ON CHESIL BEACH: "A MASTERPIECE"

Writing for TLS, Karl Miller proclaims On Chesil Beach "a masterpiece."

He is now, at no great age, the author of a body of fiction full of range and change and invention. A new book by him has long been an event. This new book, though, On Chesil Beach, is more than an event. It is a masterpiece. The very idea that informs it, fascinating and unfamiliar, is masterly.

We'll check it out this weekend and let you know.  Now, Miller goes on to say:

But such terms are apt to seem out of place when applied to his writings, which are also, for one thing, those of a learned man, whose accounts of quantum electrodynamics and other arcana have instructed and abashed a generation of literary readers. Novels are not always informative, as McEwan’s are.

One can, we think, rightly quibble with this point.  Certainly, one is entitled to look for what one wants in a novel, but we'd scarcely select McEwan (or any other novelist) to be our source of choice to educate us in matters of quantum electrodynamics.  One can further argue - as many have - that this sort of business clutters up what the novel does best with the sort of thing other forms do better.  Which points, perhaps, to the core question: for what sort of information, precisely, does one turn to a novel?  This notion that it's a boon for novels to deliver us detailed technical information about Things - call it the Zadie Smith syndrome if you like - seems open to some debate.  We found the unimpeachable technical verisimilitude of Henry Perowne's brain surgeon existence to be among the more wearying aspects of Saturday.  We certainly had a very clear picture of what he did but a considerably more opaque picture of who he was.

But.  "Masterpiece" is a big word.  We're still going to check it out.

Comments

[Dan Green]

"We found the unimpeachable technical verisimilitude of Henry Perowne's brain surgeon existence to be among the more wearying aspects of Saturday. We certainly had a very clear picture of what he did but a considerably more opaque picture of who he was."

Very nicely, if epigramatically, put. 5,000 word critique to follow?

[Andrew Deacon]

McEwan's nemesis, John Banville, is characteristically withering about the difference between writing and making use of 'research'. One is reminded of Olivier's reported puzzlement at method acting and actors: 'Try acting, dear boy.'

[Steven Augustine]

My, what a silly riff, that "learned man" stuff. Both Amis and McEwan went through that phase wherein awkward chunks of magazine hard science (remember all the astrophysics in The Information) were dumped in the stew to add nutritional value...because *making things up* just didn't seem enough at the time, I guess. I miss the giddy grotesqueries of middle-period McEwan (The Cement Garden, The Innocent, Black Dogs, the intro chapter to Enduring Love and so on)...I hope (but doubt) that Chesil Beach will be a return to form. McEwan is fat (figuratively) and happy these days and his writing suffers for it is my humble stance.

[Suzy]

(((This notion that it's a boon for novels to deliver us detailed technical information about Things - call it the Zadie Smith syndrome if you like - seems open to some debate.)))

I send you a kiss from London for saying this.

~Suzy~

[ARL]

«This notion that it's a boon for novels to deliver us detailed technical information about Things - call it the Zadie Smith syndrome if you like - seems open to some debate»

James Wood has been having that debate all by himself for a number of years. And he's won it. Even Zadie ended up conceding his point.

(Incidentally, it's true: On Chesil Beach is a masterpiece, and far better than Saturday)

[RY]

Um, Smith never defended the idea of 'research heavy' novels in the first place. Wood always mistakes a flaw in a novel as the same thing as the novelist 'making a case' for a certain type of novel - a mistake, as Smith pointed out at the time. He also used a novel by a 22 year old debut novelist as a useful hook on which to hang a whole group of novelists, widely different from each other, who weren't to his taste. The same is generally done on book blogs - whenever you want to get a cheer from the crowd, a Smith-bashing goes down well....

[TEV]

Hey now, RY ... I'm going to have to ask you to step away from the hyperbole button.

First, this post can scarcely be considered "bashing" by any reasonable measure.

Second, I'm on record as being a genuine fan of Zadie Smith's, especially of White Teeth, a book I love and that I feel is unfairly maligned (by its author as well as others).

