Jim Crace

Philip Tew

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719069130
• eBook ISBN: 9781847796103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Jim Crace is one of the most imaginative of contemporary novelists. The author of nine novels, he has received great public and intellectual acclaim across the UK, Europe, Australia and the United States. He was awarded the National Book Critics' Circle Fiction prize (USA) for Being Dead in 2000. Philip Tew's study is the first extended critical examination of Crace's oeuvre and is based on extensive interviews with the novelist, including discussions of his work from his first worldwide bestseller Continent (1986) up to The Pesthouse (2007). Designed especially both for undergraduates of contemporary fiction, and for those who simply enjoy reading the author, Jim Crace is an excellent addition to the Contemporary British Novelists series. Tew's treatment of themes, contexts and narrative strategies illuminates the literary and critical contexts within which Crace operates, situating him as one of the most adventurous and challenging of Britain's twenty-first century authors.

1

Exploring Craceland

Jim Crace insists “I don’t have any theories of literature.” However, his careful attention to structure, rhythm, motifs and the architectonics of the text suggest otherwise.¹ I hope to persuade readers that, at the very least, he does have an acute and conscious sense of narrative. Certainly, he insists fiction is a form of equivocation, claiming “Ambiguity is the soul of fiction; fiction is all about ambiguity.”² Crace himself appears enigmatic. As Begley writes in ‘A Pilgrim in Craceland,’ (2002) “Though he claims to be very private, even secretive, Jim Crace doesn’t avoid contact with journalists and critics.” (227) Sally Vincent writes of interviewing Crace in ‘Death and the Optimist,’ (2001) “He smiles his pretending, see-how-open-I-am smile and assures me he has the kind of voice that slides off tape recorders. He says I will find nothing about him through biographical details, and that there is a space between what he does and who he is, an inscape, that he has no wish to explore. He is secretive, he says, a mystery to himself.” (39) And yet there are certainties to be perceived in Crace. He is most definite concerning his own identity, commenting, “I would say I’m extremely clear about who I am as a person. I’m very dogmatic politically, but when I’m a writer I become something different … When you read me it’s hard to work out who I am and what I believe.”³ Crace emphasizes this separation of his life and work; Boyd Tonkin comments in ‘Jim Crace: Reasons to Be Cheerful,’ (2003) “Every profile of Crace labours the contrast between the mesmerising strangeness of his books and the suburban serenity of his life,” adding that “The gulf between man and work intrigues, and exercises, Crace.” (32) Begley’s notion of the impenetrability of the work derives from this public persona created by Crace, one that has assumed a certain critical orthodoxy, one that this chapter will challenge.

