Berkeley Book List: British Fiction (contemporary)
Alex Zwerdling, professor emeritus, English The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro, Knopf, 1989 Regeneration, Pat Barker, E P Dutton, 1992 Atonement, Ian McEwan, Doubleday, 2002 |
"The Remains of the Day," "Regeneration," "Atonement" … the very titles of these recent British historical novels suggest the later stages of life, when we attempt to come to terms with, or to reverse, or to make up for earlier mistakes. But here, the mistakes turn out to be less individual than societal, and the perspective of each book allows its central characters to grasp that they were mere pawns on the board, pushed into danger or complicity by the powerful figures behind them. Collectively, these novels re-imagine the era of Great Britain's world power from the point of view of its newly diminished status.
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The "hero" of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is Stevens, a butler whose pride in his impeccable service to Lord Darlington and "the most powerful gentlemen of Europe" did not permit him to see that the work these gentlemen were doing in the 1930s would one day come to be called appeasement. Ishiguro could have treated his blind deference and trust with satiric contempt, but instead he empathetically makes the aging Stevens the narrator of the novel, and his every sentence evokes the strangled personality of a man trained to think that service is his highest calling. We see his halting realization of his wasted chances, the aridity of living through his superiors, the inability even to voice a grievance, and the shrunken choices left in what remains of the day.
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Pat Barker's Regeneration, the first in her trilogy of the same name, is set in a World War I military hospital that rehabilitates the victims of "shell-shock" or "war neurosis." The broken combatants include the British poets who stripped modern warfare of its grandeur — Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves. Their vision of war as a slaughterhouse and sausage factory has resonated through the generations. Yet the real center of Barker's novel is not a war poet but the prosaic neurologist Dr. William Rivers. Despite his keen analytic intelligence and his sympathy with his patients' suffering, his task at the hospital is to return the reluctant warriors to the trenches by appealing to their patriotism, sense of duty, and loyalty to their men. He is as deeply compromised as Ishiguro's butler, and as fully imagined — a helplessly rational participant swept up in a historical act of madness that would change the standards by which sanity is gauged.
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Ian McEwan's Atonement reaches back to a time just before and during World War II, culminating in a brilliant description of the rout and flight of the British invading army at Dunkirk. McEwan sees the tragic farce of this episode as a preview of Britain's defeat in the longer run, though of course the country officially won the war. There are no winners in McEwan's novel — not the privileged Tallis family that manages to contain a scandal by accusing the son of an estate servant of rape; not the Tallis's imaginative daughter, Briony, who betrays the young man in order to shape a perfect story; not the convicted (and later exonerated) Robbie Turner, who is released from prison to fight and becomes the war's central witness. The sense of loss is systemic and total, as well as historically fated. Atonement is as impossible as the regeneration of Barker's combat veterans or the renegotiating of one's life contract at the end of the day.
Each of these novels brings the forces of the distant past to vivid life, as those forces write the unalterable scripts of the characters' lives. Reading them can also help us to imagine how our own inheritors might one day look back upon the part we unwittingly played in the circumstances in which we find ourselves enmeshed.
About Alex Zwerdling
Alex Zwerdling retired last year from the Berkeley English Department,
of which he was a member since 1961. He has taught and written
primarily about twentieth-century British and American literature,
with books on W. B. Yeats, George
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