Most importantly and germane here, though, she is on record approving writers who "who know a great deal about the world. They understand macro-microeconomics, the way the internet works, maths, philosophy, but... they're still people who know something about the street, about family, love, sex, whatever." (Her words, no one else's.) That's the kind of thing I'm talking about here (and Wood is talking about elsewhere), and that's the point that remains worth debating. And bringing it up doesn't constitute bashing - she's merely the most visible and most talented practitioner of this school (a school which, it should be noted, she has backed away from considerably, especially with On Beauty).

So, not quite sure what's really behind the defensive tone of your comment, but there's more here than can be so easily dismissed as "bashing."

[Steven Augustine]

Anyway, who would claim that research in and of itself fails the novel as a practise? Think of Roth and glovemaking in American Pastoral or baseball and DeLillo. It's just a question of how artfully the data is subsumed in the narrative. On the other hand, I took Kundera's word for it that Tomas in "The Unbearable..." was a skilled surgeon without a single reference worthy of a textbook.

[RW]

Didn't mean to be hyperbolic, just tired of the same old unquestioned dogma doing the rounds. Actually your dug up Smith quotation reinforces the point: it's completely innocuous - and the emphasis [with that 'BUT'] is that she would like to see novelists with both sides of their brains working. My point is there is a sort of innocence as to the provenance of such quotes -bloggers who are so supposedly suspicious of the 'media machine' take as gospel scraps of quotes from ancient interviews which are in no way genuinely "from the horse's mouth". For that we should go to the writer's own fiction and, if they exist, their essays - and nowhere did Woods find Smith or any of the writers he mentioned defended a theory of heavily researched fiction. "Hysterical Realism" was an easy tag by a lazy critic who is too often lauded in principle while the specifics are ignored.

Anyway, you run a good blog: keep up the good work!

[RW]

I should add, anyone who has ever been interviewed will tell you that the idea that an interview is the subject's words "and no one elses" has no basis in reality. Maybe when your book is out you can report back on the experience yourself!

best,

RW

[janitorman]

"We found the unimpeachable technical verisimilitude of Henry Perowne's brain surgeon existence to be among the more wearying aspects of Saturday. We certainly had a very clear picture of what he did but a considerably more opaque picture of who he was."

No, Mark, that *is* who he was. McEwan nailed it, absolutely. Do you know any physicians more than than to say, Hi? And I don't mean GPs; I mean specialists, probably specialty surgeons, good ones, with as much as nine years of residency and another couple years of fellowship behind them. Their technical existence is their existence; everything else for them in life is just a struggle, a humdrum to bore through, to get back to work.

Although he gets good critical notices all over the place, McEwan is consistently underrated by readers, I think. The biggest problem with any McEwan novel was the film adaptation of "Enduring Love". And Banville's self-serving badgering on the topic reads like, "He shouldn't do that in his novels because I'm not sharp enough to understand it so I can't pull it off in my books."

p.s. Banville *is* a talented writer, but he's not as smart as McEwan and his comments came across as spite.

[Suzy]

Not as 'smart' as McEwan? What does that mean? That Banville couldnt digest and regurgitate technical information in long sequences in a novel, if he so wanted to? That makes McEwan 'smart'?

[TEV]

Yes, have to agree with Suzy. Sorry, j, I generally think your comments are spot on but this notion that you can somehow divine the smarter of the two writers? Well, you're a better man than I am or have access to some secret IQ test results. McEwan's non-novel writings don't begin to approach Banville's, in breadth or quantity but, either way, it's a bit of a silly, unprovable statement.

On the other hand, I see your point about Saturday and think it's an interesting one but in the end I still don't quite agree. Sure, one can burden us with page after page of technical detail but that still doesn't necessarily add up to a real depiction of character - a facsimile or an imitation, maybe. (You've almost done so by a bit of reverse induction; assuming that the plethora of detail is meant to fill an unspoken void.) As Steven says, there are loads of considerably more interesting - and plausible - doctors in fiction without the textbook overkill.

I also don't necessary agree with your implication that one must know a Doctor to appreciate the skill of McEwan's ventriloquism. I'd argue that if the book is written merely to pass muster with neurosurgeons, there is a much larger audience being alienated (or at least unimpressed). I once saw Kazuo Ishiguro speak and someone in the audience asked how the got Shanghai so accurate and he shrugged and said he made it up. I think he understood that, in the novel, a different truth is more important.

That said, I'm thick into On Chesil Beach and finding it excellent, as advertised.

