Different Voices, Thrilling Lives

The Age

Saturday July 12, 2008

Peter Craven

There are diverse satisfactions in great books, new and old, writes Peter Craven.

IT'S AN ODD BUSINESS reading books and we constantly negotiate different kinds of reading as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

In the last stretch, I found myself captivated by the musical plainness of the prose in Doris Lessing's new book Alfred and Emily. Here is an old - in fact nearly 90-year-old - master, writing almost as if to please herself about her parents, using a form that seems to encompass both fiction and non-fiction in a style of breathtaking simplicity.

Quiet is not a word you would apply to the tumult and variety of Nam Le's The Boat, which is one of the most confident and impressive debuts by an Australian writer we have seen in years. And how cheering it is to see a young writer who can range from New York to an Australian high school or the scary street rallies of Tehran at its most disturbing.

I suppose no writer in the history of the world ever exhibited as great a variety of life as Tolstoy. Not Homer; not Proust. It's staggering that the man who wrote the most epical of all novels, War and Peace, could also write the greatest of all novels of infatuation and infidelity and ill-starred romantic love: well, let's face it, the greatest of all novels - Anna Karenina.

And at the same time he could write that most grave and moving, that most beautiful of adventure stories Hadji Murad, while also writing the equally staggering novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

It's the story of an old judge dying in great pain and confusion but seeing a light right at the end.

I remember Susan Sontag (whose death is recalled in the memoir of her son David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death), telling Vikram Seth that he had to read Ivan Ilyich.

It is absolutely harrowing and yet it is one of the greatest realisations of tragicomedic vision in the whole of literature. I've just experienced it again for the first time in many years read by Oliver Ford Davies - it only takes three hours to read aloud - on the recent Naxos recording.

It's a reminder of the different ways we can experience works of literature as well as the delights of trash.

I wonder if there's a one-to-one relation between hardcore fans of Jeremy Clarkson's TopGear and card-carrying members of the James Bond

fan club.

One of the notable things about Sebastian Faulks' very accomplished pastiche of Fleming in the new Bond book Devil May Care is the way he captures that very masculine infatuation with cars and grog and girls and food and things.

Of course, if you want to listen to fiction, you could do worse than go the whole hog and invest in a literary masterpiece such as Wuthering Heights read with a lilting Yorkshire majesty in the new Naxos recording by Janet McTeer. My only reservation about the Yorkshire voice is that it somehow makes the masculine half of the ill-starred lovers, Heathcliff, sound several shades more sinister than he might. Like Ted Hughes on a bad day.

And speaking of ill-starred couples, I saw a 1973 version of Middleton's The Changeling recently, with Helen Mirren as Beatrice-Joanna and Stanley Baxter as De Flores, the man who murders for her and says he loved her in spite of her mind.

Now there's a couple who'll give Cathy and Heathcliff a run for their money. T.S.Eliot said it was one of the greatest tragic visions outside of Shakespeare. It's collected in the DVD set - Helen Mirren at the BBC.

© 2008 The Age

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