Another certainty is that Crace accepts that he dissembles in private and public, constructing an unreliable narrative from the details of both his books and his life. This problematizes the repeated protestation that fictionally there is no autobiographical influence. Despite his equivocations, he is far more definite about the happiness of his childhood, and its familial certainties, a context he returns to repeatedly in numerous interviews and accounts of himself. His sense of a harmonious private self has been supplemented and reinforced subsequently by a happy family life as an adult. He says, “There was no distress in my childhood at all. I had really great parents whom I loved. Anyone who had to write a biography of me would have nothing to say.”⁴ Without over-determining such personal contexts I intend to illustrate that a number of biographical details influence Crace’s texts, beginning with his childhood, upbringing and education, all relatively fixed points even in his accounts of himself. On 1 March 1946 Jim Crace was born at Brocket Hall, a stately home near Welwyn in Hertfordshire, which had been turned into a maternity hospital during the Second World War. Vincent reduplicates a Cracean attempt to use the location as a veil of modesty, “The only interesting thing about him, biographically, is that he was born in von Ribbentrop’s bedroom … So there you have it. He came into the world where Hitler’s foreign minister had laid his head, just down the hall from where Lord Melbourne breathed his last and Maggie Thatcher wrote her memoirs.” (39–40) At six-weeks old, Crace’s family moved to Forty Hill in Enfield, a borough to the north of London. Its centre is the former market town where John Keats attended John Clarke’s radical Enfield Academy from 1803 to 1811, an institution contributing to a dissenting tradition that persisted in the local Co-operative movement and Labour Party, which were central to the life and political commitment of Crace’s father, Charley Crace. Vincent reports that he was, “A stalwart, a trade unionist, a socialist, a member of the Labour party, a paragon. An old fashioned atheist, the sort who just doesn’t believe in God and who provides an environment for his progeny in which the tenets of religious observation have no cachet.” (40) Although Forty Hill was on the edge of a growing conurbation, it retained even in the 1950s and 1960s a certain quasi-pastoral charm, set in what Crace describes in ‘Hearts of Oak’ (1993) as “The Essex, Middlesex, Hertfordshire borders,” (75) where his father planted a thousand oak trees. As Crace has often commented, he recognizes in this area a kind of liminality, a site of various paradoxical juxtapositions including class conflicts, and the proximity of the urban and the pastoral, dominant themes in Arcadia and Being Dead. The pastoral recurs more than simply as a setting, but as a generic precursor offering archetypes and well-developed themes of spatial dislocation and ambiguity. As Begley says in ‘A Pilgrim in Craceland,’ “Crace’s talent is hard to pin down because he seems to be straddling a divide.” (228) This in part derives from his melange of fable, myth and parable set in a multiplicity of landscapes and cityscapes. The allegorical features, common to classical pastoral, extend these environments inferentially to those of the world, as do the details of interactions and immediate environment. ‘Talking Skull’ is the first story of his first collection, Continent, which opens as the narrator, Young Lowdo, addresses his classmates, reminding them of both their privilege and admitting his rural origins:

You are the sons and daughters of rich men. Who else but rich fathers could spare the money for tuition fees, for examination bribes, for graduation robes? Calculate the value of those family businesses – the import/export companies, the trucks and bus firms, the riverside farming enterprises, the chickens and egg franchises, the Rest House chains, the strings of market booths. Include, also, the lands in town and country, the houses in the New Extension, the investments in foreign banks. (3–4)

The conjectural, suppositional tone and style, the implicit or explicit addressing of an internal and external reader or listener all recur in Crace’s later fiction. Lowdo offers his peers and ourselves a world of inheritance, of implied rivalry, and of profit and privilege all derived from the banalities of trade and commerce. The setting is a less-developed seventh continent, a non-existent, imaginary realm, offering Arcadian and nostalgic possibilities. Among the exotic or unfamiliar elements, specificity suggests other universal, realist characteristics rooted in the familiar and the mundane. This represents a paradoxical legacy of classical pastoral. As E. Kegel-Brinkgreve explains in The Echoing Woods: Bucolic and Pastoral from Theocritus to Wordsworth (1990), Theocritus’ style and form involve a synthesis of realistic elements that appears to have “combined the ways and means of literary realism with various stylizing and un-realistic elements in a subtle and at times disconcerting manner,” (10) and hence his style echoes with the liveliness of the iambic but without its actual form. Crace’s prose shares both an apparently iambic or rhythmic quality (without iambic metre), and the realism, dislocation, and energy that Kegel-Brinkgreve had identified in the pastoral form typified by Theocritus and Vergil. In Theocritus’ Pastoral Analogies: The Formation of a Genre (1991) Kathryn J. Gutzwiller, in surveying major critics of the genre, explains how despite its “surface simplicity” (15) pastoral deviates from the epic (10) by shifting its focus upon urban–rural contradictions (13), which may help situate Crace’s grandiloquence, the residue of epic vision that subtends pastoral allegory. In accounting for pastoral’s underlying dynamics, Gutzwiller crucially cites first Heather Dubrow (13), whose earlier study comments “pastoral has a predilection for binary oppositions so fundamental that if the genre did not exist the structuralists would have invented it,” (117) and additionally Gutzwiller cites William Empson, who in his classic study Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) identifies “the ways in which the pastoral process of putting the complex into the simple … have been used.” (23) The first predilection informs Crace’s style and the latter the emphasis or mood of his whole oeuvre. Gutzwiller adds that “the nature of analogy that underlies pastoral is not just comparison or similitude but proportion, the parallelism of relationships within systems.” (13–14) Similarly constituted are the essential co-ordinates of Craceland, a world proportionate to reality, and yet largely a system within itself. As with the archaic pastoral world, Craceland is neither vague nor unrealizable, sharing a comparable relation with reality to Gutzwiller’s description of that of traditional Arcadian literature:

Expression there is almost always concrete, in the sense that it refers to tangible reality. The principal literary subject is myth, in which meaning is inseparable from narrative. Thought takes the form of images that represent both part of the world and the whole of it … The interrelationship of these images constitutes a holistic mental structure, the thought system of the archaic mind; it is made manifest in literature by the juxtaposition of objects and activities that have common traits. (23)

Additionally as Andrew V. Ettin makes clear in Literature and the Pastoral (1984) a strictly pastoral environment is not essential to the genre even in its earliest manifestation (2) and it remains often allegorical and cryptic (4), all decidedly Cracean characteristics. Doris Teske in ‘Jim Crace’s Arcadia: Public Culture in the Postmodern City’ (2002) identifies the Arcadian as avowing a “non-urban alternative way of life,” but recognizes that in Crace, “This dream, however, has to be placed in the context of the novel’s real subject: the question of what urbanity and urban community are about, and the problem of coming to terms with the political city which is losing its traditional structures and its fixed symbolic language in a post-urban and postmodern revolution.” (166) Nevertheless her reading assumes an almost post-historical cultural transition and emphasizes the mythical, escapist and paradisiacal aspects of the traditional concept of Arcadia, both of which exegetical accounts perhaps exaggerate Crace’s rupture with pastoral dynamics as outlined above, rather identifying what Teske describes as his “rejection of various aspects of the Arcadian vision.” (169) Importantly there remains in Crace a seriousness, what Ian Sansom describes in ‘Smorgasbits’ (2004) as “Kurt Vonnegut without the jokes: a voice assuming a certain comic wisdom.” (13)

Both a complex sense of the pastoral, and that of paradox and ambiguity referred to by Begley, result in part from Crace’s direct experience, the social aspects and literal location of his origins and their incongruities. His family’s ground-floor flat on the Pilgrim Estate was part of a working-class area, a site of under-privilege within a privileged culture, but positioned almost magically, according to Crace’s account, as the last buildings of London. Facing north Crace overlooked fields and woods, adjacent to the grounds of Forty Hall, a Jacobean manor house set in gardens and parkland. He lived close to the remainder of the Tudor monarchy’s hunting grounds. It is an unusual conjunction, and affected the clarity of Crace’s bioscopic capacity, expressed in the descriptions of both cityscapes and landscapes, as Crace says:

Existing literature is not the only way to new literature. You cannot be in any doubt that I love landscape. My novels are full of it. Landscape is almost a character in them all. But I don’t write about landscape because I read landscape books. If I write about landscape it’s because at every opportunity I go out, I walk the coast, or I go up hills, or I go caving or whatever. That’s where I obtain my raw materials.⁵

In “The Reluctant Storyteller” (2000) Crace comments to Nicolas Wroe, “That combination of urban politics and country walks has always been with me. The flat where we grew up was on the very edge of north London. Out of the front windows it was houses all the way to Croydon. But out of the back it was fields all the way to Cambridge.” (13) Crace repeats this observation to Vincent, adding, “‘It’s a bit like this,’ he says, ‘a bit like my life. A bit like my books. The conflict between town and country, nature and civilization, the way we associate the countryside with all that is virtuous and dull, and the city with all that is sinful and exciting.’” (39) This juxtaposition combines the elements of an essentially Arcadian or bucolic view, which are reflected fictionally, particularly in the suggestively titled Arcadia. A young mother with a suckling child escapes the poverty of the countryside for an unnamed city’s market: “They left the fields behind. They reached metalled roads, and rows of houses with lawns and carriage drives. They came through high woods and found a measured townscape spreading out in greys and reds and browns, with a shimmering mirage of smoke which made it seem as if the hills beyond were chimney products of the city mills and that the sky was spread with liquid slate.” (78) When asked about the pastoral tradition, Crace responds, “The urban/rural quandary is always relevant. It’s always contemporary. I see myself as a landscape writer. There are interesting landscapes to be explored both in and out of the city, in books and in life.”⁶ This is evident towards the end of Arcadia when Victor stands paying homage to a makeshift shrine to a man killed as a result of a riot on the site of the old Soap Market, the mob protesting against Victor’s plans to replace it with a contemporary steel and glass mall:

The weather worsened. They could hear it growing sullen. The candle flames curtseyed in the damp, cold air which pierced the fabric chapel. Water made its way beneath the cobblestones and crept into a puddle beneath their feet. They might have been upon some Afghan plain, three hundred years ago, pinned in by space and sky and frost. The office blocks and tenements which circled them, though distantly, invisibly, were ancient cliffs, shrinking in the cold and wind and rain. (320)

The rhythmic insistence of Crace’s style often prioritizes the strong presence of landscape as a characterized presence, rather than a sense of internal subjectivity. Images serve to mediate between people and the objective world. Crace aesthetically interfuses perception and the objective, most dramatically in Being Dead. As Mikel Dufrenne says in In the Presence of the Sensuous: Essays in Aesthetics (1987), “Intentionality … always expresses the solidarity of the subject and object, but without either of them being subordinated to a superior agency or absorbed into the relation uniting them. The externality of the object is irreducible, even though the object is only an object of the subject.” (4) What might be called this noetic tension persists as a generative force in Crace; he perceives such relations concretely, certainly in his life, expressing them experientially and as a matter of psycho-geography. The underlying sense of a primeval, natural quality of the environment recurs throughout Crace’s fiction, permeating his symbolic sense of the objective world, as with the weather and the rocking stone in Signals of Distress. This repeated trope counters the anthropomorphic view of the human world, as do the decaying corpses in Being Dead.

In The Happy Ant-Heap and Other Pieces (1998) Norman Lewis describes a historical, pastoral sense of his childhood home, capturing something of the location that survived in Crace’s childhood and adolescent forty years later. “Forty Hill was … on the borders of Enfield Chase, a landscape covered with ancient oaks, many of them hollow, cleared, in the far past, of human habitation by terrible kings, and designated for hunting stags.” (1) He comments in Jackdaw Cake (1985) upon its “strangely unfinished look.” (44)⁷ Crace reflects upon the impulse to contribute continually to the survival of this pastoral setting when reflecting upon his father’s life and his relationship with him in “Hearts of Oak,” recalling his last walk with the dying man:

One afternoon in early March we walked to his allotment overlooking the grounds of Forty Hall in north London and then into Gough Woods to see what birds were there. He was slow already. His scalp was patchy with alopecia. His abdomen was bloated and tender. His pockets as usual were full of acorns. We heeled them into the ground in hedgerows where elm disease had destroyed the trees. We were oaking the landscape. Dad had always planted acorns, even before elm disease. It was not a mission. He heeled them in without any introspection. The sports club where he had been groundsman had – still has – a stockade of oaks, some more than thirty years old by then, from acorns which dad had dropped or thrown. The Essex, Middlesex, Hertfordshire borders where he had walked for years can thank him for a thousand trees. (74–5)

Crace offsets the suffering by synthesizing the landscape and the man, creating an elegy. Crace’s father continues to be a major influence. Crace inherits from him an ecological sense, a shared love for landscape, a passion for tennis, as well as a shared set of deeply held radical political views. He records his father’s support during his final illness for the Liverpool grave-diggers striking in the so-called Winter of Discontent. “Dad was not a sentimentalist. He w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series editor’s foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Dedication
• 1 Exploring Craceland
• 2 Communities and change: Continent (1986) and The Gift of Stones (1988)
• 3 Parables of distress: Arcadia (1992) and Signals of Distress (1994)
• 4 Death, belief and nature: Quarantine (1997) and Being Dead (1999)
• 5 Excess, passion and the uncanny: The Devil’s Larder (2001) and Six [Genesis] (2003)
• Addendum: The Pesthouse (2007)
• Bibliography
• Index