Sentiment, Pure Sentiment

Faulks in theory and practice

A Fool’s Alphabet, Birdsong, The Fatal Englishman, Engleby, A Week in December, Paris Echo and Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks

Best known for his French novels and his war novels, Sebastian Faulks managed, in Paris Echo, to combine both France and the war. Or rather, the memory of the war. In Snow Country, he combines stories of war with stories of the memory of war. These two novels, not his most recent but good enough stand-ins of his current way of thinking, also show the pitfalls and problems with his approach.

Faulks’s novels are resolutely, aggressively sentimental. They are sentimental in subject: love, early death, warfare, fate. They are sentimental in approach: surrounded by themes of thwarted hope and aimlessness, of lives being either saved or doomed by love or its lack. Of people being separated by circumstance for no good dramatic reason. But things are very dramatic.

Paris Echo splits time between the story of a North African migrant in Paris who works in its fried chicken shops and frequent massage parlours, and a ghostly historical investigation into one of those terrible crimes which you can find if you go looking into European history. It is mostly a failure, not least because Faulks does not understand, now, how young people think, how they talk, what they want to hear from each other. Its best parts are the investigations made by one character into historical memory: her interviews of those who still live and might just be induced to talk.

The better parts of Snow Country are its pure historical descriptions. When Anton Heideck, one of the protagonists, travels to Panama as a successful journalist to see the construction of the canal, he marvels at its size, the immense labours it required of those who slaved on its construction, the human toll. And the green hell of the surrounding landscape, the perils that are everywhere. What man might do, thus, if he is sufficiently motivated by greed or by necessity: he will break through obstacles, he will change the shape of the world around him. The heavy, heavily-applied, irony being that when the one we love departs from us, for reasons of the heart or illness or death, we can do nothing but lament and try — vainly, in hope of a grand universal coincidence — to surmount these terrible blows we are dealt by life, by fate. To keep the heart open and to trust, as Anton eventually does, that fate will deliver us a second chance.

Faulks’s early books were not quite like this. A Fool’s Alphabet may not satisfy most readers; it is too built on literary format and artistic contrivance. But it is entertaining and well-staged. The Fatal Englishman, three short biographies of brief lives, are artfully executed and do not insist that its subjects are anything other than real people who lived interesting lives. There is no grand lesson to be learnt there, and the book is excellent and the better for it.

Faulks’s books are now so fond of the sentimental that they have lost all sense of irony and detachment. A Week in December and Engleby are both significantly underrated, not least because of their satirical edge. The former includes a few characters of real grotesque interest. R. Tranter, the critic, scribbling away, drenching his pages in vitriol as he attacks over and over again the puffed up egos of the novelists, all while selling so few copies of his own work that he can tell, from the net sales, how many his mother personally accounted for. He could be one of Gordon Comstock’s bitter friends in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. He could be a New Grub Street fixture, combining poverty with bitterness. He could be one of Sheridan’s targets in The Critic.

Meanwhile, Mike Engleby, in the novel of the same title, is like a cod Humbert Humbert. His perversion is possibly greater but his targets are at least of legal age. There is something of D. H. Lawrence and his characters about Engleby. The humble background; the determination that he will be humble no longer; the desperate pursuit of sex for emotionally stunted, maladjusted reasons. The determination, which Engleby shares with Lawrence and some of his characters, that everyone else around him was a fool, unworthy of his respect and his attention, people bent only on pleasure, understanding nothing, deserving less. People it would be easy to kill without remorse — although they do not make it easy, provoking as they are.

All of this sounds good. But in pursuit of the sentimental, in the chasing of ghosts figurative and even sometimes literal, Faulks robs himself of some of his best tools. Birdsong played several horrible things and a few very romantic things extremely straight. And it sold many millions of copies. Faulks appears to have over learnt the lesson of that book and its immense, career-defining success.