[TEV]

Sorry, forgot to mention but meant to say: The music scenes in Saturday similarly suffer. He's got loads of technical details about blues guitar collected in a completely unreadable form, that might possibly be the worst representation of music in modern fiction. Certainly, I can think of no recent sequence that so utterly fails to capture the magic of the music. All that fussing about dominant thirds and diminished sevenths. I'm a musician and it bored me.

[janitorman]

Suzy, yes, digestion, but not wholesale, arbitrary regurgitation, of a mass of technical information makes one "smart" -- in that the ability to comprehend, analyze and later use the details of complex processes in writing or speech is generally a hallmark of smart people.

Suzy and Mark, okay, preface all the junk about my assessment of Banville's brain with "It is in my opinion that..." because that's still what I get from reading Banville versus McEwan. Yet indeed both Banville and McEwan are surely smarter than your average bear. But I don't think you can argue that Banville's comments don't read like gross spite, and that's not merely my unsubstantiated opinion.

Mark, "non-novel writings", are we talking quantity or quality, here? Just because Banville writes non-novel work is no better a criterion for "smart" than my nebulous non-criteria. (Yeah, I do have a magical, secret IQ test, but I can't get close enough to Banville or McEwan to use it on them.) As for Perowne, he's a consultant -- stateside, we'd call him an attending -- neurosurgeon, not, say, a urologist: there's a vas deferens (sorry, couldn't resist). That there are considerably more interesting -- I don't think you can fairly label Perowne implausible -- *doctors* in fiction, you could certainly write a much more interesting *attending neurosurgeon* but he wouldn't be like most real neurosurgeons. Still you're point about writing a neurosurgeon only for the neurosurgeons is valid, and one I myself almost made, or thought ex post facto that I should have made. The problem may not be with the character assembly, but with the characterization as accessible to greater than a tiny, tiny group of people, of whom only a few will actually read the novel. As for the Ishiguro quote, yeah, that has the ring of Borges about it, in fact so much so you're sort of hacking me up with my own sword, and I agree with you and KI on that point, that an imagined real place may read more true to life than a well-researched real place.

However, think back to "Saturday", and recall that, as you mentioned, the mass of technical detail was sort of its own characterization, "filling the void" as you suggest. Note the Perowne was near-impotent outside his own technical realm, a weakling away from the sterile operating field. Powerless to stop a mad intruder undressing his daughter, leaving the business of standing up to the bastards to his wife and father-in-law, old man Grammaticus, leaving the whole matter of physically eliminating the threat to his son, Theo, who in his late teens was still more or less a boy. Only when he got the thug on is operating table, to repair the damage his son -- or was it Henry himself? But his son set it up -- did to the guy's head by throwing him down the stairs, does Perowne regain his strength as master. When Perowne is paged in and heads off to the hospital to do the procedure, his wife expresses concern that he might do something "stupid" as revenge, yet the thought has not tangibly crossed his mind, that he would sully his art and science by intentionally botching the job. To me, that's great characterization. Because imagine what you'd like to do to that person.

Fair notice, too, that I was a pre-medical student, and pages of detail about human cranial anatomy and neurosurgical minutiae, if I don't find them interesting or informative, I just find them sort of there, to be read through, and would not likely notice them -- like you, Suzy, or lots of others -- as a dense of block of tedious, unnecessary detail. I had to read a lot of stuff like that and I'm used to it.

Almost finally, I've found myself in the bad position of defending something that is sort of the opposite of what I tend to believe. I'm defending "Saturday" and McEwan, and his characterization of Perowne, not this business of index card transcription as fiction. As for how I write or what I prefer to read in a novel, I'm much more likely to make up Shanghai and far more sure that this ultimately would be the best way to go about it. (I think it's interesting to note that Chabon put a lot of extraneous detail about comic books and the period setting of the novel in his "Kavalier & Clay", but didn't catch any heat for it, perhaps because it wasn't medicine or science or anything so pedestrian, but it was -- fill in your own frisson of joy -- *comic books*.)

And, finally, as for the descriptions of music in "Saturday", I'm an amateur pianist, and music is surely the most important non-human thing in my life next to air and books, and, alright, alright: There are but two things wrong with any McEwan novel, the film adaptation of "Enduring Love" and the passages of musical description in "Saturday".