unaware of his standing, but I was disappointed to hear this from a writer. In some ways this indicates his strengths and weaknesses. There are few writers able to build up such an accumulated atmosphere, from small moments, yet it isn't the prose that does the work so much as the accumulation. I always thought his next great success, the dystopian novel about children harvested for their genes, "Never Let Me Go", was a novella or a long story extended to novel length unecessarily. For me, the decision to set it in a fictional time place - a world that is deliberately anachronistic - was its real weakness; a sign of a novelist unable to quite deal with the contradictions of his ideas. The private school the characters are at is as if from the 1950s, and the echo of fifties Wyndham and other dystopian writers, is there, yet it is set in a notional seventies and eighties. Technology has gone on a different track, an alternate past, rather than alternate future. It makes for an odd read. Yet the humanism of the novel comes through in the end and what turns it into a great book; though I found so much of the set up unconvincing. With novels that also dabble in detective noir and fantasy history he's an impossible writer to characterise, certainly braver in his choices than McEwan or Amis for instance. Like Julian Barnes every book is different, and his lack of or avoidance of a signature style has made him convincing across the genres, whilst at the same time his books do share something - and I think this rather than prose style is what the Academy has praised - a certain atmosphere, a quietitude. His characters are almost always unknowing of their situation, accepting of their lot, until it is almost too late. It seems, in this instance, to be an update of more wilful writers like Beckett and Kafka; but there is no nihilism in Ishiguro, there is love,  and hope, and that humanism.

The Nobel, of all prizes is no judge of literary excellence, but it is it's own strange reading list; international in scope, adverse for whatever reason to the greats of American literature, and prone to like hyphenate writers - whether that is in their nationality, like with Ishiguro or Lessing, or in art form. His books, never frequent, have slipped to five year intervals, with the story collection "Nocturnes" splitting the decade between "Never Let Me Go" and the poorly received "The Buried Giant." At sixty-two this is hopefully no end of career prize though one wonders how this often garlanded, but similarly reticent writer, might be changed a little by the global status the Nobel gives him. An interesting, and worthwhile rather than worthy choice.

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Perhaps it was the idea of the film that had put me off reading this novel previously. In the 1980s there seemed to be a whole range of slick adaptions of 20^th century literary classics – mostly from Merchant-Ivory though “The Sheltering Sky” was Bertolucci – and Bowles’ debut novel probably got tainted by it; though I’m pretty sure I’ve not seen the film either.

Port Moresby is with his wife Kit on an escape from a devastated post-war Europe. His father has died leaving him the money to do as he pleases – anything other than work – and he insists that he is a traveller rather than a tourist, though he always carries too much luggage, speaks only European languages, and insists on staying in the best hotel wherever he is. They are joined on this trip by the younger Tunner, an amiable adventurer who has fallen in love with Kit, but truthfully, is in love with them both in some way.

The style of the book shifts in terms of sympathies – written often as not in a localised internalised third person, only zooming out every now and then, a technique that creates the quiet claustrophobia that sets in from the very first page.

They are in Northern Algeria, but Port is unhappy there. His relationship with Kit is now sexless and they have adjoining rooms. He wants, more than anything it seems, to be away from everything, to be alone, but he can’t quite manage that true adventurer’s calling, and has dragged her and her luggage – and at the last minute, his friend Tunner – along for the ride. Port hates the world he has come from, hates Europe, America, and civilisation, but he also dislikes the colonial French, and more than that he loathes the Arabs and other indigenous populations, whilst being drawn into the potential excitement of an unmediated world. Kit, on the other hand, is there because she is scared of losing him – though in many ways he is already lost – and because her fear requires her to have someone to hang on to. Tunner’s puppy love asphyxiates her and she just wants time spent with Port, but when they are together they argue, or worse, fail to communicate. His very seriousness – his existential consideration of where he – they – are going is in itself something that Kit finds hard to take seriously; it as if the very emptiness of his life, and of his dreams, is now so obvious that she can only be drawn along with it. Her vibrancy is an affront in some ways to Port; who does as much as he can to hurt her, and in doing so, to double up on the hurt he feels himself.

He might be devastated to know she has been unfaithful to him, but before this happens, he thinks nothing of going off into the town and finding a young woman prostitute, who then steals his wallet. He is an American out of sorts in a world that is still in bits, and yet he is enough of an American to resent the theft, to want to use his money as more than currency – hating the haggling of the Arabs he meets, but at the same time wanting to always buy more than just a good or a service with his money. He at one point sees a blind woman dancing in a bordello, and is desperate to have her, but she is gone before he can make it happen. He is certain he has lost the chance of love.

The book is nevertheless one of stories told. The famous story of three girls who go to have tea in the Sahara, and are found with only sand in their cups. The great desert is always on the corner of the tale, until, as they head further south into it, it also becomes the tale, and in the third part of the book, becomes Kit’s very existence.

Along the way they keep bumping into an English con man and his mother/wife, who they try and avoid, except when it is expedient to take a lift with them. By separating himself from Kit and Tunner as he goes south with them – leaving them to take the train – Port seems to be willing the action to happen; yet he doesn’t find out about the betrayal (his betrayals of Kit are the greater.) There’s a compelling existentialism to all of this. The man who has no longer got a belief in anything, and the woman for whom there is still hope – but where the hope resides in her husband. Throughout, the prose is remarkable. The interior knowledge we have of each of the characters only makes more complex their motivations, rather than allowing us to understand them. The usual motivations – money, lust – are replaced by different ones; of living a meaningful life. A dark reading of the novel could see it as being a book about the devastation we all must feel, when we realise life is not leading to something, as much as away from something. Port’s illness manifests itself as he takes them further and further away from civilisation; where only Kit can see him suffer. In this she finds her own motivations to live – but then – unable to escape and lost in a desert where she could just as easily perish, she becomes herself another victim of circumstance; perhaps achieving the negation of personality that Port was looking for.