booklit

Alain Elkann has, in the last thirty years, published over twenty books spanning essays, biography, and fiction. Envy (2006) is the first, as far as I’m aware, of his works to be translated into English and given that much of its action takes place in London, it may well have made itself a prime candidate for introducing him to an English speaking audience. That it’s central concern, as implied by the title, is a universal one probably helped too. And being published in the’ Pushkin Modern range ensures the container is as good as the content.

Envy tells the story of Giacomo Longhi, an Italian writer, who, having heard much about him, wishes to interview the great English artist, Julian Sax. It’s not that easy, though, as Sax isn’t the sort who likes granting interviews and there’s a wall of people - friends, relatives, other artists - who all know him, promise to ask him about the interview, invariably coming back with apologies.

Julien Sax (”a seductive man with a disturbing gaze”) is seen as the world’s greatest living artist and details about him emerge from all manner of associated people. He is “the grandson of Ludwig Sax, the most important scientist of the last century!” and, as one person notes:

“He has an ambiguous relationship with money and with women. He is very reserved and arrogant too, in a certain sense. But he is undoubtedly an extraordinary artist.”

When people get on to the subject of Sax, they linger long on the details of his life:

His turbulent past, moments of great debauchery, his vast brood of illegitimate children, his rebellious side, and his arrogance, were all subjects that triggered endless anecdotes.

These aren’t merely details, but clues, for Elkann is describing, in all but name, Lucien Freud. But the novel is not so much about Sax as it is about Longhi’s perception of the man and it’s this that produces the more interesting sections of self-analysis as he tries to understand why he envies the artist:

I am interested only in Sax because I realise I envy him, I envy the security of a talent confirmed by critics, collectors and market prices all over the world. The great, recognised artist is perhaps the only man who does what he wants, lives as he wants, while his life becomes a legend. Perhaps I haven’t really admitted this even to myself, but I’d like my life to be a legend too.

Throughout the novel Longhi has, on discovering where he dines, plenty of opportunities to introduce himself to Sax but is too hesitant. In his eyes, the artist is “a part of an extinct race, that of the great personalities” and this may go some way to explaining his timidity. At one point he spies a woman interviewing him and resolves only to sit at the next table and listen in.

In discussing how he’s unable to get Sax out of his head, a friend suggests that he write a novel about him. And in a piece of dialogue, Elkann uses this opportunity to show the reader why his novel uses thinly veiled characters rather than explicitly name them:

“Are you sure that this obsession of yours doesn’t hide a desire to write a book about him?”
“No, as long as he’s alive that’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because I would have to tell the whole truth.”
“But people write novels because they are imaginary stories, you can tell the truth in them.”

Thus Envy becomes the planning of a story - a crime novel, with Sax as victim. Essentially it’s a retaliation against the fear that, like many women before her, his wife will submit to the artist, become his lover, only to be discarded.

Through his work, he can dominate any woman: the most sophisticated, the most cultured, or the coarsest, who on seeing herself portrayed reacts with either love or hate, but in both cases feels mastered and flattered. Literature today no longer has that power.

Surely autobiographical in nature, Envy is an interesting treatment of its subject matter and provides a strong grounding for many of its ideas. While there’s the sense that more could have been said, especially on the subject of art and of being an artist, the conclusion is satisfying - to Longhi’s novel, and to Elkann’s. Literature’s power may be waning, but it’s still a force to be reckoned with.

When it comes to writing a novel, there are two approaches: doing it for the art and doing it for the money. In James Meek’s novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (2008), Adam Kellas is doing it for the money. And why not? His career as a warzone reporter is fraught with danger and journalists in his line of work go from one contract to the next. Writing a commercial thriller and the subsequent sales would give him the security he needs in order to sit down and write the books he really wants.

And security is what he needs, what with a divorce behind him, adding to a history of relationships which never work out and he finds difficult to get over. One such affair was with an American journalist, Astrid, during his time in Afghanistan. Yet one day, while boarding a helicopter, she jumps out as it’s taking off and he never sees her again. It’s no surprise that such a lack of closure should play on his mind. That he should let it guide him, well that’s another matter.

So when he receives an email from Astrid asking him to come and see her, he doesn’t think twice about boarding a plane, without even so much as a coat. (”He had wanted to see her for a year and now she asked to see him, and he was coming.”)

The subsequent journey fills the greater portion of the novel, although little of the journey is described. Not because it would be boring, but because Kellas is too busy wrestling with recent events to notice what’s going on. Women have left him, he’s quit his job (the book advance is a six figure sum), the war is getting to him, and in one explosive set piece, he lays waste to his best friend’s house. It’s no surprise, therefore, to hear the announcement of ‘we are now beginning our descent’ as the plane comes into New York. But for Adam Kellas, he has already begun, casting off partners, his job, and friends along the way.

That Kellas was inadequately dressed for the season marked him as a loser. The suit and shoes were plain enough warning in themselves that here was someone in themidst of their descent from security to insecurity, a man yet to settle in his new location on the bottom.

Like Kellas, Meek is no stranger to reporting from undesirable countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. So, with the benefit of experience, the sense of place brought to the novel’s locations is impressive and feels authentic. One can almost imagine the half-buried Soviet machinery “digested by the tissue of the road” and the feeling of being there, as it happens, with other journalists pushing for stories in the face of tragedy really shines through:

A barefooted Afghan man in grimy grey clothes and a gold cap squatted in the dirt in fron of the bombed house. it was his house. The explosion had killed his wife while she was sewing clothes for a wedding, and wounded his two children, his mother and brother. He squatted near the ruins, with his long clay-stained red hands resting on his knees, and reporters came to ask him questions. He answered, although he could not meet their eyes. For hours he had a changing little group of people standing awkwardly in front of him in western clothes, taking his picture, writing down his words and filming him. The same set of questions would be asked, and the Afghan man, whose name was Jalaluddin, would answer, and when that group of journalists was halfway through, another set would arrive and get him to start again from the beginning.

