KTH RDGWY

The night before I set off by train and ferry to Dublin for Christmas I grabbed, at more or less random, two short novels from my buckled ‘to-read’ shelf and stuck them in my bag. The first was Homo Faber by Max Frisch , which I had wanted to read since reading Man In The Holocene earlier in the year, which I wrote about on this blog . And the other was William Golding ’s Pincher Martin . I’ve returned to Golding in the last couple of years, very slowly, after a brush with him in my teens (instigated by Lord Of The Flies at school I presume) which had left me feeling that he was too oddly English and peculiar and serious for me. He still is oddly English and peculiar and serious. But.

I didn’t know it, but the two books have things in common. They were published within a year of each other (1956/57); they both tell the story of a middle aged man faced with what looks very much like his death; both central characters are given generalising eponymous nicknames; both writers fiddle with our perception of accuracy (Golding with detailed renditions of hallucination and mental derailment, and an unfortunate Tales Of The Unexpected last line twist; Frisch with a much more subtle, dissembling first person narrative); they both involve sea journeys; they both render a disgust and terror at organic natural things; they both involve sex that really shouldn’t have happened; they’re both about going a bit bonkers.

I felt very comfortable with Walter Faber, Frisch’s Swiss UNESCO engineer whose flight crash lands in a Mexican desert. He’s a practical man, has no time for novels or dreams or religion or myths or any of that stuff, and finds himself thrust nevertheless into a daft series of coincidences which unravel his sense of himself and his world, sort of. He survives the plane crash (or does he? (yeah, he does, I’m pretty sure (really?))) but through it meets the brother of an old friend who married the woman he perhaps should have married. He sets off to find this old friend, who is missing in the jungles of Guatemala, with the man’s brother. After a horrible journey consisting mostly of sweat and entrails, they find him - hanging by his neck in a plantation hut. Faber goes back to his apartment and his girlfriend in Manhattan and dislikes everything. He sets off for Europe by ship. On board he sees, is attracted to, meets, and gets involved with a young woman who reminds him of the woman he should have married all those years ago. There is a gradual escalation of dread, but it’s comic, absurd, and Faber is dizzy with it, disbelieving. The extended, perverse ending, involving a snake bite and a fall (or is it a fall? (I really don’t know)) is compelling and rather beautifully ridiculous.

Pincher Martin is much more foreign to me. I suspect that like a lot of readers who were raised Irish and Catholic, I’m at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to reading English writers who are concerned with, in broad terms, religious things. They seem so earnest. So worried. Golding worries an awful lot. In Pincher Martin the worrying takes the form of a kind of self created hell - a rock in the North Atlantic where Martin finds himself washed up after his ship is torpedoed. The physical details are great. The scraping and scouring of the body, the fright caused by gulls and seals, the terrifying assault of the wind and rain and the sea. But the important thing for Golding is that all this provides an arena in which Martin remembers and regrets and, importantly, digs his stubborn selfish heels in. He does not surrender, and that seems to be his sin. It’s an odd book. It seems to have come from another world - a different, scarier world. Like the 1950s for example. Homo Faber on the other hand seems to come from last summer.

Both books visit upon their central characters the theoretical, if you will, repercussions of their past actions. They’re both pretty cruel. Golding’s cruelty is blunt and quick and bloody. And maybe there’s something to be said for that when set against the playful, complicated, slow cruelty of Frisch. But Frisch’s Faber is more recognisably us. And Frisch grants him the larger rock, half the world, on which to come face to face with what’s he’s created and destroyed.

It wouldn’t be hard to find yourself thinking that Max Frisch wrote Man In Holocene this year, not in the late 1970s. It feels contemporary, April 2009 contemporary, not only in style and mood, but in detail as well. Nothing jars, nothing seems dated. There is nothing anachronistic about the elderly man living alone at the edge of an alpine village, worrying about the rain and about the possibility of being cut off, stranded or crushed by a landslide. And nothing odd about his preoccupations, or his decision to go for a long walk late on in the book, or in the unravelling of his connections to what we might think of as sanity or caring. Add to that a couple of techniques which seem positively modish - the liberal use of encyclopaedia and reference book cut-outs, for all the world like Wikipedia cut-and-pastes, and the funny/poignant/trivial-in-isolation one-liners that scroll up the page like a good Twitter feed.

But the real shocker, the thing that made me check the publication date (1979) half a dozen times, is the continual undertone of nebulous catastrophe both ancient and imminent, personal and species wide, inevitable and impossible, dreaded and desired. (I really need to get a handle on my contradictory coupled adjective paradox problem. There’s a word for it isn’t there?) While it might not mention global warming, or asteroid strikes, or swine flu, or whatever is your current poison, Man In The Holocene nevertheless pokes its finger straight into that soft part of you that knows how mortal you are. It scratches that irritating patch of your imagination that has glimpsed the cold lonely truth of the brevity of your own existence, and the sure and certain fact that on nature’s scale, you might as well not have happened. And not just you. Us.

Scale is the key, really. It’s in the title, and it’s all over the pages that Geiser cuts from his books and pins to the wall of his living room to better remember what they tell him. We are currently in the geological epoch known as the Holocene, which has lasted for about 10,000 years, and human civilisation’s full history has occurred within it, though we’ve been around for longer, maybe as long as 200,000 years, in various forms. Before the Holocene was the Pleistocene, which started about 1.8 million years ago, and before that, the Pliocene, which began 5.5 million years ago. The dinosaurs lasted for about 160 million years, from the Triassic period to the end of the Cretaceous period, which is about 230 million years ago to about 65 million years ago. So they were here for about 800 times longer than we’ve been here. Now they’re gone. The mountains outside Geiser’s front door were formed in the early Cainozoic era, which started 65.5 million years ago. His daughter lives in Basel, his wife is dead, and sometimes the mail bus can’t get into the valley.

I’ve never read any Max Frisch before, and now I have read one of his books and will probably read others and later on I’ll die. He died in 1991. He was Swiss. He was an architect. Architects should make good novelists (though I can’t think of any other examples) because architecture and novel writing are similarly hilarious distractions from the problem of scale. Frisch was probably very clever, though Man In The Holocene is simple, and despite what you might think, it’s a warm and quite beautiful book, and often funny. Geiser is very likeable. His troubles are small and trivial, but they are all of his troubles, and so they’re as large as he is, and as we are. And the vaccine for the despair that Geiser’s meandering thoughts might provoke lies in the fact that you end the book feeling sorry not so much for yourself as for him.

Sadness is a proof against despair. Which is cause for rejoicing.