Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning.

The book is subtitled The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, and here Ryder takes a step back from the story that he has been telling, essentially to himself, to reinforce Waugh's theme of the peculiar nature of the grace of the Catholic god, and of the unbeliever coming into the fold. This brief quotation combines several of the book's more notable features; that the narrative of events occurs almost entirely in the past, remembered by Charles Ryder; that the author uses elaborate metaphors and is capable of pulling them off quite beautifully; the wry misdirection of phrases such as 'for we possess nothing certainly except the past,' which litter the novel like a false trail of breadcrumbs. The inclusion of St. Mark's is no accident, nor is the broken biscuit in the mouth, and the deft circling around from the image of memories as a flock of angels that draw the mind to higher things to the image of startled and startling flock of pigeons leaving St. Mark's square bare underlines the economy of both Waugh's prose as well as his thematic dexterity.

The book begins with Charles Ryder serving as an officer during World War II, coincidentally stationed at the family seat of his estranged childhood friend Sebastian Flyte, and the location turns Ryder's thoughts to when he first met Sebastian when attending university. The narrative then begins in earnest, with Ryder recounting his dissolute university days, his meeting the Flyte family, the descent of Sebastian into a rather pure state of alcoholism. Later, Ryder moves on to describe the tragedy of his own life, wherein he marries and becomes a successful architectural painter, only to find himself in love with Sebastian's sister, Julia, who is married, as well. They have an affair, going so far as to break off their marriages, but in the end, it does not end well.

Or doesn't it? Despite the somber tone of the tale, and Ryder's eventual ostensibly lonely end, there is, hidden beneath the narrative, the theme of conversion that comes to life in the end. It is a flaw, a flaw that this book shares with some Graham Greene novels; namely, that the story seems to be of secondary concern, and that it is the Catholicism that matters. To be clear, it is not the fact that the book's theme is religious that irks me, it is that it is so deviously slipped in. The above quotation, which I think truly gets to the heart of the book beneath its attempts at misdirection, is followed by this passage, where Ryder is thinking on the memories of those moments that rise above the unremarkable moments that make up most lives:

The human soul enjoys these rare, classic periods, but, apart from them, we are seldom single or unique; we keep company in this world with a hoard of abstractions and reflections and counterfeits of ourselves--the sensual man, the economic man, the man of reason, the beast, the machine and the sleep-walker, and heaven knows what besides, all in our own image, indistinguishable from ourselves to the outward eye. We get borne along, out of sight in the press, unresisting, till we get the chance to drop behind unnoticed, or to dodge down a side street, pause, breathe freely and take our bearings, or to push ahead, outdistance our shadows, lead them a dance, so that when at length they catch up with us, they look at one another askance, knowing we a have a secret we shall never share.

I can't help but think that this novel would have been better had Charles Ryder kept that secret in his breast, locked away, and that Waugh kills the subtlety of his theme by hitting it, right at the end, on the head.

Amseterdam - Ian McEwan

Besides, in Vernon's life lately there was so much to think about, so much of the real world that thrilled, that mere fantasy could hardly compete. What he had said, what he would say, how it went down, the next move, the unraveling consequences of success... In the accumulating momentum of the week, practically every hour had revealed to Vernon new aspects of his powers and potential, and as his gifts for persuasion and planning began to produce results, he felt large and benign, a little ruthless, perhaps, but ultimately good, capable of standing alone against the current, seeing over the heads of his contemporaries, knowing that he was about to shape the destiny of his country and that he could bear the responsibility. More than bear--he needed this weight, his gifts needed the weight that no one else could shoulder.
-Pg 109

So thinks the Vernon the unremarkable newspaper man, who until the political scandal he is helping to stoke came to light, was described as an empty vessel of a human being whose position as an editor of a failing newspaper was a matter of chance and coincidence rather than any real ambition or skill. His hubris is notable only in that it is the unconvincing peak of his character's arc, and is the ham-handedly given key to this ham-fisted morality tale of an entertainment. Vernon, like the other main character in the book, Clive, a successful composer who falls short of his own aspirations to genius, is petty. In fact every other character in the book is petty, each armed with the commonplace instinct to disregard any idea of moral fortitude in the quest to get ahead. And in the end, although the two main characters suffer for their sins (the punishment brought about by an extremely unconvincing deux ex machina), the theme is not that the righteous will prevail, but that two awful men brought down by their own actions are merely representative of a society peopled with other, equally detestable human beings.

Is it funny? Perhaps, but not particularly so, as the humor is undercut consistently by the sense that reading the book is an utter waste of time. What it reminds me of is a Boccaccio story that has been stretched so as to make it long enough to be publishable as a novel (aided by a large type that indicts the publishers of this book with the same cynicism that is embodied by the books characters), which by being overly lengthened distributes the weight and heft of the tale in a diffuse, inefficient way. It seems like the whole point of the book was to introduce the cute trick that ends it, and although McEwan has a good grasp on the vicissitudes of newspaper men, artists, and politicians alike and can use his fluid prose to present the story in a painless way, the whole thing is undermined by the feeling that much of the detail included about the characters was introduced as needless filler, mealy potatoes added to the gristly meat in a watery, all-too-common stew.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me the condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
-pg 471 (Bantam Classic)

By the time the reader runs across these lines, Melville in fact has accomplished what this passage describes; he's written a book that, while ostensibly about whales and one whale in particular, is used as a vehicle to explore everything. What is more surprising than his ambition is the execution, and how even in the descriptions of the most technical aspects of whaling he manages to be both edifying and entertaining. Or, at least, this was surprising to me, having long held the perhaps common misconception that this book is 'about' Ahab's quest for the white whale Moby-Dick.

What I found almost as enjoyable as the questing narrative, or the action of the hunting of the whales, was the descriptions of all the processes of the whaling world; the whales' biology; and, even, Melville's detours into the suburbs of the narrative, such as when he considers the dread that whiteness produces in men (there might be some connection here between Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Moby-Dick). But more than the sheer enjoyment of reading Ishmael talk about the importance of whaling, its history, the methods for hunting, killing, and processing the beasts mid-ocean, I was struck by how convincing it all is; I found myself believing, quite willingly, that the sum total of human knowledge of Cetacea was contained in this book; that nothing more had been discovered since; that here, when reading, in my hands was the key to that world. It was like a different order of the willing suspension of disbelief, that although Wikipedia might be a click away to discover, truly, what ambergris is, or the entire historical process for dismantling a whale, I preferred to be led by Ishmael's encyclopedic knowledge, however dated it might be.

Part of it, of course, is Melville's prose, and although almost any passage plucked from the text would serve to illustrate this point, as, even, the quotation above does, there are some moments of surpassing eloquence, that manage to both describe and inspire, such as this one, in which Ishmael describes their arrival to the South Pacific:

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
--pg 498

And although the prose here is stellar, the rhythm rising and falling as naturally as waves, the thematic depth that he achieves in such a short passage is particularly noteworthy and representative of the book in general. The Pacific, which serves well as a synecdoche for the ocean as a whole, is a vast graveyard for the entire world, over which the living observer travels, conscious of the "the tidebeating heart of the earth," which might stand for history or simply life, or both, in fact. In this way the passage also has an ourobourian quality to it, that if one considers the ocean, one is considering the land; if one is considering the dead then one must needs be thinking of those who have yet to pass; and so the passage serves to illustrate the thematic link between whale and man; they are complementary, and each worthy of a grand book to describe them to those who would listen.