The authenticity of the Afghan landscape is never in question. Meek has lived and breathed it. But there are occasions in the novel where he let’s his grip on the narrative slip and intrudes on the story. Dialogue is usually spot on but is sometimes guilty of pushing ideas rather than relaying believable statements and sentiments. And a couple of events are implausible, even if they do get the story back on track. And going off track, even if it mirrors Kellas’ descent, his mind a maelstrom of regrets, is the hardest part of reading the novel. That and regular passages of lengthy paragraphs that can be suffocating in their relentlessness.

Where it picks up - or takes off, should that be? - is when the ideas behind the novel come to the fore. At its core it’s a novel about love and friendship, and about how people are never - and never can be - who we make them out to be. Layered over this, using Kellas’ novel as its emblem, is a criticism of modern society that has dumbed down and gone in search of the dollar; that has, like Adam Kellas, been seduced by America.

It would subvert the genre by making America the enemy - not a group with America, but the American government, the American majority, and the American way…Readers would be made to believe in a limited war to save civilization…

With the current political climate involving efforts to bring “the American way” to nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq, Meek is perhaps right that culture has begun its downward flight. But We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is not the novel to combat it, being a lesser novel to Meek’s previous effort. One wonders if The People’s Act Of Love was him doing it for the money, allowing him the leisure of writing what he wants to write. And while he slips in some remarkable imagery and turns of phrase, and proves himself more than capable of penning effective set pieces, these are lost in an abundance of prose, forcing indigestion on the tissue of the page.

In a world where the arts would appear to be in terminal decline, or at least in a depression, it’s somewhat reassuring - though devastating - to discover that it’s not purely a western phenomenon. In Bi Feiyu’s The Moon Opera (2007), it’s clear that over in the Orient, cultural traditions are also on the slide, and notably so in the specialised world of the Peking Opera.

The narration pinpoints the cause, saying, “the decline of Peking Opera began with the decline of man and woman, hand in hand” and blames it on “the degeneration of the sexes.” As for solutions, well there aren’t any offered (save, the regeneration of the sexes). What The Moon Opera does, then, is take this premise and, like all great theatre, reduce the theme to the human level and make the players act it out.

But the stars of this curious performance don’t merely act, because so much more is required of them:

Peking Opera is like no other art form. Whether they are speaking, singing, reading, tumbling, or playing an instrument, though they are touted as ‘artists,’ the performers rely on the strength of their bodies; it is how they make their living. Their bodies are worn out by the time they reach a certain age, and then they are like a desert - pour water on sand, and it disappears without a sizzle.

Luckily there’s a good cast on board for a production of a piece called Chang’e Flies To The Moon, the show that “fortune did not favour”:

The Moon Opera, long a painful memory for the troupe, had been commissioned in 1958 as a political assignment. The troupe had planned to perform it in Beijing a year later as part of the festivities marking the Republic’s tenth anniversary. But before the first performance could be staged, a certain general was unhappy with what he saw at the rehearsal. “Our lands are lovely beyond escription,” he had said. “Why would any of our young maidens want to flee to the moon? It was a simple comment that raised goosebumps on the troupe leader’s flesh. The Moon Opera closed before it had opened.

Then, after the Cultural Revolution, an effort to reprise the opera in 1979 ended when its star, Xiao Yanqiu (”even at nineteen a natural for the role of a heartbroken woman”), threw boiling water in the face of her understudy, subsequently finding herself demoted from performing and, instead, teaching, a move that would remain sore in the mind for years after as “an open wound.”

It’s not until twenty or so years later, that a performance of The Moon Opera is conceived of again, this time under the suggestion of a wealthy cigarette factory owner who, recalling the past, would like to hear Xiao Yanqiu sing once more. And with this first request we begin to see some of the westernisation of the Peking Opera as the money starts to dictate the art, reducing its potency.

Xiao Yanqiu, now forty, is brought back to The Moon Opera to reprise her role as Chang’e, a woman who, on becoming immortal, decides to retreat to the moon. Even after twenty years she’s still an irrational prima donna, and in her years exiled from the stage, has maintained her reputation:

…her temper was justifiably famous. She could seem as formless as water, giving the impression that she would meekly submit to oppression and abuse. But if you were careless enough to actually come up against her, she would turn frosty in the proverbial blink of an eye, and was capable of bringing things to a shattering conclusion through sudden and reckless actions. That is why the dining hall workers at the drama school all said, “We chefs use salad oil whenever we cook, and we avoid Xiao Yanqiu by hook or by crook.”

Xiao Yanqiu’s commitment to the role features excessive dieting to retain the shape she had years before and, towards the end, even more desperate measures. Her growing commitment to the role enhances the observation that “men fight other men, but women spend their whole lives fighting themselves” - and the tragic nature of the performance is revealed.

In addition to being a gripping drama, The Moon Opera takes time to introduce the reader to the world (and theory) of Chinese opera and does so in an engaging way. The translation, for the most part, reads competently although the occasional cliché drops into the prose. But these are soon swept away under the force of myriad water based metaphors - seas, rivers, puddles, tears - that dominate Feiyu’s writing.

For a small novel, The Moon Opera packs a surprising amount of content, and digging beyond the superficial there are wonderful layers of depth to pick away at. It’s a novel that takes on the subjects of identity, gender roles, and cultural decline, amidst the wider themes of jealousy and regret, and, when the curtain drops, is worthy of a standing ovation. Although there are moments when the writing dips, The Moon Opera is quick to recover and rarely hits a wrong note.